6 Key Challenges in Customer-Centric Quality Management and How to Overcome Them

Quality departments are decentralized resulting in isolated customer data, and almost certainly inconsistent customer experience. It is pointed out by Accenture that 52% of firms note that silos exist to hamper the efficient sharing of data undermining a unified customer strategy.

Causes of the Challenge

Organizational silos refer to a situation where departments within an organization have different objectives and plans. For instance, marketing may insist on ad visibility, while customer service may concern itself with reply speeds, typically independently of what the client must endure. They are: misunderstandings in the communication; no common data base; and at times, different approaches to problem solving or handling customers. While there is interaction between the systems, legacy IT systems negatively influence data sharing making it difficult to integrate.

Case Study

A large retail company analysed by Accenture enhanced the satisfaction level among customers by 25% when the company reorganised its channels to remove barriers and integrate them into a coherent set of customer-oriented objectives.

Solutions

• Utilize inter/ intra organizational collaboration to have similar goals and objectives for all departments, with a focus on customers’ needs.
• Implementing one database for the company as this will encourage an easy transfer of data.
• Daily /weekly/ monthly/ yearly / ad hoc interdepartmental meetings should be conducted to deliberate on customer experience strategies.

When managers and employees start adopting a customer-centric approach, they meet resistance because change from the previous model is tough.

Causes of the Challenge

It originates in culture and complacency with tradition that has been in use within the organization. Employees may feel uncomfortable with role shifts, may be afraid to lose their jobs, or do not trust new standards. Leadership can also participate if they have no time or are not willing to devote effort to customer-oriented improvements. Lack of training also increases resistance as well as lack of incentives do so.

Case Study

McKinsey said that a B2B company in one instance, received some push back to a change in direction to focus on customers. With change management approaches and enhancing leadership endorsement, they managed to increase customer satisfaction by 30 %.

Solutions

–Build effectively the high leadership commitment to customer-oriented strategies.
Organize training that should enhance the customers’ related skills among the workforce of the company.
Engage the staff in the formulation of customer strategies in order to gain their support because of lower levels of resistance.

Many organizations have not been able to acquire and use customer data to understand and deliver to customer needs.

Causes of the Challenge

Most of the time it are old data systems that are unable to capture the complete customer journey and provide a lack of customer insights. Based on limited transactional data, organizations may rely on behavioral metrics without exploring deeper. Investment in advanced analytics tools may be constrained by budget, while lack of adequate training of data staff may limit use of data they have collected.

Case Study

With AI-driven analytics personalized customer services, a global financial services firm increased retention by 20% as McKinsey’s research highlighted.

Solutions

– Spend on advanced analytics tools and training how to interpret customer data.
First, you’ll aim to set up a centralized data repository that can be accessed by all departments.
Solve AI and Machine learning challenges to unlock deeper level insights from customers.

For many of the organizations, evaluating personalized customer experiences and rigorous data privacy rules is demonstrating challenging.

Issue Causes

Organizations have been pushed to act in a responsible way towards the data they handle due to the rise of regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. Businesses with no legal resources or up to date security technology can find compliance to be a challenge. Meanwhile, personalizing with help of audience data is also dependent on a proper balance of personalization with privacy, too much caution may prevent engagement opportunities and too little puts compliance at risk.

Case Study

McKinseys research also featured a multinational healthcare company that made GDPR compliance more streamlined and rebuilt customer trust through data privacy first policies.

Solutions

Stipulate a complete data protection policy following GDPR and other frameworks.
Personal information is protected by using data anonymization techniques.
Data security infrastructure is updated in regular intervals to avoid breaches and protect trust.

Traditional metrics don’t correlate well with customer centric goals, creating a limiting factor in customer focused initiatives.

Issue Causes

Legacy metrics focuses on dimension of efficiency, cost reduction, growth in sales rather than customer satisfaction. It is this misalignment that can prevent teams from tracking meaning experiences of customers. Without adopting customer centric metrics, employees may fail in understanding how their assigned work matters to overall customer satisfaction.

Case Study

A McKinsey case study example of a telecommunications company that changed their metrics to include Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction. It triggered an increase of 15% in customers’ loyalty over two years.

Solutions

Set the KPIs with the aim of serving the customers well — there are NPS, retention, and satisfaction rate based ones.
Metrics should be reviewed and adjusted regularly to align with customer experience objectives.
Train your employees on how the customer metrics will impact the overall business success.

That’s why old or incompatible technologies often get in the way of creating smooth, cohesive customer experiences by limiting responsiveness and adaptability.

Issue Causes

Integrating new customer focused platforms using legacy systems brings along with it challenges to organizations. There may not be money for necessary upgrades, and there could be a shortage of skilled IT people to put it all to good use. As rapidly growing companies do, they also experience scaling issues that cause a patchwork of technology which ultimately slows down the customer journey.

Case Study

One retail firm, McKinsey reported, increased customer satisfaction by 30 percent after upgrading its technology platform to bring data from different platforms into a single system, improving order accuracy and speed.

Solutions

Use cloud based platforms that are easy to integrate and scale into.
As we create new products and long-lifecycle technologies take us back in time, it is crucial to continually prioritize continuous technology updates.
Improve the strength of IT’s support and resources for a smoother transition to technology.

Conclusion

To overcome these common problems in customer-centric quality management, your company will be able to overcome these common challenges and significantly boost its capacity to provide a seamless and enjoyable customer experience. Addressing problems like organizational silos, change resistance and technological boundaries can give businesses a secure bedrock for customer loyalty and trust.

References

• Most Companies Struggling to be Relevant to Their Customers, Accenture Report Finds 2022 https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2022/most-companies-struggling-to-be-relevant-to-their-customers-accenture-report-finds
• Case study: Building a customer-centric B2B organization 2020 https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/case-study-building-a-customer-centric-b2b-organization
• Creating value through transforming customer journeys 2016 https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Public%20and%20Social%20Sector/Our%20Insights/Customer%20Experience/Creating%20value%20through%20transforming%20customer%20journeys.pdf