Kevin Price, Host of the Price of Business on Business Talk 1110 AM KTEK (on Bloomberg’s home in Houston) recently interviewed Kate Feather.Here’s that interview.
About the interviewee
Kate Feather, Executive Vice President at PeopleMetrics, describes herself as being ‘customer-obsessed’. She has 20+ years researching and advising organizations on how to increase employee engagement and customer loyalty.
Today, she helps businesses devise strategies and tactics to capture the hearts and minds of their customers and employees, deeming this to be the sole route to competitive advantage in the 21st century.
Kate’s research speaks to the imperative we have in front of us to build our businesses around our customers and to align our organizational cultures to support that goal. Kate’s goal is to make you think differently about your business model – about what it means to be customer-obsessed and how you can start to take steps in your own organizations to become more so.
Tell me about your firm (number of employees, location, type of companies you work with, etc.).
We are a team of 26 experts dedicated to helping our clients transform their customer and employee experiences. We only take the best of the best. We are located in Center City, in the heart of Philadelphia, PA.
We work with some of the largest companies in the world (Microsoft, GSK, Merck). We have done customer experience work in 100+ countries and 50+ languages.
What type and size of companies do you have as clients?
We work with medium to large sized companies. Currently, we have a focus on financial services, but work with many different industries from utility companies to charity organizations.
What comes to mind when you see this topic?
We are a company that will enable you to humanize your business. We will retain your customers. We will help you identify the customers that need something more from you. And lastly, we will create happy employees, to create happy customers, to create happy revenue streams.
All of this is well and good – but it is impossible to create this happiness ecosystem without the C-Suite being engaged in the program.
Customer experience, in general, is an initiative that in some companies, is a wildfire being spread through the entire organization, and in others is a small match kept alive in a silo. We are the ones that provide the kindling to keep it not only going, but spreading. You need to know that halfway through someone isn’t going to rain over the whole program.
What are the best practices when it comes to this issue?
If you don’t initially have access to the C-Suite, ask for it! With our product, you need C-Suite buy-in, and you need to know that a VoC or VoE program is going to do well. We aren’t just selling technology to you; we are selling a completely new way of customer experience. We need there to be support across all levels of the organization for this to work, because we want you to be successful. This new way of running your business means that every piece of customer feedback is valuable and should be acted upon.
It is vital to gain C-Suite buy-in from the get go, in order to ensure long-term commitment to transforming the customer experience. You’ll need to create a business case, and demonstrate the ROI of an improved customer experience. If you do this correctly, you’ll gain a burning platform that will allow things to move things faster.
Contact information:
www.peoplemetrics.com
