CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

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Retail Industry

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Finance Industry

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CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE BASED OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE

Retail Industry

How to Perform Customer Experience Better in the Retail Industry?

Finance Industry

Empowering Frontliners Workers in Finance Industry for Customer Experience

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OPERATIONAL

EXCELLENCE OF RETAIL INDUSTRY

How to Perform Customer Experience Better in the Retail Industry?

[Walmart Inc is a retailer that operates grocery stores, supermarkets, hypermarkets, department and discount stores, and neighbourhood markets.]

Operational excellence in the retail industry can be improved and optimised by visual merchandising as well. Try to create attractive displays of your products and set a tone along with a sense of expectation.

A wave of digital technology, designed to make retail leaner and smarter, is shaping a new environment for the industry that bears little resemblance to the shop floors of the past. So how will these all sorts of technologies impact operational excellence in retails? The answer lies in the inverse of the question, as only organisations with a sufficiently high level of operational excellence will gain any benefit from this next stage of retail evolution.

The high-level of required excellence can only be accomplished via an incremental and maturity-based approach to operational excellence as well as the best fundamental people engagement practices. All these factors directly or indirectly affect the retail industry and in this blog, we will see how the retail industry is fighting disruption with operational excellence.

High performance

The Kroger Company is the United States’ largest supermarket operator by revenue and fifth-largest general retailer. The company is one of the largest American-owned private employers in the United States.

Kroger operational excellence should not be confused with operational improvement or operational innovation. Those terms refer to achieving high performance via existing modes of operation: ensuring that work is done as it ought to be to reduce errors, costs, and delays but without fundamentally changing how that particular work gets accomplished. Operational excellence means coming up with better and new ways of developing products, filling orders, and providing customer service, or doing any other activity that an organization performs.

Experience elements

Products display & placements

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Store atmosphere and Ambience

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Aesthetics

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Digital Signages

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Store Space Management

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Other exterior or interior designs, etc.

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Communication between the stores

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Store opening and closing checklist

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Virtual tour of the stores

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Easy Visual Merchandising Implementation

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Centralized communications solution

store, and if necessary, each employee within the store

Excellence in

In-Store Retail Operations

IKEA, home furnishings retailer that is the world’s largest seller of furniture in the early 21st century, operating more than 300 stores around the world.

No matter the size of the retailers, there needs to be systems in place in order for their operations to run smoothly and effectively. What aspect of their system to keep in mind, and what strategy to apply depends on the retailers themselves, however the overall goal is to be able to stay competitive in the retail environment.

To achieve operational excellence in the retail industry, there are four aspects to keep in mind:

Consistent Customer Experience

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Revenue Uplift

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Efficiency and Cost Savings

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Enabled Frontliners

Consistent Customer Experience

Costco Wholesale Corporation operates an international chain of membership warehouses, mainly under the “Costco Wholesale” name, that carry quality, brand-name merchandise at substantially lower prices than are typically found at conventional wholesale or retail sources.

The main idea of consistent customer experience is that you are able to meet your customers’ needs in an efficient and  timely manner, ensuring a pleasant experience whenever they interact with your brand, be it digital or in-store.

When you take a look at customer service for brick and mortar locations, consistency is key. You want to make sure that you do not have any underperforming outlets.

Having visibility into a company’s problem occurrence rate, and being able to drill down and identify issues per outlet can provide great insights to management and help them make informed decisions, and look into accountability and compliance in SOPs Hygiene, store quality and safety standards.

You need to have a system that can keep track of inventory to avoid problems such as shrinkage, especially when dealing with time or temperature-sensitive stock with a short shelf life (food items or ingredients).

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OPERATIONAL

EXCELLENCE OF  FINANCE INDUSTRY

Empowering Frontliners Workers in Finance Industry for Customer Experience

Financial services firms have faced unprecedented challenges in recent months to sustain operational excellence. Those with a strong culture of excellence—based on purpose, agility, and simplicity—have fared the best. The experience is the operation. It’s not what you design. It’s not what you want it to be. It’s how it’s seen by your customers.

Purpose, agility and simplicity

JP Morgan believes that diversity among employees enables the organisation to be the world-class company that they are today. It strives to foster a culture of respect, and is committed to making the workforce, workplace and marketplace diverse, inclusive and accessible for all the employees. It helps to power economic growth by breaking down barriers and creating opportunities in communities across the globe.

Operational excellence is best supported by three aspects of culture, all of which also underlie an organisation’s ability to accelerate performance in other ways. They are purpose, agility, and simplicity. Purpose aligns an organisation and inspires engagement by making everyone feel as if they’re working toward a greater good. Having a clear purpose has other drivers of organisational success.

Embracing agility does not come easy for large, established financial services organisations. They operate in highly regulated environments with varied local regulations and legacy systems that underpin many of their critical processes. This, combined with the size of their workforces, lends itself more to hierarchical chains of command than to less formal networked structures. But they still must try.

Simplicity

Simplicity starts with strategy: one of the most difficult things for companies to do can be deciding what not to do.

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The way leaders can set and communicate strategic priorities internally and externally is to create a “strategy on a page”—that is, creating a short, clear overview that lists the company, function, or business unit’s major strategic priorities and the core activities to deliver them, the main areas.

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The company will need to simplify to achieve those priorities, and associated metrics, with a strong focus on customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and baseline earnings.

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Work culture

Bank of America has built a strong culture of inclusion by fostering an environment of trust and engagement, where all employees are empowered to bring their whole selves to work.

The culture of an operationally excellent organisation is one deep-rooted in problem-solving, inclusive leadership, and collaboration. These cultural themes are normalised by consistently upskilling the workforce and empowering them with tools and technologies to quickly communicate and act proactively in resolving issues. In OpEx organisations, not only can workers see the flow of value to the customer, they are equipped to detect a break in flow and effectively solve the ‘breakage’ without calling out for managerial interventions.

Every stakeholder recognizes their role as a process leader and, having been empowered, can fulfil this role to the latter. The organisation is forever developed in a cycle of growth and development. where continuous improvement is the norm.

Competition

Capital One’s competitors and similar companies include Bank of America, Citi, Mastercard, Visa, Synchrony, American Express, Discover, Ally Financial, Fifth Third Bank and Navient.

Operational excellence can also be examined with reference to the competition. Here, operational excellence is construed as having lower operational risks, lower operating costs, and increased revenue than the competition.  For a company,  this is evident in internal procedures, tools, and culture that outstrip everyone else in the industry. Soon enough, this internal excellence will translate to heightened perceptions externally (on the part of customers, competitors, and regulators), that quickly positions the company as an authority in this space.

Workers engagement

Buffett understood that most people, regardless of what they say, are looking for appreciation as much as they are for money. He made it clear that he was depending on them and he underlined this by showing appreciation for their work and by trusting them to run their own operations.

Operational excellence is a state of readiness attained as the efforts throughout the enterprise reach a state of alignment for pursuing its strategies. The corporate culture is committed to the continuous and deliberate improvement of company performance and the circumstances of those who work there – and is a precursor to becoming a high-performance organisation.

In manufacturing, workers who inhabit shop floors on the field, and understand the nitty-gritty of the production process, have a major role to play in delivering operational excellence.

The CEO is the leader (and as the leader, should lead by example!) but the employees should be no less involved or engaged.

Empower workers with digital solutions

HSBC technology teams at HSBC Technology India (HTI) that use the latest in automation, artificial intelligence, data engineering, machine learning, cloud and biometrics to make banking simpler, better, faster and more secure for the customers across the world.

HSBC is utilizing a number of emerging technologies including artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, cloud and payments to improve operational efficiency and enhance customer experience.

Involving frontline workers in the journey to operational excellence sounds good in theory, but in practice, how will these workers actually play their role?  And when they deduce that a process is ineffective or misaligned from the company strategies, what can they do?

Problem-solving, along with inclusive leadership and collaboration, is one of the cultural themes of operational excellence. But remote field workers cannot solve problems if they do not have the tools to do so. They cannot act proactively if they have not been trained to do so, and they cannot collaborate with office-based managers if they do not have the platform to do so.

Connected Worker platforms

All Wells Fargo employees have the opportunity to participate in Employee Resource Networks (ERNs) at Wells Fargo. Employees – who are connected by a shared background, experience, or other affinity – formed these networks, and they are open to anyone who works at Wells Fargo. Each ERN is aligned with

the company strategy and devoted to professional growth and education; community outreach; recruiting and retention; supporting business development; and customer insight.

Connected Worker platforms, with the real-time communication and collaboration capabilities it hold, eliminate the communication gap between on-field workers and stakeholders in remote locations.  Also, they provide data feeds that allow workers to proactively detect problems, an information ‘storehouse’ from which they can (if necessary) search for solutions and collaboration mediums to guide them through resolution.

The platforms help organise visually appealing, engaging, (and utterly effective!) training that quickly conveys operational excellence to new employees, and fosters skill transfer – in so doing, reducing the seismic impact of losing legacy company workers.

For managers, it increases their visibility into field operations and enables them to eliminate manual instructions and procedures that dampen productivity.

CX quality in Italian banks

As per Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™),  the quality of the customer experience must delivers to its customers to create and sustain loyalty. In 2023, it benchmarked CX quality at nine leading Italian banking brands.

CX quality in Italian banks grew just enough to match the European average. In 2023, CX quality across Italian banks has made little improvement compared to 2022, yet with a modest 0.7-point increase, Italy has managed to match the European average CX quality score. Overall, Italy ranked third, following the UK and Germany. Five out of the nine Italian banks in the evaluation have increased their scores from 2022 but with a significant 10-point gap between the best and worst performer. Two out of the top three Italian banks are challengers with a predominant online presence. Intesa Sanpaolo has made significant gains by improving its mobile banking app in the last year.

Banca Mediolanum leads the Italian ranking. Banca Mediolanum confirms its leadership in the Italian CX banking rankings for the third year in a row and positions itself well above the European industry average. It scores best on the top three drivers for CX quality and is the European leader in aligning with customers’ values. By focusing on customer relations and specialising in family banking, it provides the most emotionally positive experience in the sector.

In Italy, communication with plain language drives loyalty the most. By using plain and accessible language in their communication with customers, banks can provide positive experiences, drive loyalty, and differentiate themselves from competitors. Intesa Sanpaolo, for example, communicates clearly and effectively by, for example, clearly labelling fees to help clients choose the right products and avoid unwanted charges.

Italy provides promising and most in demand jobs in the field of banking. Banking professionals can find profitable jobs with decent appraisals and work benefits.

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Our consulting on customer experience is managed by a dedicated team from Italy.

Italy is the largest global exporter of luxury goods (clothing, cars, etc.). Other major Italian industries include precision machinery, motor vehicles, chemical products, pharmaceuticals, electrical items, fashion and clothing.

Main industries of Italy are tourism machinery,  robots,  aircraft, electronics,  defence systems,  iron and steel, chemicals,  food processing,  scientific instrumentation,  pharmaceuticals,  textiles, motor vehicles, clothing,  footwear, ceramics, cruise ships, and  electric power. MCGR team has hands-on experience in these industries.

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