Members of the media update team were in attendance on Thursday, 17 August at the Century City Conference Centre in Cape Town.

Providing positive customer experience

Kevin Seaman, national patient manager for Mediclinic, spoke about the integrated approach to giving patients a positive experience. He explained that Mediclinic wanted to stand by the patient throughout the journey, because the patient is vulnerable and are not in hospital by choice.

Patient experience needs to be considered in terms of every point of contact – a business has to own the responsibility of each interaction, and in Mediclinic’s case, that extends to patients’ family members. Staff need to exhibit company values because it will determine the company’s culture.

Areas of focus were identified through surveys, focus groups, feedback, and research. When resolving complaints, he explained the importance of businesses accepting the mistake and apologising while displaying empathy, which will help to foster brand loyalty. Examples of solutions that Mediclinic arrived upon through this process include name badges for staff, built-in safes in rooms for valuables, dignified patient gowns, and using terminology that the patient can understand.

Driving customer centricity

Joe Fuster, global head of CX cloud at Oracle, explained the importance of staff being empowered to make the journey memorable for the customer. Today, there are greater expectations for immediate, seamless, and personalised experiences, and businesses need to consider how their underlying systems would have to change to accommodate that.

“Data itself de-humanises us,” he said. “We are not just a number, so data needs to be investigated to its core in order to humanise it.” The challenge, added, is to move from reactive to proactive customer service.

Customer experience is leveraged on seamless, innovative and personalised features, he explained, which rest on humanised data that can be derived from social media, core data, and customer data.

Empowering customers to interact

Sven Schoof, head of customer experience at Spree, began by asking delegates to consider who their customers are – a simple question to ask, but difficult to answer. He suggested it should be rephrased to ‘who is the customer being referred to at that specific point in time’. Factors like the markets, customer expectations, and technology change constantly, which means that brands are trying to hit a moving target.

Mobile access to a brand must always come first, he stressed, and a lot of companies aren’t yet getting mobile strategy and customer experience right. While it once was desktop first, then mobile, brands must now start with mobile and work backwards.

Re-shuffling the organisation to CX

Khomotso Molabe, head: digital banking, e-commerce, and moonshots, Standard Bank, took on the topic of re-organising a business around customer experience. A bad system will beat a good person every time, he said, quoting Edward Demming. Brands tend to try to fix a single issue rather than giving attention to the system as a whole. However, but they could maximise functionality if they did.

Taking a view from the outside is important in regards to seeing the organisation from the client’s perspective. Working backwards from that point is better than working from the inside out, where the focus is invariably on cost reduction rather than client experience.

For more information, visit www.cemafricasummit.com

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The way human-centric customer service needs to take precedence was one of the lessons imparted on the first day of the summit. Read more in our article CEM Africa 2017 summit gathers professionals for SA's largest CX industry event.