I’m pretty sure we are all fed up of hearing the term “customer first” or “customer centricity”.

I think we all know how important it is to put our customers first and it’s amazing to be part of the conversation with many of our customers as they strive to evolve their business to be ever more customer centric.

However, I believe that the journey to customer centricity will never be complete. There is always room for improvement and we should always strive to improve.

Our recent research shows that 68% of people say price is still the most important factor when buying a new car, however, I also think that if we could ask their subconscious that same question we would get a different answer. I’ve always been a strong believer that the dealership has its place, and to ensure it does, we need to build out an outstanding customer experience – one that suits every customer on every channel, however they want to interact with you.

I was introduced to the term ‘Kaizen’ in my time working with some talented Product Development people at Arnold Clark. It’s something that is a fundamental part of how I go about life both in work and at home.

It’s literal meaning Change Good translates to a movement around continuous improvement by making lots of little small changes that help you improve. It really helps me put things into perspective and really breaks big tasks down into more manageable, actionable things. I think if we all thought for 5 minutes about what we’d like to change about our customer experience we could write down at least 10 things, but how often do we then spend time trying to decide how to deliver all 10 of them. My advice: pick one, then figure out what is the smallest part of that one thing that you could do to have an impact and do it, then pick the next.

The biggest danger is to not change anything or expect to deliver it all in one big bang.

Every piece of research shows that the vast majority of customers want to (and are willing to) visit a dealership but they want a frictionless experience. So for me, I think we should all be looking at every touch point and how we can remove the friction, and build in joy.

So go on, take 5 minutes – what’s the small thing you are going to change tomorrow that can start making a difference.

…and with 84% of people in our latest research saying video was a valuable part of the customer experience perhaps that could be your first small change 🙂

Read at our latest research at this page https://www.citnow.com/resources/accelerating-the-digital-customer-experience-2021-report and if you want to follow me on Linkedin my page is https://www.linkedin.com/in/carol-fairchild/

Dealers are taking their customer experiences to the next level with CitNOW – and with our learning resources, so can you. Register for one of our free webinars or explore the tips and advice available in our How2CitNOW video series on YouTube.