Journey to Customer Centricity | Silvana Buljan | Engati CX

Here is how to get a head-start on your journey towards customer centricity, with Founder and CEO of Buljan & Partners, Silvana Buljan.

Silvana Buljan, Founder and CEO of Buljan & Partners, internationally recognized as an expert in Customer Centricity Management, Customer Experience, Employee Experience, CRM, leadership, talent management, and customer-oriented organizational changes. Since 1998, she has been a part of client strategy projects for leading automotive, air transportation, healthcare, industrial manufacturing, financial services, and software vendor brands. Teacher, lecturer, mentor, coach, consultant, and trainer, she is the guiding beacon of the Buljan & Partners team!

Journey to Customer Centricity — An interview with Silvana Buljan

Journey to Customer Centricity

The following section contains a summary of our interview with Silvana. But if you’d like to listen to the full interview, check out the podcast below.

Tell us something about your “Start — Create — Engage” methodology?

Often, we’d find customers asking “how do we begin?” Silvana created this methodology to make things more understandable and more tangible. And to help customers understand what we need to do when we want to begin a company’s journey to customer centricity that actually engages customers better and improves overall experiences.

This is how start, create, engage was co-created with customers.

Here’s a brief rundown of each phase in Silvana’s methodology.

Start

First, Silvana always checks how the company is doing. Here are a couple of questions to ask ourselves when we’re starting our journey to customer-centricity.

• What is going well? What isn’t?
• Is there any way of measuring customer satisfaction and experiences?
• What kind of process landscapes are in place?
• Is there a defined customer journey in place?

After asking ourselves these questions, you can see where you are in planning your customer journey. But we also have to have a journey map in place. We have to find a way to understand our customer’s reality. Silvana urges us to keep a roadmap, KPI, brand awareness, a defined mission, and vision in place. We have to find a way to keep data in place for feedback, and how to measure processes like complaint management.

“Essentially, ask yourself what do you want to be for your customers?” — Silvana Buljan

Create

This is all about envisioning what you want the future experience to be . It’s about identifying and making changes that we need to perform. But it’s also about understanding that our employees are the experience creators . So it’s important in this phase to create and to apply methods like design thinking, service design, service blueprints, etc. There are so many tools and methods out there to create the experience we want to deliver as the desired customer experience.

Engage

This is the most challenging part, it’s all about implementing. Usually, initiatives around customer-centricity are led by a department or a team, but this is not the way forward. Customer centricity must be branched out to everyone, every team, every department. It’s a mindset that organizations must develop. We have to move away from a process-fulfilling task mindset to a customer centric one.

This is what we mean by engagement, it’s not between one department and a customer, but engagement within the whole organization . It’s engaging our employees to understand what this transformation is about and how it impacts their daily work. They need to understand the journey and its touchpoints, and how to measure feedback.

It’s about the correlation of improving customer experiences and the impact of business results. Because we want better results in terms of profitability and sustainable business models for the future.

On the other hand, Silvana’s seeing a trend of customer engagement for companies with excellent customer experiences. Being able to understand where the customer is one a one-to-one level.

It’s about understanding what would be the next best activity to offer as a company based on their needs and preferences. And tracking this data in real-time with technology.

Did you like the insights shared by Silvana? Read the complete blog here.