In this episode of Getting to Aha!, Darshan Mehta is joined by Luka Popovac, a Senior Customer Experience Executive. They discuss why businesses need to change their way of thinking when it comes to customer experience; why businesses need to be more straightforward with their customers; and how to make customer experience the key driver of your decision making

Luka is a Senior Customer Experience Executive of a leading agribusiness and food ingredients processor who proudly connects with customers and rural communities, delivering value through both innovation and expertise! Prior to this, however, he was the Head of Customer Experience at Mcdonald's (a fast-food company that needs no introduction), and was also a National Customer Experience and Capability Manager at Volkswagen Group Australia for eleven years! 

He’s a passionate person who fully believes in the customer experience, something which becomes evident right away during the episode!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

👉 Like many other in customer experience, Luka first started off in digital marketing. He claims he saw customer experience as a tactical thing, something you do to help customers when things go wrong. It was when he was presenting to stakeholders that he realized: the customer experience needs a shift and a change in direction in everything they do. The thing is, everyone has their own definition of what customer experience really is, but for him, it’s the concept that helps the company orient towards truly serving the needs of its customers, not just making sure people are well trained. It starts all the way at the mission and vision of the company. 

👉 Yes, your customers are important and you need to ensure that your employees are interacting with them appropriately and to the best of their ability, but something you need to ask yourself is this: are you doing the right thing by your employees? If they’re not happy in their roles, if you’re not setting them up for success or paying them right, then they will get burnt out, which means they won’t be able to provide excellent customer experiences.

👉 A lot of companies still don’t understand how to approach customer experience properly; they tend to get stuck in the analytics and numbers of it all, that somehow they can measure a customer’s happiness through data, but that’s not true. You need to go all the way back to the mission and vision of the company - What do you stand for? What’s your purpose? Where do you want to go and how do you envision your customer persona? If you can figure this out and use customer experience as the number one key to your decision-making, the rest should fall into place.

👉 You need to strive to understand the customer; you’re never going to understand them a hundred percent, but you need to develop a deeper understanding of them through the experiences they’ve had. Usually, customers are striving for something that is not often done in the corporate world: balance. In fact, customers are looking for strong values in a company, whether that’s through the environment, good employee relationships, a focus on customers - anything. You can’t just give vague statements that somewhat allude to particular values, you need to get specific.

bCast - https://bit.ly/3ACsRBz

Apple - https://apple.co/3gsuA31 

Spotify - https://spoti.fi/3B0lVy6 

Youtube - https://bit.ly/3KYAHtd 

RSS -  https://bit.ly/3AFrUs6 

Darshan Mehta on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/darshan--mehta

IResearch Website - https://iresearch.com

Luka Popovac on Linkein - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukapopovac

Grain Crop Website - https://www.graincorp.com.au