Insights

While it is true that brands have the power to control their image, it is equally true that brands can’t control the thoughts of their customers about their business, especially in the golden age of social media – where one little slip is all that it will take to take down a business.

Disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and the latest mobile solutions will inevitably shape the evolution of asset management – and the expectations of their customers. From real-time service updates to recovery plans for outages, the demands of customers have increased and that trend will most likely continue.

Operators understand that they’re in the business of customer perception. Knowing what to say, how to act, and what to offer will directly impact their growth and conversely, their churn. It’s essential to keep customers happy by implementing tools that anticipate, avoid and mitigate the impact of outages. And maximize the efficiency of necessary maintenance.

The key is putting customer outcomes first – listen to what they’re saying about your service and organization; quantify how much they value your services, including your influence on the environment and the community; and significantly, how they feel when an unfavorable event occurs, such as leakage or interruption of service.

Once you’ve got this framework in place, you can attribute a monetary value to customer perception and use it to inform your investment decisions. Analyze customer perception alongside your pricing and asset database to determine your risk exposure across your portfolio and the potential reputational impact should an asset fail. These steps should make it easier to identify the assets that need immediate attention as you continue to keep your customers happy.

Our Making Change Predictable lite paper discusses how organizations can understand and improve how their customers perceive them. It highlights solutions purpose-built to identify and quantify metrics that impact customer perception, along with proactive resilience.

You’ll read about a customer perception-oriented resilience methodology developed by an organization from the water sector to indicate if the population is served by satisfactorily resilient services – focusing on the 4Rs of Resilience: resistance, reliability, redundancy, and response and recovery. This approach has been used to assess thousands of facilities, has identified CapEx savings, and secured additional funding to improve the resilience of systems.

At the end of the day, customer perception is a team sport. Everyone in an organization has a role to play, and there’s not job too small to have an impact.