Positive Customer Outcomes

If you think about a customer experience, our success or failure in that experience is dependent on the customer's interaction perception. In an enterprise organization like GE, our customers are looking at us in our entirety and grading us on their perception of their experience across our ecosystem. While my team has responsibility for guiding our GE Oil & Gas customers through their Digital transformation journey, the responsibility of driving a positive customer experience lies with every GE employee and partner who engages with our customers. 

Speaking from personal experience as well as customer discussions, customers gain positive experiences when a number of things occur regularly:

1. We eliminate gaps.  Our customers are expansive and unique and the way they engage with GE often spans multiple areas of our business. As part of customer engagement, we sit down with the customer and develop their personal journey map with GE. Collaborating with our customer, we outline their touchpoints with GE and the ways in which they contact and engage with our oil and gas and digital businesses. Simple things, such as ensuring that our customer support function is on the customer’s first call and is staffed by people who know our customers and their solutions, helps eliminate service gaps and provides faster resolution to our customers. By understanding those contact points, as well as the customer’s expectations of those contact points, we are able to work to provide our customers a more seamless, positive experience across all interactions supporting their investments.
2. We train and educate employees. Every touch point with a customer is an opportunity to influence our customers’ perception of our service. We educate our teams on the importance of their roles in influencing our customers’ satisfaction with our service and provide them the support they need to deliver on and exceed customer expectations.
3. We execute on our commitments and customer expectations.  We expect our employees’ say/do ratio to be high for their internal as well as external commitments. During projects, we connect weekly to provide updates and gather feedback on our performance and continue those communication rhythms after the solution is live at a customer site. Our recent technology announcement with BP is an excellent example of our execution commitments.
4. We have fun with our customers. “Sense of humor required” is on every job description that I create. Our teams are known to take on Star Trek character avatars (I’m partial to the Borg Queen, personally...). Digital transformation is a new concept for a lot of our customers and we are excited about what Predix can do for them. A core piece of our engagement process is to work with our customers as a team to drive their transformation forward. In that, we plan, we educate, we execute, and we even code with our customer as a partner, engaged at every step of the way. During that process we are even known to throw a few parties and celebrate successes in the transformation journey.

Every customer experience is a learning experience for us in GE Oil & Gas. In the spirit of GE, we are constantly learning, improving, and striving to improve how we create connected processes and strong relationships with our customers.

What have you learned from your customer experiences?