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To continuously improve your service provision, you need insight into various areas. You need to understand your organisation and know its playing field inside out. The customer experience and customer journey should hold no secrets for you. But that also applies to the employee experience and employee journey , because only with inspired employees can you work in a structured way on better results and enthusiastic customers. In short: what insights do you need exactly? How do you find them? And how do you record them?

No insight, no view
Many organizations that strive for better results and enthusiastic customers and employees base their decisions and actions on opinions. That does not go without a fight. Decisions are delayed by a lot of discussion and no one is really satisfied with the outcome, which is by definition a compromise. Moreover, it is dangerous: opinions often contain assumptions. And do the choices actually yield anything? Sometimes, but often that is more luck than wisdom. It is not without reason that a frequently heard quote is: “Without insight, no prospects.”

“Without insight there is no view.”

Base your choices on numbers, facts and proven truth
If you are working on better service and better results, and trying to ensure enthusiastic customers and employees, then you must base every decision and choice on insight. You algeria telegram number list must always be able to substantiate your decisions with figures, facts and proven truth. What insight is needed? How do you find that out? And how do you record it?

Insight into 'hard' and 'soft' areas, internal and external
In order to be able to work in a structured manner on (continuous improvement of) your service, communication and results, you need insight into 4 areas:


I will briefly explain them one by one below. Then I will discuss how you can go about gathering insight into employees (employee experience and employee journey), since much has already been written about mapping the customer journey and the needs and experiences of customers.

Insight into your organization: ambitions, direction, structure and internal challenges
First of all, ensure in-depth insight into and understanding of the goals and developments in your organization. You map out how the organization is structured and which processes are important. And in addition, you really try to understand what your organization needs to do to become a so-called 'service excellence' organization. In other words: in which areas does your organization need to develop? You gain this insight through analysis of strategic documentation, through in-depth interviews with the most important internal stakeholders or with tools such as SWOT analyses, vision and strategy sessions.

Insight into the playing field: stakeholders, competitors, trends and developments
In order to have a good overview of where you need to act, you need insight into the playing field of your organization. This concerns the activities of your competition, the expectations of your external stakeholders or clients. In addition, you need insight into external trends and developments: what is coming your way? You look at social, technological and market-related trends, at changes and patterns in consumer behavior, market characteristics, product development, etc. You assess these for opportunities and threats. What should you prepare for, and which boat can you miss?

And of course you can learn a lot from best practices . That is why you look at the leaders in your market, or even completely outside it. You try to draw lessons from an analysis of what they do or do not do and translate them to your organization. You also find out these things with a combination of methods: competitor analysis, SWOT analysis, stakeholder mapping, in-depth interviews, you name it.

Customer insights: needs, experiences, ambitions, motives and behavior
Of course you try to gain insight into the complete 'customer experience'. You ensure that your organization really understands the needs, wishes, situation, context and experiences of your customer. But you also provide insight into their ambitions, the underlying motives and the behavior that results from that. For insight into their emotions, attitudes and beliefs. And of course into their profile and characteristics, so that you get a complete picture of who your customer is, what moves him and how you should respond to that. You do that with needs and usability research, mystery shopping, an ongoing customer experience or customer satisfaction monitor, with customer journey mapping... you name it. For example, you record it in personas, customer journeys and CRM systems.

(In a later article, my colleague Natanja or I will go into more detail about making data from this type of research or monitors usable and 'actionable'. In other words: how do you ensure that 'data' changes into 'insight', so that you can indeed make safe and substantiated decisions based on it?)

Insight into employees: needs, experiences, motives, behavior and involvement
Finally, the last area you need insight into is the employee experience. Or, as guru Simon Sinek tweeted:

Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.”

This involves needs, experiences, motives, behavior and involvement. What do your people need to do their daily work and serve your customers well? How do they experience working for your organization? Why do they actually work for you? How appreciated do they feel? And how involved and inspired are they? From the last two, inspiration and involvement, it is only a small step to two super important elements that are often overlooked: core values ​​and culture.

You don't name core values, you find them
Especially when it comes to core values, organizations often get it wrong. But then again, it is also difficult to establish core values. Simply picking up terms out of thin air in one session is rarely effective. No one gets excited about the core values ​​that emerge from such sessions.