Risk management professionals cannot help their organizations succeed without a clear strategy to win, delight, and retain customers. Yet, too many companies remain reactive when it comes to mitigating the risks associated with customer-related experiences.

There’s a Problem

We’ve all seen it before: A customer has a negative experience with your brand, let’s say at a hotel, where they are disappointed by a hard mattress and a late check-in.

Unfortunately, in today’s age of social media, a poor customer experience doesn’t stop at the comment box and a quick rant to friends. Instead, a customer’s words can reach beyond their network. With just a few keystrokes, your brand has gone viral for all the wrong reasons.

No one likes to get beat-up on social media, but once the complaint is out there it’s up to your company to do damage control. Every potential misstep that a disgruntled customer can air on the internet has far-reaching implications.

For many industries, especially retail, food service, and hospitality, success is measured by positive ratings on social media.

What if you could avoid the whole scenario in the first place?

Proactive Risk Management

By adopting a proactive approach to providing a consistent, streamlined, and positive customer experience, organizations can limit the number of risks that might impede a positive customer experience.

Minimizing, or even eliminating, such risks helps your brand protect its reputation, revenue, and regulatory fitness.

Industry studies confirm that a successful customer experience program benefits the bottom line.

So why aren’t more organizations placing greater emphasis on eliminating problems before they have a chance to appear?

There are a few reasons:

• Customer experience risk management gets lost in finance, legal, and HR risks.
• Business executives don’t understand the extent of customer experience related risks.
• Traditional audits don’t focus on customer-facing policies.
• Auditing teams are stretched too thin.

Thousands of Hours of Work

Ask any audit professional and they will tell you that they are strapped for time. They spend their time auditing for safety, quality, and local and federal regulations. Auditing customer-facing policies like brand standards can be viewed as a ‘nice to have’ rather than a necessity.

Too often, overshadowed by finance, legal, and HR risks, potential risks related to customer-facing processes just don’t show up in audit forms.

In the hotel example, the mattress firmness would not be part of a typical risk management assessment. Hotel auditors focus on high risks areas like pool, fire, and food safety, and the guest experience becomes a lower priority. As we know, the guest experience is the focus of customer reviews.

In most organizations, there are simply not enough human resources to address nontraditional and non-regulatory risk management.

A Better Way

Automating your audits frees up precious man-hours to do more than just pen and paper regulatory audits.

With the right tools and techniques, auditors can cover customer touch points like mattress firmness in addition to traditional regulations. This gives your brand the opportunity to prevent negative customer experiences by taking a more proactive approach.

When Hard Rock Hotels switched from Excel to Mobile Auditor, the brand compliance evaluation process transformed into a continuous improvement cycle. With the time saved by switching from manual audits to a mobile app, auditors could add an additional layer of evaluation—the mystery shop—to their workflow.

It’s time to arm risk professionals with the tools and technology they need to include the customer experience in traditional quality audits. By investing in the right technology and techniques to focus on managing the circumstances that inhibit good customer experiences, risk-management professionals and programs can move from a position of cost mitigation to a more valuable one of revenue generation.

With RizePoint, getting the right technology and techniques into the hands of your employees is simple. Learn how RizePoint can help you manage your risk by creating a powerful brand experience inside and out when you download this free datasheet.