Building Customer Experience Strategies

Customer experience, known also as CX, is a customer’s complete experience when interacting with your business. These interactions could be in the form of front desk service, navigating website, and delivery of purchased products. Creating an excellent CX for your business influences your customer’s approach, and it can also determine whether they will come back.

Companies desiring to succeed and outperform their peers need to develop, a culture of customer entricity, which calls for action across all levels:

1. Build aspirations anchored in purpose

Many customer-experience transformations stall because most companies fail to link the efforts with strategic priorities, such as revenue growth by product/service. Without clearly showing how a better experience will increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and attraction, and thereby better business results, the effort is likely to seem frivolous and to lose executive sponsorship. Marketing targets would be a lot easier to attain with improved customer satisfaction which

would drive referrals, attract more customers, increase market share, and improve employee engagement. This ability to clearly articulate how a CX effort will lead not only to more satisfied customers but also to better business results, is a skill that must often be intentionally

developed.

2. Take a comprehensive approach to transforming the business

Many companies fall into the trap of solving issues around customer touch points “a call to customer care or a marketing email” instead of considering the customer experience with the company, that is, looking across the entire journey a customer takes to achieve a goal, such as solving a billing issue. Addressing customer pain points, without understanding how the pieces fit together often leads to incremental CX changes that don’t get to the root of the problem. Addressing customers waiting time, to get issues resolved and refunds issued, without addressing why customers were calling into the service center, will only improve satisfaction scores for each customer-service touch point. Whilst the more important metric, whether customers would recommend the company to a friend remained the same. Mapping the end-to-end customer journey to achieve a certain goal is critical to avoid jumping to the wrong solutions. Mapping helps to reveal customer pain points not only within touch points but also in the hand-offs between them, and potentially to identify where the issue originated as well.

Equally important is that, not only the front desk, but the entire work force can use them to solve business problems. When journey maps is applied to customer-service problem, the root cause will be solved and thus customer-satisfaction will improve.

3. Establish critical enablers that support and speed the transformation

Many companies struggle to systematically come up with bold, innovative solutions for customer challenges and to bolster a culture that encourages such creative thinking. Its not uncommon for a business to reject new ideas because “We have tried that before, or thats not how we do things ,or We’ll never get the funding for that” that kind of thinking causes employees to limit their creativity to safe. To truly transform, a different way of thinking is needed. Fostering transformational thinking requires a focus on both creating a culture of unconstrained innovation and building the right employee capabilities. The former includes creating time and space to generate ideas without judgment or constraint on business feasibility assessments of feasibility come later and role modeling that it is acceptable to challenge long-held organizational orthodoxies. The latter includes building the muscle to take inspiration from other companies or even industries, using design-thinking techniques to generate bold ideas, and supporting a customer-centric mindset in every member of the organization. An on-demand revolution in customer-experience operations?

4. Avoid sidelining customers upfront

Failure to seek feedback out of a desire to save time can keep companies from testing solutions with customers, and seeking it too late to make real changes can lead to inferior products and lackluster financial results.

5. CX on its own island

Ensuring an excellent customer experience requires a cross-functional mindset and a customer-centric culture. It is not just the CX team that drives customer experience, nor is it just the customer-facing front line. Looking deeply at a customer journey reveals that many employees, even those who will never see a customer, affect it. Engaging marketing organization to offer better promotions and training reception staff to greet customers by name will only result in a short-term gains. Truly customer-centric companies train employees at every level of the organization and in every function, from sales to accounting, to make sure they understand the role they play in maximizing the customers experience. The opportunities to transform customer experience and thereby improve profits, customer loyalty, and employee engagement are numerous and can be revolutionary for an organization. Identifying and grasping those opportunities requires an organizations leadership to clearly articulate the value of CX, encourage agility and design thinking, and empower every employee to contribute to a better customer experience.

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