#11 | DCX - Perspectives and insights on digital customer experience
Putting The Customer Back At The Center Of Customer Experience; Links to Industry news, thought leaders, and ideas of interest; DCX Thought Leader Linkedin Profile of the week
Putting The Customer Back At The Center Of Customer Experience
Customer experience encompasses all aspects of customers' interactions with your company, from the moment they become aware of you to when they buy from and continue doing business with you.
The goal of customer experience is to make every interaction with your company a positive one. Through effective customer experience strategies, you'll be able to better connect with customers, improve your brand image and build trust in your company.
The customer experience is critically important because it shapes how customers view your brand. If they have a positive experience with your company, they're more likely to buy from you again and recommend you to others. And if they have a negative one? Well, that can lead to lost business fast, as well as damage to your reputation online and offline.
Customer experience is a combination of three elements:
Product experience — how functional a product or service is; how well it performs its intended use; how easy it is to use; whether it meets expectations
Service experience — how effective a company is at meeting customer needs; how responsive they are when problems arise; whether they go out of their way to provide exceptional service
Brand experience — what customers think about you based on what they know about you
If customer experience is so important, why does it seem like so many businesses don't get it right? There are two main reasons: lack of understanding about customer experience and lack of resources dedicated specifically to improving customer experience.
Let's look at each problem separately:
1) Lack of understanding about customer experience
Businesses that don't focus on customer experience tend not to have a clear idea of what it means. They may think it's about delivering products or services that meet customers' expectations — and that's certainly part of it.
But it's much more than that. Customer experience is also about how you interact with your customers before, during, and after they use your product or service; how well you anticipate their needs and respond accordingly; whether you make them feel cared for as individuals rather than just another transaction.
2) Lack of resources dedicated to specifically improving the customer experience.
You may have a team in place dedicated to improving your customer experience, but it's not enough. You need to allocate specific resources — time, money, and people — toward making improvements. If you don't do this, then it's very likely that your efforts will be sporadic at best.
≥Many companies have no dedicated resources for improving their overall customer experience, which makes it impossible for them to make meaningful improvements in this area. This is particularly true in small businesses where there may be just one person who handles everything from marketing and sales to fulfillment and support, which makes it difficult for that person to focus on improving only one aspect of the business without impacting other areas as well (which is usually a bad thing).
Get Clear on What Makes a Great Customer Experience
It's important to get clear about what makes a great customer experience before you start making changes or investments in your business. One way to do this is by asking yourself some simple questions:
Who am I trying to satisfy?
What do they value most?
How can I deliver value in ways that matter most to them?
How can I make it easy for my customers to do business with me?
Is the experience I offer them valuable and memorable enough to keep them coming back?
If you can't answer these questions, the first step is to start asking your customers.
One way to do this is with a customer experience survey. A good survey will ask for feedback on specific touchpoints (like the website, sales staff, delivery people or customer service reps) and also provide an opportunity for customers to give more general feedback about their overall experience with your company.
It's also important to ask customers what they're looking for when they're doing business with you. For example, if a customer orders online and then calls for support because their order didn't arrive on time, does this mean he or she won't be back? If so, why not? And how can you ensure that your company doesn't experience this type of negative feedback in the future?
Once you have the feedback, it's important to analyze it and make changes based on what customers say they need. Be sure that any changes you make are measured so you can see if they're really helping your business.
Finally, it's important to follow up on feedback with your customers. Ask them how your changes have helped their experience with your company; if they say they're not doing any better, try again.
Summary Recommendations
1) Start with a baseline measurement of what you're currently doing well and where you could improve. This will help you set realistic goals for improvement over time.
2) Create a cross-functional team whose responsibility is to work with every part of your organization to improve the customer experience wherever possible — from sales and marketing through operations, finance, and beyond.
3) Create an organizational structure that allows this team to collaborate closely with all areas of your business so they can identify opportunities for improvement wherever they arise.
DCX Accountability Coaching
Helping digital customer experience leaders to unleash their full potential
Here's a simple 3 step framework for staying accountable:
1. Make a commitment (action, result, time frame)
2. Share the details with someone in your life (friend, colleague, coach)
3. Commit to providing regular updates to them (daily, weekly, specific date)
Accountability comes to life when you have someone who knows about your goals and expects results from them and helps keep you on track.
Etc.
Links to Industry news, thought leaders, and ideas of interest
Five Strategies For Improving The Customer Experience (forbes.com)
Shopping has changed significantly over the last two decades, but the focus on customer experience likely isn’t going anywhere. Jesse Haynes is the VP of Marketing at Guardian Baseball, a baseball equipment eCommerce company.
How telcos can create an empathetic customer engagement strategy (Reader Forum) (rcrwireless.com)
Telecommunications companies are continually looking for ways to stand out from the crowd. Your customer engagement strategy can be part of this — and core to this is empathy. More than just the current buzzword, empathetic engagement is key to growing stronger, longer-term customer relationships. That means understanding what being more empathetic really means when it comes to your customer engagement strategy — and you can’t afford to get this wrong.
How To Use The Customer Experience To Create Differentiation In The ‘sea Of Sameness’ | The Drum
Experts from VMLY&R, Cloudinary and PA Consulting discuss customer experience trends, challenges and emerging tech that can help optimize the CX to boost engagement, conversions and revenue. Watch the full session here. (Registration required)
Aflac virtualizes the customer enrollment experience | CIO
When the pandemic put its independent agents and franchises at grave business risk, Aflac IT set about augmenting their work with digital capabilities that make them ‘bionic,’ tech chief Richard Gilbert says.
DCX Thought Leader Linkedin Profile of the week
Each week, I share the profile of someone I am connected to on Linkedin that I think will bring value to your life and career.
Rajat Chawla is the founder of Koyopo, Asia’s 1st certified CX mentoring company offering The Ultimate CCXP Simulator, a CCXP Exam simulator and the author of The Customer Experience Design Book. The Customer Experience Design Book is written to help individuals and organizations get a fundamental understanding of the customer experience domain through interactive exercises and illustrations. The book also provides guidance to those who want to become an Internationally Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), the accreditation provided by CXPA after a thorough assessment.
Rajat’s purpose in life is to transform the life stories of Individuals and organizations by unlocking their passion, purpose, and natural strengths. He posts really informative and insightful content here on LI.
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