#14 | DCX Perspectives and insights on digital customer experience
CX Foundations; Stop Selling Yourself Short; Links to Industry news, ideas, insights, and the DCX Thought Leader Linkedin Profile of the week
CX Foundations
Customer experience is the new marketing. Whether you are selling a product or service, delivering a service, or leading an organization, customer experience is critical to success. But what does it mean? And how do you go about planning for it?
Your customer experience plan is the blueprint for your future. It's the roadmap for how you’re going to get from where you are now to where you want to be in 2023. And once it's built, it will guide all of your decisions about how to execute that vision. So how do you build this plan?
In today's fast-moving business climate, it's easy for CX leaders to focus more on tactical business-led operational issues and metrics vs. strategic opportunities that build long-term customer relationships. The problem is that it creates a disconnect between what the business thinks is important and what customers need. The best CX leaders can see what tomorrow's customers need beyond today's operations.
The CX Foundation
The Customer Experience Foundation (CX Foundation) is the relationship between you, your business, and your customers. It's what makes or breaks a company—you can have the best products in the world, but if people aren't buying them because of how you treat them, what good are they?
This foundation is built on trust, experience, and expectation management. If any of these is weak or missing from your business model, it will collapse under pressure from competitors who take care of their customers better than you.
A strong CX Foundation will make sure that when challenges arise (and they always do), you'll be able to solve them quickly by having a plan in place ahead of time instead of relying on improvisation once trouble arises on social media or through other channels where consumers talk about their experiences with products/services/companies online all day long!
Organizational Alignment
To win at CX, your business and IT teams need to be aligned with one another on key touchpoints like CX reporting and analytics. They also need to align around their respective roles in driving a great customer experience:
Business teams should understand why they're investing in CX initiatives—and what value those initiatives will bring them (e.g., increased sales from new customers).
IT teams should support business objectives by providing tools that can measure successes and failures along the customer journey.
To make this alignment work, it's important to have a shared understanding of what customer experience is—and why it matters. This can be challenging for both business and IT teams because they often use different definitions when referring to CX. It's important that everyone knows what CX means in their organization so they can work together toward the same goal: improving customers' experiences with your brand.
Prioritization
Prioritization is essential for the success of any CX plan. It helps you focus on what's important and ensure that you're spending your time, resources, and budget in the right places.
Prioritization can be done in different ways, but there are two main categories: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down prioritization occurs when a company establishes its most important goals—such as increasing customer loyalty or reducing churn—and then works out how to achieve them through specific actions or initiatives that support these larger objectives. Bottom-up prioritization is more of an iterative process where teams identify areas where they need improvement, design solutions to address those needs, and then implement them across their organization over time.
Digitally Driven
A digital-first customer experience is an approach that focuses on delivering an exceptional experience via digital channels first. This approach aims to improve the overall user experience and provide a more consistent experience across all touchpoints. It’s important to note that a digital-first customer journey doesn't necessarily mean your customers will be interacting with your brand exclusively through their mobile devices.
The best way to achieve a digital-first customer journey is to establish goals for each touchpoint in your organization with the knowledge that every interaction has the potential to influence future interactions, both online and offline. When you start planning for these touchpoints, it's essential to consider how you want customers to interact and how they'll interact with employees or representatives within your company. This step can be difficult because it requires completely rethinking how we're used to thinking about our business processes, which often involve multiple interdependent steps between departments within organizations—but it's necessary if we're going to support customers' increasingly complex needs!
Taking an Integrated Approach
It’s easy to get caught up in the simple things: optimizing your website, improving customer service, and making sure your app is working smoothly.
But as you do these things, keep in mind that they are all connected and should be part of an overall strategy. Your goal should be to become more efficient and effective at delivering great customer experiences across channels of communication (email, phone, web chat).
Tactical Approach
A tactical approach focuses on the immediate needs of the customer and is focused on short-term goals. It's important to take a tactical approach if you're just starting out with your CX plan because it helps you focus on getting things done as quickly and efficiently as possible. If a customer has a question about their product or service, for example, your tactical plan will guide your team in how they respond.
Strategic Approach
A strategic approach is more long-term than tactical plans; it looks at where you want to be in one year or even five years down the line. Typically, strategic plans are created by senior leaders within an organization because they require more time and effort than regular projects do. Strategic plans can help companies reach their goals by providing guidance on how all departments should work together toward common objectives over time—but they don't necessarily tell employees what they need to do daily!
Examples of companies that have built strong CX foundations
To help you get started, here are some examples of companies that have built strong CX foundations:
Apple has created an ecosystem of products and services that, when used together, create tremendous value for its customers. This result is the foundation of an outstanding CX strategy.
Amazon offers a wide variety of products and services—from books to cloud storage—that allow consumers to easily access what they need without leaving their homes or offices. In doing so, it's created a seamless experience for customers who can easily order items online and have them delivered right to their doorsteps in as little as two days!
Google has created a friendly, helpful interface that makes it easy for users to search the internet, access information, and find what they need. This experience is so seamless that many users don't even realize when they're interacting with Google as opposed to visiting an entirely different website!
Conclusion
The customer experience foundation is one of the most important plans in your business. It’s the single place where you can clearly articulate your vision and strategic goals, as well as the strategies, tactics, and resources needed to achieve them. Most importantly, it will help you focus on building a better customer experience that drives loyalty and ultimately improves profits.
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Stop Selling Yourself Short (And How to be okay with the results)
Once, a young employee felt like they had to be someone else at work.
They felt like they had to be more polished and professional because that's what they thought people expected. They felt they needed to be different from the person they were outside of work.
But one day, something changed: they had a meeting with their boss.
The young employee walked into the meeting and sat beside their boss. The boss looked at them, smiled, and said: "You know what? I'm really glad you're here today."
The young employee was surprised, but they smiled and said: "I'm glad to be here."
The boss looked at them again and said: "You know what? I'm glad you're here today because I've been thinking about your great work this past year. You're an excellent employee, and I appreciate everything you do."
The young employee was surprised and smiled. They thanked their boss for the praise.
The employee left the meeting feeling great: they had been recognized for their accomplishments, as they were! They realized that being themself—being authentic—was the most powerful thing they could do.
They started to notice that people were drawn to them when they showed up in their whole, authentic selves. Their presence felt magnetic and powerful. People wanted to be around them because they were genuine and honest.
And people respected them for it.
The young employee learned that being yourself is the most powerful thing you can do in any situation—especially at work.
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Your employees are your best asset. How are you enhancing the experience they have at work? Are you inspiring them through your words and actions? Are you leading by example? Are you being intentional about how you connect with others? Are you being authentic?
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Links to Industry news, ideas, insights, and the DCX Thought Leader Linkedin Profile of the week
Experience Business Glossary | By Mathieu HANNOUZ
Came across this glossary of CX terms produced by Mathieu Hannouz, a Marketing and Customer Experience Technologist and the Director of Digital Experience Evangelism at Adobe. He provides not just a definition, but explores the business value of each term.
Just Walk Out is billed as a frictionless way for fans to avoid concession lines and get back to their seats faster. Professional sports franchises across the nation are rolling out checkout-free stores from Amazon and other competitors in a test of the nascent technology.
Walmart Now Lets You Use Your Own Photos For Virtual Clothes Fitting | PetaPixel
In March 2022, a virtual fitting room service launched that gave users 50 different models with various body types and heights to select from in order to find what they believed would be the closest match.
However, users still had trouble envisioning how the clothes would look on their own bodies. Now the company lets anyone upload photos of themselves to the app and see what clothes would look like on their individual bodies.
As our world becomes increasingly digital, cities are reinventing themselves yet again. But the next generation of cities won’t be built with wood or bricks or steel. This time around, cities will be built with code.
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.
This week’s feature is on Matt Faulk. Matt is making a transition and exploring new options for where he can put his passion for Customer Experience to work. He is seeking a leadership position that will challenge him to motivate individuals and teams in order to achieve new levels of success. He wants his efforts to help expand the perspectives and worldviews of those around him so they, too, may support and enhance the organization’s mission.
He started his career in law enforcement in Tucson, AZ, where he developed and taught leadership principles, implicit bias, diversity and inclusion, and community engagement and business engagement programs that empowered internal employees and consumers, focusing on marginalized community members.
Most recently, he was leading the charge for Crisis Text Line, which provides free, 24/7 support for people in crisis in the United States via text messaging. While there, he created a 360 CX structure including, Success (support, including wellness), Learning (continuous training & development), Operations (data & user feedback loops), and Ecosystem to support volunteer engagement programs. All based on what he termed “User-centric, User-first” feedback loops.
I highly recommend you reach out to him, say hi!
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