Successful brands often have something in common, they surpass customer expectations. If you ask me, it’s the most important metric of this era. Many customers want to trust you and feel valued and most businesses know that. They have dedicated people constantly working on customer experience (CX). They have customer experience data coming in. And for almost every brand, it is a digital-first world now. Brands can’t win on customer experience unless their approach keeps pace with the new methods people research, compare, purchase and share their experiences.
While customer experience is critical to the success of businesses, implementing a customer-centric culture is a process that requires a strong foundation at all levels of the company.
There are 5 major building blocks that you must have in order to build a winning customer experience strategy. These are foundational components that must be in place in order for your strategy to be successful.
Vision for customer experience
If you don’t have any idea where you’re going, how will you know when you arrive? Your customer experience vision is an inspirational and aspirational statement that plots the expected experience of the future. It portrays the experience you intend to deliver and serves as a guide to help select future courses of action. A customer experience vision aligns with the corporate vision of the organization, or, even better, they might be one and the same.
Customer Understanding
Any improvements that you make to the customer experience should be grounded in data, insights, and customer understanding. You must put the “customer” in the middle of customer service and customer experience. There are three primary methods to do that, listen, identify and measure customer perceptions of the experience today through surveys, online reviews, and other listening posts, characterize to get a deep understanding of who your customers are by developing personas and overlaying them with empathy maps, and empathize walk in the shoes of your customers and understand the experience today via journey mapping. By the way, these same understanding methods should also be applied to structuring and delivering a great employee experience.
Listen to customers at scale
Whatever measure you’re using customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), or something else you have to scale your customer listening program beyond direct feedback and surveys. There is a huge universe of unstructured data out there, and it holds crucial insights you need, to improve your customer experiences.
Your customers are talking to customer service executives, on social media and through live online chats and chatbots. Forbes in partnership with Opinium Research interviewed 36,014 consumers for their 2018 report known as “Defining the Human Age: A Reflection on Customer Service in 2030.” Their study discovered that when there is an urgent inquiry, the desire for human contact increases, with 44% turning to the phone and 25% doing so face-to-face.
As a major aspect of a voice of the customer (VoC) program, use speech and text analytics capabilities to listen to customers at scale and mine interactions for emotions, satisfaction and competitive intelligence.
Prioritize and act
Dependable cause-and-effect insight is rare, and it is one of your most powerful decision-making tools. At the point when you know what actions will yield real benefits, decision-making isn’t a guessing game. If data shows that redesigning of the website will yield almost no business improvement but expanding the capabilities of your mobile application could boost upsell opportunities or reduce call centre volume, the course of action is self-evident.
Correlative insight such as statistical, regression or multivariate analysis isn’t enough. Utilize a predictive, causal data model to know that when you do X, Y will happen. Link customer experience improvements to business outcomes, like likelihood to purchase, return and recommend. With a consistent model, you can prioritize at the touchpoint level and across the customer journey.
Employee experience
There is a clear link between the employee experience and the customer experience. We know this, but many companies still refuse to make the employee experience their priority, concentrating rather on shareholder value, the bottom line, or customer experience without considering the implications of poor employee experience to all of the above. When employees have a great experience that doesn’t mean ping pong tables and beer Fridays in office, they are happier and more productive, and they help in delivering good customer service experience.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chandrima Samanta
Content-Editor at MartechCube
Chandrima is a Content management executive with a flair for creating high quality content irrespective of genre. She believes in crafting stories irrespective of genre and bringing them to a creative form. Prior to working for MartechCube she was a Business Analyst with Capgemini.