Most organizations today acknowledge that they are in the customer experience business. However, transforming into a customer-centric company is not easy. It requires bringing together multiple expectations of the company-client-customer to deliver a unique experience. What an organization needs to create customer experience success is a strong strategy – one that differentiates what they provide from that of the competitors. Once the service strategy vision is clear, it lends to the development of a stellar service culture.
While every organization will have its own set of needs to achieve change, here is a six-step approach to build better customer experience strategies:
- Discover: First things first – know the customer. Consumers today are more informed than ever and have evolving expectations. Companies need to research, analyze and understand what their customers want now and possibly in the future. An insight into what they value and how they want to be served will help align the end goals.
- Assess: Emerging technologies which have been embraced by the consumer have changed the nature of customer company interactions. For a strategy to be successful, organizations need to take this into account and change accordingly. They will need to evaluate the levels of their organizational maturity in critical competencies and priorities to define the scope of transformation needed..
- Envision: Once a 360 degree picture of the business standing is gained, companies can begin to roadmap relevant, seamless customer-company journeys. In doing so, it is crucial to consider customer experience as a whole, without too much touch-point focus. The idea is to set forth a vision that unites the company’s value proposition with its capabilities and goals to ultimately drive loyalty and growth.
- Involve: The momentum of putting customers first cannot be sustained without cross functional participation. It is thus important to get all the concerned people on board and get clients to think beyond operations and instead focus on people based outcomes. This is about getting stake-holders to work together to push innovative ideas to set the bar higher than the average ‘good’ experience.
- Train: A strategy, no matter how sound, will work only when the teams are skilled enough to implement it. Employees thus need to be taught to focus sales conversations not just on closing deals and meeting margins, but rather on identifying and creating opportunities that highlight the product or service uniquely to each individual. This will lead to an effective execution of the experience strategy at all levels. Optimize: Customer experience strategies are an on-going process that can be affected by new trends, technologies and competitors. Every company needs to look for ways to measure and manage their CX strategy via operational metrics (KPIs, NPS) for optimized outcomes.
In the end, a great customer experience is about creating remarkable real bonds with real people for real impacts.
