The customer experience is made up of a number of different dimensions, including diverse brands, product lines, customer behaviour and channels - all of which have an impact on the way in which the provider’s business is perceived. This makes it very difficult to match the brand promise with operational reality, especially when there is no single person responsible for managing the customer experience.
The picture is further complicated by the increasing use of customer segmentation and the rising number of channels. This hinders co-ordination of customer interactions, with inconsistencies as a result. In addition, not having a clear picture of what the desired Customer Experience should be undermines investments in capabilities such as complaint management, store lay-out and website usability.
For example, research shows that the majority of consumers abandon online shopping carts due to usability barriers. The problem is arguably getting worse, for as organisations are trying hard to meet customers’ expectations, these expectations are racing ahead of such organisations’ ability to keep up.
An additional challenge is that most companies design their processes around improving efficiency and releasing cost savings, not necessarily focusing on improving Customer Experience. So a business case with ’Customer Experience’ in the title will most likely be subject to particularly close scrutiny.
Last but not least is the knowledge and mandate required by the employees to be able to handle flexible offerings and solve problems in order to deliver the desired experience. This requires the correct tools and a service culture that empowers employees to do the right thing for the customer immediately.
Defining a strategy
Brands that regularly top customer experience charts invest heavily in the necessary capabilities, whether it is training of staff or the offering of a flexible delivery system. They put the Customer Experience guiding principles at the heart of their strategy.
For example, most consumers are inconvenienced if they have to stay at home in order to receive a delivery, where the delivery slot is “between 9.00am and 6.00pm”. To offer a more precise and targeted delivery slot may well require an investment in an advanced planning system that plots the geographical complexity of orders with resource availability.
As part of developing a strategy to manage their Customer Experience, organisations should first determine what the desired experience should be across the entire customer journey. To define the strategy, it is imperative to ask the right questions, such as:
What do you want your brand to be well-known for?
What kind of relationship do you want to build with your customers?
How do you want your customers to feel when they have completed their customer journey?
How will this differ across different customer groups based on need and value?
How will you deliver the desired experience for each customer journey, consistently across each customer experience/touch point, for hundreds and (or) thousands of customers?
Again, research studies confirm that the majority of senior business leaders believe they could increase customer loyalty and market share by focusing their organisation on integrated customer experience strategies and implementation.
Additionally, conscious and business-case based decisions should be made as to how to implement the desired Customer Experience, taking into account practicalities like cost and efficiency.
More than technology
In theory, the customer experience should be managed across all channels and customer interactions. A practical way to get an understanding of this is to map out the customer journey and describe the Customer Experience for different customer scenarios.
This process can highlight which elements of the customer journey are helping to retain customers and which elements are turning them away. Companies can take it a step further by differentiating the Customer Experience across all different customer segments. For example, long-term profitable customers may receive an enhanced, more ‘expensive’ experience in comparison to long-term ‘net cost’ customers.
Top-down
In general, companies in which the marketing model is running out of steam or those with a persistent complaint history turn to a top-down approach. The starting point here is to map out the entire customer journey and decide on what the desired Customer Experience should be for each step. This can be differentiated by channel, by customer segment or by specific scenario.
The next step is to identify where the key opportunities for improvement are and what capabilities are required to turn the suggested improvements into practice.
Additionally, it will be necessary to determine what this means for the supporting business enablers; people, process and technology, for there is no doubt that creating a ‘customer centric’ culture in most cases is a long-term project.
Turning training and customer-focused incentive schemes into an accepted and automatic way of working is a real challenge. In many cases the employee who focuses on being friendly with the manager is still viewed as being more successful than the employee who makes a real effort for the customer.
Bottom-Up
Companies with a clear view of the weakest link in their customer journey - and who are not in need of a large-scale customer experience-driven transformation - will benefit more from a bottom-up approach. This approach focuses on improving a single point in a desired Customer Experience.
For example, take a scenario where customer growth numbers are fine, but many potential online customers are lost due to a cumbersome payment process. In this case, a business could start with improving the online checkout process by integrating the web channel with the contact centre by means of a web chat functionality. The customer then has the option to initiate a real-time chat with a call centre agent should they need assistance.
Measuring the impact
For both top-down and bottom-up options it is imperative to support any programme or project activities with a solid business case. This is essential for determining the return on investment and gives it a practical foundation for management approval. In addition, metrics are required to measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as retention and referral rates.
A powerful and straightforward tool for measuring the impact of customer experience strategies is the Net Promoter Score*. This method measures the number of ‘promoters’ you have (customers that positively refer and recommend your brand to others) compared to the number of ‘detractors’ you have (those customers who stop buying your products and services and have a negative opinion of the company).
This information is collected by a simple questionnaire that can be used across the channels and different organisational functions. It is possible, for example, to measure how many net promoters a specific agent has of a particular product line. The Net Promoter Score is already being used by many blue-chip companies.
These days, your customer’s experiences are an open book – especially with the rise of social computing. Many companies are now trying to gain a better understanding of the end-to-end customer experience, but are struggling to put their strategies into practice.
A recent blog criticising the customer service of a large retailer has had a serious impact on the retailer’s corporate reputation. Some even claim that it had an impact on the company’s stock value.
A simple Internet search of ‘complaints’ or ‘positive experiences’ relating to any airline, for example will generate hundreds of thousands of pages on which customers share their experiences and receive responses from like-minded customers.
A Customer Experience ‘champion’
Companies that manage the Customer Experience best are typically those who have a senior manager dedicated to ensuring that the customer is fully considered in any strategic discussion regarding the organisation’s current performance and future plans.
This has a number of important implications. Firstly, this will only be truly effective if the ‘champion’ has the full endorsement and support of the board and senior management team in ensuring that all parts of company’s activities are aligned to deliver a consistent and coherent Customer Experience.
Equally, to achieve this requires much more than simply ‘looking at things from the customer’s viewpoint’. Rather, it demands both a deep understanding of the desired experiences within each key customer segment and the knowledge and expertise to put these into effect throughout the business, via a series of practical deliverables across different communication and delivery channels.
Standing still?
Whether it is a top-down or bottom-up approach, improving the customer experience has to be embedded in the organisation’s way of doing business. In order to achieve tangible results, it is crucial to have a deep understanding of the different Customer Experience dimensions and their interdependency.
A single Customer Experience competence or a partner with multi-channel advisory skills is essential in outlining and managing the required activities. It should be a conscious decision as to whether to adhere to a particular Customer Experience or not and what the resulting financial consequences should be.
And in doing this, it is important to be realistic: although the customer is ‘king’, both the board and stakeholder experiences are vital too.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in what will typically be a highly complex series of activities, it is essential to maintain momentum as part of a process of continuous improvement.
For standing still, whether through simple inertia or paralysis as a result of internal functional disagreements, will simply hand the initiative to your more responsive competitors who could steal your customers from you.
*Net Promoter® is a registered trademark of Fred Reichheld, Satmetrix Inc. and Bain and Company.
