Building a Strong Foundation for Customer Experience
Rafael Kaduri
EVP Customer Success at Intentia | Help companies to enroll loyal customers, meet and exceed their expectations | Customer Facing Leader | Technical Support and Delivery Master
Customer experience, that’s the name of the game.
When we all understand what Customer Experience is and what goes into it, we'll see opportunities to improve and innovate. Your organization and teams should be ready and excited to deliver consistently great experiences to your customers.
What are the (secrets that might be known to all and worth remembering) that a successful organization is doing to further strengthen its approach to secure the ultimate excellent customer experience??
Great customer experience helps to build high customer satisfaction and loyalty that secure the retention of the customers and expansion of your business.
?The following is a short practical introduction to the key areas that support great customer experiences. These points and tips are relevant for Customer Facing Executives, CSMs, Support Experts, Account Manager, Projects Managers and whoever is dealing with customers.
So first, what is “Customer Experience”?
Everyone has a role to play in customer experience.
I remember one day, when I used to work for Delta Air Lines, I was handling travelers at the Check-In desk. It was a busy day.
The “next” customer approached my desk and before even saying hello, he said: “I am a high mileage frequent flyer and I just want you to know that you are the slowest and most inefficient agent that I have ever met…”. I thought that he could move to another line if I was so bad… but I didn’t say anything but asked the necessary questions to check him in for the flight. I realized that he had a complicated route. When I determined that his preferred seats were not reserved for him, I corrected it. After I finished, he remembered to mention that his wife would be joining him later in the trip. I asked him for her details and realized that her reservation had problems. I corrected it in few seconds and changed the seat assignments in order for them to sit together.
I saw the surprise on his face. He was not expecting such service. I decided to give him the “knockout”. I stood and forwarded him the flight(s) documentations and… I also gave him a voucher for a coffee in the departure hall as “compensation” for the time he spent in my desk.
He was speechless! He could hardly find the words to apologize and thank me.
I could remember the last sentences he said: “If I knew that this is the service I am going to get, I wouldn’t mind waiting another one hour in line. Your professional handling is far beyond my expectation… Delta spirit is amazing!”.
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So, here’s how I define customer experience?
?It's everything a customer hears about your organization, every interaction they have with your organization and its products and services, and ultimately, how they feel about your organization.
Customer experience is more than products, customer service, or your technology platform. It also comes down to any one interaction that can make an indelible impression on the customer.
?Allow me to introduce you to the 10 key pillars that can support and strengthen customer experience.
Pillar 1: Vision and Goals
?To deliver great experiences, your organization should have a vision.
Vision can take many forms, including a vision statement, a mission, or a set of values or principles.
Here are some examples:
Now, along with vision, organizations should establish supporting goals in two areas.
Note that business goals reflect the health of the organization and include things like financial performance and market share.
Some advice: If you are a decision maker or a leader, make the connection between what you're doing and your organization's vision and goals. If you're in a role that seems far removed, ask questions about the organization's direction.
TIP: It's just fine to come up with a vision for your area or team, or even yourself, as long as it aligns with the organization vision and goals.
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Pillar 2: Employee Engagement
The most customer-centric organizations build on a foundation of employee engagement. This means more than just job satisfaction.
Engagement is the enthusiasm or emotional commitment an employee has to the organization and the work they do.
What's behind that level of engagement? As it turns out, the key driver is “purpose”. Do we believe that our work matters? The research is clear. Engagement is essential in every role, be it marketing, the warehouse, product development, customer service, or any other area. Along with purpose, we have some other key drivers of engagement; employees have ample opportunities to learn and grow. They're empowered to make decisions. Performance goals and measures align with doing what's best for customers. Coaching and recognition are part of the culture.
TIP: Ask employees a very effective and very specific question. Are there requirements in your job that are at odds with doing what's best for customers? These might be rules, procedures, communication, or technology barriers, whatever, and they look for themes and then they work hard to fix them. As an employee, it's important to make your voice heard. More than that – someone is listening and makes a change based on their feedback.
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Pillar 3: Voice of the Customer
Feedback from customers is like oxygen. Your organization has to have it to survive and thrive.
Voice of the Customer, or VOC, is the term to describe the process of listening to and really understanding customers.
One problem is that many people equate listening to surveys, but customers are so over-surveyed that what surveys can tell us can be limited.
So, in addition to surveys, we still need them, we need to include other sources, such as product and service reviews, social posts, focus groups, operational data, and direct feedback from conversations with customers.
It’s worth having a brainstorming session to identify all possible sources of feedback. Many organizations aren't casting wide enough nets, so this can be an opportunity to really get a step ahead.
When you have and can analyze feedback from many sources, it's so valuable. This is the first step on improving your product, your customer handling and provided services.
TIP: Organizations getting great results have found that there's tremendous insight that comes from comparing customer feedback and employee feedback. They look for themes where employees point to the same frustrations as customers. That's a powerful way to identify priorities. Whatever your role, do your part to capture feedback from customers. Get your team involved and try to see the big picture.
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Pillar 4: Customer Service
Some people think that customer service and customer experience are the. same.
Well, customer service is just part of customer experience, but it's a vital and strategic part of it.
When effective, customer service makes it easy for customers to resolve issues and provides extraordinary opportunities for listening and learning.
If we deep dive into the customer service framework, we can mark three levels on which effective customer service creates value:
Accurate workload, good schedule and work forecast that prevents rework. In addition, self-service systems that can help customers handle cases quickly and effectively.
If you measure customer satisfaction before and after a service interaction, effective service should translate into higher scores. “Wow, thanks for the great help.”
This is a strategic point, and here customer service contributes value to other functions across the organization. In such cases, customer service significantly contributes to products innovation, operations, marketing, services improvement, and other areas. Above those, customer service contributes to customer experience.
TIP: Always think and talk about customer service in terms of the value it provides beyond helping just those customers. Remember that you're impacting far more customers than just those who you directly serve.
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Pillar 5: Customer Narrative
To design and deliver great customer experiences, you must understand the customer's journey, or put it another way, customer narrative.
To understand the customer narrative, the most successful way is storytelling. Stories are powerful because they're memorable; certainly, more memorable than facts and figures, and they help move us to action.
Internal newsletters are a good way of telling stories of specific customer experiences; some great and some that went very wrong.
Another way is simulations workshops with teams of employees that act out what customers might experience along their journey, good and bad. This always generates a lot of laughs and some serious discussion.
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TIP: Cultivate a culture where you share and encourage others to share customer stories. Remember that metrics and data are important, but stories are memorable, and they compel change.
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Pillar 6: Processes and Technology
It is no surprise that we need effective processes and technologies to support customer experience.
As expansive as this topic might seem, there are a few overarching principles at work here.
One is that your organization needs diverse input and perspectives as you shape processes and technology. The technology is there and available. What you really need are processes that shape the technologies to work with the team’s input.
The second related principle is the necessity to collaborate effectively. Without deliberate intervention, departments don't naturally work well across functional lines. For example: the marketing team may focus on messaging and response rates and the product management team is occupied with product development. Billing concentrates on revenue and collections and the contact center on creating positive customer interactions.
Great experiences happen by design. They're shaped with a view of the customer as they traverse through the different parts of our organization. So, the work on our end must be coordinated and seamless for that journey to feel effortless and satisfying.
The collaboration requirement around a common vision and a set of shared goals is a challenge when you have different perspectives. This leads to the third principle that is simply “thinking outside the box”. In many cases, extraordinary customer experiences are started by reimagining customer experience.
Ask yourself, what would the ideal experience look and feel like? Then work backwards through the processes and technologies that made the vision a reality. And as you think outside the box, obvious solutions might be right under your nose.
A good example is the “zero gravity” writing pen. While one space program spent millions of dollars and many months to design new pens that could write upside down, another program thought of an entirely different approach. They simply switched to pencils.
TIP: Sometimes the best ideas come from those who don't know much about the inner workings of the processes or technologies, but they aren't afraid to ask. Try to get their point of view by asking what would make things simpler for those of us doing the work? What would make things easier for our customers?
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Pillar 7: Customer Advocacy
Customer advocacy consists of the actions you take to focus the organization on what's best for customers, which in turn rewards you with loyal customers who advocate for your products and brand.
Think of customer advocacy as an ingredient that compliments all of the activities that are already happening across the organization. Everybody makes decisions with the customer in mind. In return, customers would like to make sure the company stays strong and provides the required services as the they depend on us and on our services.
As such, customer advocacy means building a culture where ideally everyone in every role is advocating for customers. To serve customers well, we need a strong organization. We need employees who want to be part of the team, and of course, we need investors who believe in our future.
To make it simple, creating a strong organization is part of customer advocacy.
TIP: Create a way to represent the customer in your decisions. Think of what it means to do what's best for customers in your role. On my team’s board I had pictures of my customers. The header of the board said: They pay your salary. Think of them!
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Pillar 8: Innovation
So much is changing so quickly. As such an important part of customer experience is staying ahead of our customer's needs and expectations. Pillar number eight is innovation. Employees see innovation as risky. It's a cool word, but at its heart is change, doing things differently. And yet innovation is the heartbeat of customer experience. So, we have to be purposeful in encouraging it.
?The goal of the most innovative companies is universal participation because anyone can have the next great idea. Here are four key steps an organization can take to cultivate innovation approach.
TIP: Celebrate innovation. I will use an example to explain. The global conglomerate TATA Group celebrates risk taking by annually awarding “Dare-To-Try” awards. These are awards to employees who conduct worthy but unsuccessful attempts to just try something new. If you're in a leadership role, these steps are a must. And whatever your role or responsibility, having your antennas up for new ideas will help you stand out today and will be increasingly important to the jobs of tomorrow. And to the point of this course, your ideas and insight will contribute to innovation and in turn strengthen customer experience.
Pillar 9: Investments
?Customer experience requires resources. Pillar number nine is investments. Now you might be reading this article and feel that you really have no direct involvement in investments or budgeting but that doesn't mean you don't play an important role in this process. Understanding the principles we'll discuss is essential to really understanding customer experience. Let's first review two categories of considerations when looking at whether and where to make improvements to customer experience. The returns you'll realize from those investments and the cost you'll incur should you not make the improvements. I just call them the good stuff and the bad stuff.
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And let's begin with the Good Stuff.
These are five potential benefits of making improvements to customer experience.
They include:
Customer loyalty; Brand promotion, and this refers to customers who promote your products and services through referrals and positive reviews; Operational improvements, in other words, to improve customer experience you'll be improving areas such as service delivery, shipping, ?
warehouse management and other aspects of your operation; Product and service innovation; And employee engagement. Improvements to customer experience almost always boost employee engagement.
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And what about the second category? The Bad Stuff.
These are the costs of inaction if you don't make needed improvements. You'll notice they're the inverse of the benefits:
They include:
Customer defection; Brand damage; Recurring problems in your operations; Compliance, safety, and legal costs; And employee dissatisfaction.
And yeah, it's discouraging to be part of an organization that doesn't consistently meet customer expectations.
TIP: Here's a power tip, whether or not you're formally involved in budgeting, write out how someone in your role could positively impact each of the returns in those five areas. Then write out how someone not doing a great job could potentially create costs in each of those five areas. You know, the bad stuff. It's always eye-opening to see just how much of a connection there is, good or bad, between specific job roles and customer experience. You'll also be better equipped to make a case for the tools and resources you and your team need. If you are currently involved in budget decisions develop. a toolkit of these five returns and five costs. You won't use all of them in every case, but you should consider at least one return on improvement and the cost of inaction for any significant decision. So, think through how you'd calculate each. All of us (all team in the company) must determine how we allocate our time and attention and talent. Being aware of the benefits and costs that we identified can provide context for making good decisions and for making the case for the tools and resources that we all need.
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Pillar 10: Leadership
The 10th pillar is leadership. Leadership is the cornerstone. It's what takes all these pillars and puts them into practice, and I believe that everyone who influences others is a leader. ?Leadership requires courage to push for change. It also involves knowing where to focus your efforts and priorities. I encourage you to use this article to take inventory. Where are you and your organization with each of these pillars? As you identify gaps or areas you want to improve, you might also want to establish some goals and metrics that help you strengthen those areas.
Now, I believe the most important trait of great leaders is humility. Not lack of confidence, but the realization that no one can deliver customer experience alone. You need the insight, engagement, and contributions of everyone. That's a theme in every pillar that we've explored.
Here's my last power tip: As you take inventory of where you believe your organization is in developing each pillar, think about your own career and areas that interest you the most. There may be some pillars that really stand out and grab your interest and attention. Think through how you might become more deeply involved. When our passions are aligned with our contributions, and as we build organizations on that foundation, it's very powerful.
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That's where we'll discover areas that may be missing or weak. It's how we'll grasp the important role we all have in customer experience. And as we explore these areas, that's where we'll likely get very excited about opportunities that we find to improve and innovate.
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About the writer:
Rafael Kaduri?-?Senior Customer Success Executive
Help companies enroll loyal customers, meet and exceed their expectations, build long-lasting relationships that lead to business growth and expansion.
Drive, coach, develop, mentor and manage global Customer Operation and Success teams.
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