Building a winning customer experience : a 10-step practical guide

Every business talks about putting the Customer Experience (CX for short) at the heart of everything they do. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is now a key measure used by all and many have full Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs.

Yet, all of us as consumers still often have bad experiences. In fact, most customer experiences actually suck. From the need to repeat your personal details to different people, to not being able to get service in store for something you bought online or in a different store, to an app not letting you create an account because “your details don’t match”, the list goes on. Companies often seem to struggle to get it right. Why?

The reason is simple: companies don’t have a clear process that goes from CX design to implementation. Sometimes Marketing will dream the best possible end-to-end customer journey, but they struggle to convert that into a set of programs and IT projects that will bring it to life. They will focus on improving one or two bits, like changing the website or building an app, rather than tackling the more complex end-to-end transformation.

Result: the end-to-end customer experience remains clunky, the customer suffers, loyalty and advocacy go down, and gradual slide into a dated and irrelevant brand becomes inevitable.

Having a clear process to create and implement the dream customer journey should not be that complex and this article provides a 10-step practical guide to build and deliver an amazing and differentiating customer experience. This should be your blueprint for Customer Experience transformation.

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Step 1. Dream the dream, from the outside-in: Outside-in thinking requires us to think about our customers more broadly than just as users of our services/products. Other companies they interact with set their expectations higher than we think. When thinking about the customer experience in your industry, you need to look at it with a new perspective. Imagine that your Executive Committee was replaced by that of Amazon, or Tesla, or Salesforce? What changes would they implement? Why settle for a 2-week delivery timeframe, when tire distribution companies have found a way to deliver tires anywhere in the country within 3 hours or an order being placed?

In addition to looking at other industries, sample your competitors and identify where they get things right and you don’t. They welcome you with an iPad whilst your own stores only have Dell desktops? They authenticate you with your voice whilst your own customer service people still ask for your mother’s maiden name? Take note. That is the new base level you need to offer.

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Step 2. Eat your own dog food, don’t drink the kool aid: You and your employees have to use your products and services as a customer would. Don’t just take the corporate benefit which means you don’t have to order in store or online, to pay, to receive the emails, to call customer service when there is a problem, etc. Actually buy the stuff and expense it. That way you will experience it the same way a customer would. When you go in the store, don’t flash your employee card, just be like all the other customers. See how you get treated when you are not a VIP. And be critical, just as a customer would be. If the website is clunky, if the store staff let you wait, if the delivery is late, the invoice is impossible to understand, note it down. These are the moments of truth you want to get right.

By the way, steps 1 and 2 will take time, probably weeks and maybe months. It takes time to define an end-to-end dream customer journey. And of course, you need to have a leader, stakeholders or a team around you that will challenge your thinking and push you further.

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Step 3. Validate and document the journey for each persona: Once you have completed steps 1 and 2 and therefore defined what a draft omnichannel customer journey should look like, the next step is to validate it and articulate the user journey through your buyer personas.

Validation at the highest and most economical level might be to simply run a workshop with a few customer champions, and to decide what should go in, what really matters, and whether what you have built is differentiating enough and meets the objectives. But if you have budget, you should invest in research, both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative research will allow you to capture insights and anchor your decisions into the profound needs and wants of your customers. It might even throw up new ideas you hadn't thought about. Quantitative research on the other hand will help you decide the relative importance of each element more precisely, which will be useful when you get to the prioritising part of this process (step 7).

When you have your final dream journey validated and agreed, there are different ways to then document it. The usual (and not so good one) is to create a large flowchart using Visio, Lucidchart, Figma, or any other of these kinds of tools, or a spreadsheet. But remember you will need to inspire your company to change. This is not going to happen by sending them flowcharts and spreadsheets!

Maybe do a video series instead. Or if your budget is limited, ask a graphic designer to create comic strips. Everyone likes a comic, and it appeals to one’s visual memory so it tends to stick. Whatever media you use, it needs to be simple, easy to read and understand, and inspire your troops.

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Step 4. Convert the journey into user stories: This is where the magic happens and we start to convert our dream journey into a tangible set of programmes. A user story is typically written like this: “As a [insert persona], I want to [do X] in order to [get Y]. So who am I, what do I want to do and why.

Normally user stories are used to capture requirements in Agile software development, but here we just want to break down the end-to-end customer journey into small chunks, so that we can turn it into projects.

So you’ll want to first cut your customer experience in phases (e.g. browsing online, visiting the store, using customer service, etc.) and for each phase, list out the key user stories that will make up that differentiating customer experience.

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Step 5. Assess the company’s performance against each user story: Here is where we start to prioritise. Maybe your company is already pretty good at delivering parts of your end-to-end customer journey. Maybe other parts are completely non-existent. By assessing your company’s current performance against each user story, you will not only find some relief that not everything is doom and gloom, but more importantly, it will become apparent what will need to be done to deliver what is missing.

So create a table, with the first column as your user story, the second as its importance to the customer, the third as your current performance (1=poor, 5=amazing), and the fourth as comments (e.g. why is it good, average or poor).

You will want to bring a cross-functional team of opinionated and customer-centric people to workshop filling this table. Believe me, it’s actually a lot of fun, and an eye opener!

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Step 6. Draft the list of projects required: Now that you have established quite precisely all the gaps that your company has in order to live up to the dream customer experience everyone has agreed to, you need to add an extra column in your table which will list out the projects that are required. Note that this list of projects will be exhaustive. It will determine everything that needs to be done. It will likely be a fairly intimidating list.

You may want to complete step 6 at the same time as you complete step 5, or you may need a separate workshop.

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Step 7. Prioritize projects based on benefits, effort and costs: I can guarantee that you will not be able to deliver all the projects identified, nor will you want to! You may even decide that some projects will never be delivered as the effort and probable costs outweigh benefits. That is fair.

Prioritisation is crucial so that the few things that will make the biggest difference will get delivered. So focus on customer benefits, estimated overall business benefits, effort required and estimated costs, and this will allow you to decide where to draw the line on your project list. Larger items may require a full business case and a broader approval process.?

At this stage, you will want to add a few more members of your IT team so that effort and costs can be estimated with some degree of precision.

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Step 8. Define owners, timeline, budgets: You now have a prioritised list of projects, but sequencing their delivery remains to be done. You will need to analyse, for each initiative, the required resources (internal and external) and based on the situation and makeup of your IT team, projects team, marketing team and everyone that will need to be involved, you will need to adjust your timelines. If for example two projects require full capacity of a type of resource you only have one of, you won’t be able to deliver both projects at the same time. If you need to launch an RFP, this will add to the delay before you can get started.

Each project will need a business owner, some larger ones may need a Project Manager, and ultimately all the information gathered to this point will become critical to establish your budgets for the year ahead. Depending on the availability of capital, you may need to further cull the list of initiatives. What you thought was going to be a one-year or two-year timeline may turn into a longer one. That is just the nature of the beast.

My personal advice would be to anticipate delays, as most technology and change initiatives are complex and are packed with unknowns. It is better to deliver fewer initiatives but key ones, than over-committing to deliver more and failing at every hurdle. This will dishearten the teams and you will lose credibility which may impact the whole program.

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Step 9. Implement: Now you have projects, owners, budgets, timelines, so pretty much everything you need to get started. Be sure to have sufficient governance and Project Management resources so that you remain on track.

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Step 10. Repeat! Staying ahead of your industry and being a customer experience leader is not a one off. You will need to continue to perform steps 1-2 on a constant basis and the other steps annually.

Be careful not to get caught up purely into delivery mode. If your role is to be the overall company’s customer experience leader, your job is to keep designing an amazing customer experience and for that, you need to stay out there and keep ahead of your customers’ expectations.

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Should you want to discuss the above, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

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Jean-Michel Maltais

I help companies drive incremental revenues and measurable results through performance marketing and customer experience reinvention.

Get in touch! 438-494-5025, [email protected] , linkedin.com/in/jmmaltais ?