Caring for your customers?

Competing in a world, where more and more products and services are commoditized more quickly than ever before, you have to up your game and deliver great customer experiences at every point of interaction in your business.

Some essentials building blocks designing a superior customer experience are:

• Create and deploy customer experience intent statement
• Establish customer touch point mapping
• Get feedback from customers
• Build customer experience knowledge in the work force
• Design or re-design your processes
• Implement a technology platform to connect the dots and siloed information

Let’s take a look at how you can approach managing your Customer Experience.

Customer Lifecycle

The Customer Lifecycle or Buyer Lifecycle is an active process driven by a company’s marketing and sales teams, involving segmenting potential customers into a variety of stages and using each defined stage to adjust marketing and sales techniques to maximize conversion.?

Designing a complete map of your Customer Lifecyle will help drive your marketing and sales team’s actions in order to measure and optimize the conversion of your leads into concrete buyers, in a short amount of time, and at a minimum cost.

?For example, if the Marketing and Sales teams determine that there is a high rate of drop-off at the Consideration stage, they might want to put some extra Marketing and Sales efforts at this stage to mitigate the drop-off rate, such as reviewing the messaging to clarify the value proposition, highlighting distinguishing features compared to the competitors, or review pricing packages etc.

Customer Journey

The Customer Journey or Buyer Journey refers to the set of actions a buyer takes, from the moment he hears about your brand, to the moment he consumes your product or service and becomes (or not) an advocate of your brand: as such, the Customer Journey often refers to the complete experience of a Buyer with your brand.

The Customer Journey is often represented through a Customer Journey Map:

?Let’s take the example of the Consideration Stage as defined in the Customer Lifecycle above: to consider purchasing your brand, product or service, a Buyer might take a series of actions- which constitute the Customer Journey- such as:

• Checking out options, between your product/service or existing others on the internet
• Watching customer reviews videos or reading blog posts about your product/service
• Reading case studies or fact sheets about your product/service
• Asking advice from friends or family

Customer Journey vs Customer Lifecycle

To put it in simple terms, the Customer Lifecycle is a tool for your Marketing and Sales team to better understand how to better optimize their sales process, while the Customer Journey reflects the Customer’s perspective, and the series of actions and overall experience that he has with your brand.

Both the Customer Lifecycle and the Customer Journey Map are important tools to better manage the overall Customer Experience.

Customer Experience Management

Customer Experience Management tracks, oversees and organizes interactions between customers and your organization throughout the Customer Lifecycle and the Customer Journey Map.

The goal of Customer Experience Management is to gain deep knowledge about your customers, so you can create and deliver personalized experiences that will drive loyalty to you, and also will create active brand ambassadors. Therefore, it is essential to extract insight from all customer touchpoints and channels across your entire organization.

An old saying in business states, "if you can't measure it - you can't manage it" – and perhaps even worse, you can’t improve it either. Some of the questions most business owners would therefore need to ask themselves are:

• How efficiently does our organisation generate new sales leads?
• What is our win-rate?
• What is the cost of a new customer acquisition?
• How good are we at converting marketing leads?
• How effective is our sales team?
• Which of our customers are the most profitable to us?
• Are our customers happy about our products and/or services?
• Are our customers buying more (or less) over time from us?
• How good are we at retaining our existing customers?

With clearly established check points to measure your performance you can quantify progress and adjust your process to produce the desired outcome. Without clear objectives, you’re stuck in a constant state of guessing.

People, Process and Technology

A scalable approach in connecting the dots is implementing a technology platform to improve your marketing and sales efforts, for example a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.

But keep in mind that technology isn’t the one-size-fix-it-all for inefficient underlying processes or organizational silo-thinking. It is far more important building a foundation with a sales-driven collaborative culture and processes across your organization before implementing any sales technology support system.

The most important element is to train your employees, since employees are often trained only on the specific functions needed to execute their individual part of their siloed business process. Very few are given real-world, hands-on, practical experience in exactly how to deliver great customer experience.