Customer experience? So... err... what's that?
I get asked "What is customer experience?" quite a lot. So it made sense to write a post about it. As my partner Rob Dew says in his book: "Organisations that can create a remarkable customer experience stand out from the crowd. They succeed because customers refer them to friends, family and the world."
What is customer experience?
Your customer experience (CX) comprises your customer's impression of all of the interactions they have with your employees, systems, channels or products. CX includes customer service, however customer service is a small part of your full customer experience.
What is innovation?
We do Customer Experience Innovation. Everyone can innovate. Innovation means coming up with new ways of doing things. Bringing innovation into your business can help you save time and money, and give you the competitive advantage to grow and adapt your business in the marketplace. Using a process that includes proven tools and methodologies will give you more chance of success. Applying the innovation process to your customer experience is an incredibly powerful way to redesign and grow your business, at a minimal cost (because there is often no capital outlay).
What is human centred design?
When people talk about customer experience, you will often hear them refer to 'human-centred design' or HCD. Designing in a ‘human-centred’ way is a philosophical position. It places the people, or humans, that your organisation interacts with as fundamental to it’s success. You can have a human-centred organisational design, product design, office design or service design.
In practice, human-centred design empowers those designing businesses, products, services, systems, and experiences. What distinguishes human-centered design from other problem solving or innovation approaches is its obsessive focus on understanding the perspective of the person who experiences a problem, their needs, and whether the solution that has been designed for them is truly meeting their needs effectively or not. Customer experience innovation falls under the philosophy of human-centred design.
At the Customer Experience Institute, we enact the philosophy of human-centred design in every aspect of our business: from our overarching mission; how we partner with and employ people; to our educational design and day to day customer interactions.
Why is customer experience innovation important?
In an increasingly networked world, shared customer experiences are becoming more important than marketing communications. Offering remarkable CX creates loyal customers who happily pay more for products and services, and then refer other customers for free.
Are you working in an industry with high competition and not much difference between products or services? Are you trying to compete based on price? Has traditional marketing not worked for you? If you said yes to any of these, innovating your CX is how you can get a competitive edge.
Why learn customer experience (CX) innovation?
Organisations that can create a remarkable customer experience stand out from the crowd. They succeed because customers refer them to friends, family and the world.
Rather than bringing in consultants, businesses need to develop their own capability to investigate customer motivations and behaviours, understand human-centred design and implement an agile execution approach for new customer initiatives. In today’s experience economy, it is the best way to achieve a competitive edge.
There are three key competencies required to leverage superior CX for results – research, design and execution. In the Customer Experience Institute, we developed a training program that builds on proven frameworks, designed for working managers with a mandate to drive CX innovation for a real return. The content is meaningful for businesses of any size.
What is covered in the program?
We take you through the 6 Steps to Customer Experience Innovation. You can also read about these steps on our website.
If this is something you think would be useful for your organisation, you are welcome to get in touch.
Our next CX Innovation training programs are: