Customer Experience – Why and How

A business cannot exist without its customers, and this is why companies are focusing on how to win new customers and perhaps more importantly, retain existing customers. Delivering a great customer experience has become a top strategic objective for most of the organizations. Key benefits that can be derived from effective CX optimization include increased revenues (61%), greater customer satisfaction (58%), increased sales (52%) and a competitive advantage over rivals (46%).

The challenge here is that even though it’s a high priority, many companies are failing. 80% of organizations believe they are delivering a superior experience. This is compared to  only 8% of customers who believe they are receiving a great customer experience .

Customer expectations are rising, and faster than the speed that companies can improve their customer experience. Customers expect every interaction as the best experience they have with any company, so the question is remains, how can your organization create a great customer experience?

Let’s take a look at ways to create a great customer experience strategy to help you improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn and increase revenues.

Understand your customer

 If your organization is going to really understand customer needs and wants, then they need to be able to connect and empathize with the situations that your customers face. One way to do this is to create customer personas and give each persona a name and personality. By creating personas, your customer support team can recognize who they are and understand them better. It’s also an important step in becoming truly customer centric.

Capture customer feedback in real time

Customer experience (CX) efforts aren’t primarily being held back by lack of strategy or organizational support, but rather from a lack of real-time customer insights and troubles operationalizing the experience. You need to ask – And ideally you do this by capturing feedback in real time. Post-interaction surveys or outbound calls can help in collection of real time feedback

Use a quality framework for development of your team

The next step is to understand customer touch-points through their journey. Understand customer's expectations and need at each touch point will help you prepare to provide the best experience. You should train each individual member of your team who interacts or supports the customer. Many organizations assess the quality of phone and email communication, however, thats just one aspect of overall customer experience. A quality framework takes this assessment one step further by defining the framework from 'Customer-First' approach and coaching your teams accordingly.

Creating a customer-first culture is the top challenge for most organizations, followed by competing priorities, employee engagement, and shifting from a product-focus to a customer-focus.

I can sum them all up as the following:  commitment issues. Executive commitment issues, that is.

Do those challenges resonate with you and with what’s happening within your organization? How are you addressing them?