CX – Which C Are We Talking About? – PART 3

CX normally translates as Customer Experience, but that can be misleading. Depending on the business you are in, you need to choose from the following list:

• Consumer
• Customer
• Client
• Constituency

In the Age of the Customer, all enterprises need to deliver better experiences to whomever they serve, but how to go about doing so, and what to prioritize, is different for each case. In this series of blogs, we are going to look at each one in turn. The previous two blogs focused on the consumer and the customer. This one is about the client experience.

Client Experience

The client-centric business model focuses a high degree of personal attention on a specific individual. This makes it the most expensive and least scalable of the models we have addressed to this point. To justify the expense, client services should address high-risk, high-consequence life decisions that warrant engaging with a trusted advisor, be that in the domain of health, investment, home buying, contract signing, legal trouble, or the like. 

The client engagement typically falls into four parts, each of which has its own experience norms, as follows:

1. Investigate, diagnose, prescribe. Here clients are looking for an intelligent, empathetic advisor to interrogate them about their current state and help them frame their desired future state. Frameworks that help put their situation in a larger perspective are highly valued, as are war stories of other clients who have faced similar challenges. The key deliverable from this phase is a strategy that is sensible, coherent, and fresh in its approach to the problem.
2. Plan, enlist, engage. Having architected the solution, clients are now looking for a contractor to implement it. The experience they want is one of reassurance—clear planning, comprehensive checklists, and a get-things-done approach with strong change management and risk mitigation processes. They want your company to “own” their success—hence the growing importance and status of customer success, both as a philosophy and an organization. Committing to concrete milestones and meeting delivery dates anchor this part of the experience.
3. Monitor, alert, intervene. Having implemented the program, clients are now looking for guidance and reassurance that things are working as anticipated. The experience they want is one of unobstrusive and discreet monitoring of relevant metrics, with appropriate levels of alerting when they deviate from their control limits, and direct intervention if things are headed off the rails. A lot of digital transformation is in service to this phase, where the desired experience is to minimize false positives and false negatives as much as possible, and in general to be invisibly present.
4. Review, assess, course-correct. Finally, when a program has become sufficiently assimilated that it is now a standard system, clients value periodic reviews to assess their current state and make whatever incremental changes are warranted. The experience they are looking for here is something like a health check-up—regularly scheduled, not terribly invasive, but a chance to step back and make sure everything is in operating order. Presenting them with a clear report provides a tangible indicator that they are continuing to be served.

The key takeaway from all this is that the client experience evolves over the life-cycle of a given engagement, as does the kind of talent needed to provide it. Systems are critical to enable monitoring in the background, else you are spending valuable and expensive talent on routine tasks for which they are often not particularly well suited. By contrast, once an issue does surface, then you want to transition immediately from system to service provider, getting knowledgeable eyes on the problem as quickly as possible. In short, client service is not a run-rate business that can be managed to the mean. Rather it is a series of performances separated by periods of standing watch. If you are a parent, you will know the drill.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Follow Geoff on LinkedIn | Geoffrey Moore Mailing List

__________________________________________________________________________

Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube