Good isn't Good enough when better is expected! - Will Smith

I was speaking in regional CEM – telecom conference few days ago in Singapore (held by IQPC) and met all Customer Experience (CX) professional from telecom industry in this region, was a very fruitful forum indeed, and carried away some notes and insightful thought on how actually CX is now progressing in the region, particularly in Asia. CX communities & evangelist, most of them Telcos were all gathered to share their experience and thought on how to embrace customer experience and move them higher to the next level, they are from Singtel, Starhub, Telekom Malaysia, Celcom, DiGi, U-mobile, Maxis, Bharti Airtel, Grameenphone, Dialog Axiata, and other big companies. I can see the evolution to a better maturity level of CX framework and better adoption in this region. I concluded it after met some of the speaker who also came and speak at previous CEM conference (held by TM forum) about 2 years ago in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and they presented the progress, challenges, and achievement, as well as other invitees who explain higher level of trust on CX in their company. It was a very delightful situation to see how the industries start to see the importance of CX, embrace them, and entering the next level of CX maturity.

Most company previously has been seeing (or perhaps still might see) CX is just about delivering a great customer service, I can convinced myself now it is a myth, a myth that often mislead or make the company push themselves very hard to create and establish a great, high-tech, internationally certified, and award winning call center and/or set up luxurious service center or walk-in center in every top corner and malls – yes nothing wrong about it, but some important notes has to be clearly underlined in bold.

First, customer experience (CX) is about what consumers think and feel about your brand across the journey encompassing ALL channels or touch-points that you have. It is an accumulation of several experience ‘wow’ experience – not a single piece (I should say it ‘wow’ because people only remember what they feel, not what they see or listen from you, and I say it several as people can't remember everything), meaning that focus only on customer service is about forgetting other bigger chunk of customer journey, letting the complete journey left unsynchronized and unable to create a synergic link across the journey that can strengthen your brand.

Second, customer service has to be prepared very well as the last resort (not to clean up all the mess); given all things has been optimized and well prepared–before the customer complaint - to deliver best experience (making things right at the first time). It reflects the customer experience at early stage when having a research about your brand before making a purchase decision, dealing with the subscription phase, using them, change to something better or thing that fits their needs better, paying it or refill to extend the good experience; AND get in touch with customer service, ONLY when they find the previous stages doesn't really satisfy me or even give me some pain. I myself never contact any call center of any product or service that I used when everything is fine and all information available in my hand, etc. BUT the brand will experience a total disaster whenever the customer service team failed the address the pain points - when happened. I am trying to open the fact that when customer upset with the brand after they call to complaint, actually contains an accumulative pains that contained a bad experience from previous stages of journey (while thinking, using, change or paying) - not merely due to bad customer service experience, but sometimes we just take it for granted, or jump to that conclusion. Having a great customer services, I am agree, will multiply a ‘wow’ experience whenever they can address it better at first contact or even before customer aware about the potential pain the possibly faced.

Above opinion is giving me some context, and stones to step up, in moving CX beyond the myth of delivering a great customer service, well I've done it well before. In this CEM Telecom conference, I presented on how CX team embed in company’s core process, it’s a product and service creation / delivery to its end-user. It contains a complete customer’s moments of journey with the brand, encompassing hundreds of business processes and policies; hundreds of nodes, boxes, and sophisticated technology; multi-channel experience; as well as cross-functional decision making process. I can't help myself to quote my favorite movie star’s tweet, Will Smith, in twitter 2 years ago: “Good isn't good enough when better is expected". I can't argue more about it - and I put it as title of this article, it reflects that imperative to exceed your customer expectation, and otherwise they never remember any positive new things about your brand. CX team has to be one of the gate-keeper of saying Go/No Go recommendation for a product launch, after having an intensive test and assurance activities on the product and its communication in each touch-point on every stage of journey (SMS or email blast, notification, web, self-service channel, etc.), the more advance level of this process is getting further at earlier stages, product design review and approval, supported by superscript and customer comms design to manage customer expectation – when things below your expectation, I put some hints here, nothing is perfect, especially when comes to innovative ideas vs. legacy system. Getting more informative about it will get you closer to social norms than market norms, I took some statement from Rob Stanley (Senior Vice President & GM APAC Lithium Tech.) in this conference that focusing on social norms will make your customer more forgiving when things are failed.  

There will be so many customer-related processes in your company, selecting the process based on its magnitude/impact, importance level based on customer perspective, company’s strategic objectives, and segmentation strategy is important to prioritize your scope and involvement, trying to fix or involve in ALL things – I am not saying it is wrong, but will make your CX team in a spread thin situation, and possibly failed to deliver a maximum value to the processes. One of the famous truths in Uncommon Service book by a Harvard professor, Francis Frei and Anne Morriss is “You can't be good at everything”, CX team in many company is not a huge team – few of them are, as well company’s resources, so invest your resources strategically, underperform on the dimensions your customers value least so that you can overperform on the dimensions they value most. It becomes one of the underlying principles to run the CX operation.

After all, it is important to bear in mind that, all CX activities has to be supported with strong data and analytics to reflect the customer expectation and a quantified version of it – mostly comes from research, survey, and complaint analysis, otherwise you’ll be easily challenged by other team and they never believe in you again, ever. Don’t forget to have a strong sponsor, at least CxO level, it is very important as in fact, CX and revenue, at some point (please make it very minimum) are not always walk in a perfect harmony.

I close this article with quote which reflect a key learning from my journey in setting up and establishing a CX role and team from a green fields, 2.5 years ago:

Don’t try to CHANGE the from outside, go inside – CHANGE from within, embed CX team to involve in ALL customer related processes (get it formalized), and start adding values to convince the stakeholder; make an agreed customer promise as a guideline, value – for brand, marketing, and customer communication -, principles, and policy in “protecting & delivering” the product & services to consumer – consistently across customer journey & at ALL channels, it’ll last longer than a top down CX transformation.