The Hard Thing About Transforming Customer Experience

Why Transforming Your Customer Experience is Hard – it’s Everywhere

Today we are part of the Experience economy, whether it’s Consumer business or Business to Business. In this customer-first, digital era, there is no other choice than to differentiate your company by building frictionless, memorable, exceptional customer experiences.

Customer experience is the top priority for businesses when it comes to making a difference in their market – to survive, thrive and pass the cap of digital transformation. As a Gartner[1] study reports: “While 95% of business leaders believe CX teams must deliver a superior or world-class customer experience, most CX leaders doubt their current project selection strategy can accomplish these goals.” The same report also tells us that: “Customer Experience drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty, outperforming brand and price combined”. Another reason impacting sales, and hence the reason to focus on CX.  

‘Experience Economy’, ‘Customer-first’, ‘Age of Customer’, ‘Digital Transformation’, may seem just like buzzwords used liberally in our industry. However each in their own right are critical components contributing to customer experience.  We don't refer to these buzzwords just for the sake of it but because they are real current challenges for all organizations. The one thing all these concepts have in common is the experience of the customer, be it a company, an individual or an organization. Let's try to explore and shed some light on this.

The concept of Customer Experience is hard because it doesn't belong to any clearly identified part of the organization, just like Digital Transformation. Associating the experience of a customer to a specific part (or parts) is wrong, and too many companies make that mistake.

As an example, how often have you completed a "Voice of the Customer" survey and felt that the survey questions didn’t enable you to properly express yourself about the overall experience you just had? I get the impression this happens to me all the time.

Typically. the survey, after a call with a bank or after having taken a flight, gets you to rank the last stage of the organization delivering the experience – the customer service rep talking to you, or the flying attendant helping you in-flight. But in the majority of cases, you feel you aren’t really providing feedback on your ‘experience’ with the organization but simply rating the person in charge of that touchpoint. And for most of the time, they are unlikely to be responsible for the experience you just went through, whether good or bad.

Unlike many other domains which are simple to relate to, and to which we can easily associate a clearly identified function in the organization, it’s not the same when speaking about Experience. There isn’t one team, one leader, one discipline, one language or one box that you can simply replace, fix or transform. Almost every part of your organization contributes to your Customer Experience.

Marketing and Sales is Customer Experience

A customer journey starts with the brand.

Typically we refer to "Sales and Marketing" but looking at how B2B sales evolve , in reality the order is reversed: first Marketing and then Sales. Marketing activities enable your future customers to find your product and services, learn about, and evaluate them. And the Sales team, if the purchase is not fully digitalized, help guide customers through the purchase, agreeing terms and conditions, and finally negotiating – or not the price.

The experience at every touch-point along this journey will set up the customer experience over the long run. Needless to say that it should better be a good experience. More important than being a good experience in itself, it is crucial that this phase helps you set the right expectations with your customer for all the future touchpoints: from product and services to order management, fulfillment and any other part of the journey that will deliver on these expectations.

Product and Services is Customer Experience

Here, I’ll state the obvious: if a product or a service does not deliver on its promise; if the value derived from it by the customer is doesn’t materialize, or if the value is inferior to others options on the market, it leaves the door wide open to a negative customer experience. Conversely, when a product exceeds expectations, that can very well be the beginning of a memorable experience.

However, it doesn't stop here, experience is more. It doesn’t just come from the Product or the Services acquired.

Order Management is Customer Experience

Order Management is traditionally all things that happen after a customer makes an order be it digitally on an app or a website, or more traditionally via  phone or email, right up to the point that the order is fulfilled. And at that moment, right after placing an order, when the new or returning customer gave trust, commitment and money, he is particularly attentive to what he is getting in return. Order management has to be streamlined and transparent. If any issues arise at this crucial stage – on product, on availability, on payment and invoicing, or of course on fulfillment, that's when a customer experience can quickly turn into a bad one. Order management processes should pay special attention so that errors, issues or edge cases can be dealt with thoroughly and in a way that the customer experience is unaffected or even, enhanced.

Supply Chain is Customer Experience

Supply Chain is an area very close to order management, somehow the next step. We mostly speak about it when talking of physical goods. As the council of supply chain professionals (cscmp.org) defines it: Supply Chain Management encompasses the planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing and procurement, conversion, and all logistic management activities to cover the production of fulfillment of a product ordered by a customer, to that customer. Supply Chain includes all intermediaries involved – suppliers, resellers, third party service providers etc. which naturally makes it a very broad and complex domain!

Supply Chain is quite far from customer facing activities, the only touchpoint which is part of the supply chain being the delivery of products. Supply Chain has become a more and more critical element contributing to a good Customer Experience. Naturally, delivering the products is a crucial step, but increasingly, Supply Chain relates and affects a lot more than that:

In the digital era, modern Supply Chain Management is the key to streamlining the supply process, it is also the key of providing visibility to the customer, and this becomes even more important as we move into highly dynamic and customized products, some even made on-demand.

And here as well, beyond the normal experience, we know that overall customer experience is being shaped when facing issues, especially in long standing business-to-business relationships. You can't bet on no-issues in your supply chain just as you can't bet on bug-free software, and the way you'll deal with these supply chain issues will be critical in achieving a good customer experience, be it through highly digitalized interactions or not.

Support is Customer Experience

And as customers face issues, be they in the supply chain, in the product, during the order phase or at anytime, the way the customer can be supported is also key. The ‘Support Department’ becomes another domain of your organization that shapes a good - or bad - customer experience. Support has been evolving a lot during the past few years, with new tools and approaches, and in particular with the emergence of ‘Customer Success’ as a discipline. Whether this particular new field is part of Support or not is another discussion.

Obviously, this on the one hand is very human yet on the other it is an obvious target for digitalization as it can benefit significantly from digital experience technology – from rich, easily discoverable content to interactive bot-based conversations and more conventional support portals. Here, digital opens up a lot of opportunities to automate support work as well as improve the support experience which in turns improves the overall customer experience.

Brand is Customer Experience

And finally, your Brand can also define your Experience. And, I’m not going into a long discussion around branding, but a beautiful brand identity, a good name and a fancy logo isn’t what I’m referring to. What I am discussing is the ‘real brand’, as Jeff Bezos puts it, ‘the one that is defined by what your customers say when you are not in the room.’

Building a strong brand builds customer expectations and attachments.

The best example I can think of in that respect is Tesla. While its cars have been notorious, at least in the early years, for being well behind in terms of quality compared to their high-end competitors such as Audi, Volvo, Mercedes, Lexus and others, their customers, because of the brand effect, do not recognize this as a negative but as a positive. Something related to "being part of the revolution".

A clearly negative touchpoint in the journey which so easily could be offset by a strong brand, but ultimately did not erode the customer experience, and even possibly contributed to improving it!

The list of "... is Customer Experience" could go on. Many other parts of your organization can have a strong impact on the customer experience.

Customer Experience is the result of all parts of your organization.

Now What? Breaking Silos is Customer Experience!

So, as much as it is fairly easy to assess your customer experience, changing and transforming it for the better becomes a huge challenge as it will impact all functions of the organization, as well as impact on how they collaborate with each other.

All aspects of your Customer Experience need to align and play well together, it's clear at this point, that the more your organization is siloed, the less easy this transformation will be. The road to a better Customer Experience will with no doubt involve a large amount of reorganization and changes, and this will depend a lot on the maturity, agility and readiness of your organization to take that transformative journey. A lot of our consulting partners can support you in such a change, and naturally, technology is also here to help.

Modern Digital Experience Platforms like ours, API-driven and not monolithic, have been created for this purpose. Among other key capabilities, its modular approach helps to break down the silos in your organization at the technology level.

It is the Experience layer, the glue connecting many business systems used by the different part of the organization – ERPs, CRMs, CDPs, Support systems etc. But technology is only one part of the equation. Organizational, strategic and cultural parts will need to be transformed to break the silos, reach maturity and ensure the path to building memorable experiences that will make your digital transformation a success.

[1] Gartner for Marketers: Creating a High-Impact Customer Experience Strategy

? 2019 Gartner, Inc. Published 16 January 2019 — ID G00705782