How brands can build superior customer experiences - Part 1

?? a comprehensive look at creating a phenomenal customer experience

It’s not personal; it’s just business!

Well, evidently, when it comes to creating a delightful customer experience (CX) for a brand, it’s ultimately all about the feelings that our consumers and customers experience when they engage with our products and services – and, importantly, the relationships we build with them along the way.?

5 core principles to lead with empathy and trust

Successful brands thrive on creating lasting customer relationships grounded in empathy, trust and transparency. Companies that have invested in building trust with their customers bring in 5.7 times more revenue than their competitors.

There are five key principles that we believe will help your brand stay close to the needs of your customers.

In the words of your customers:

• Know me: Get to know me, my priorities, challenges, channel of choice and consumer demographic (for B2B customers).
• Protect me: from your internal silos, please. You are one of the many suppliers that I deal with, so I don’t want to have to repeat myself when speaking to multiple people and departments within your organisation.
• Be where I am: Know my preferred channels. Be aware of the important events and critical timelines for me and my personal life as a consumer (B2C) or my business as a business customer (B2B). Show me content and prices tailored to those events and my budget.

And particularly in the case of B2B customers:

• Invest in me and my development: I’m surviving in a very competitive landscape – help me thrive. Share some best practices and insights to help me grow my business.
• Be my business partner: Don’t see me as someone who just buys from you, but rather someone who has mutually beneficial goals.

In summary: In order to feel what it’s like to be your customer, step into their shoes. Be your customer, shop for your customer, buy your products, use your products, request support and have an empathetic understanding of how it feels to be your customer. Failing to understand changing customer needs can lead to a poor CX or even customer churn.

Move away from selling to serving the customer

Whether your business is B2B or B2C, your customers no longer go through a linear customer journey. They can now enter or exit a journey at multiple stages and switch channels frequently and simultaneously.

As a result, driving growth in the new digital economy takes more than just shifting the existing process and data into digital touch points; it requires an organisational shift where product and service innovation is centered around a connected customer with ever-evolving expectations.

This means moving away from the notion of selling to serving, and wholly understanding your customers.

Responding to customers requires brands to think of the foundational building blocks of CX:

• Investing in the relationship with customers and understanding them.
• Understanding which stage customers are at in their relationship with your organisation. The goal is to effortlessly solve problems in the current stage of the relationship and predict where they will go next, and then prescribe actions.
• Estimating which touch points and interactions the customer has, like sales reps, distributors, your website, social media and so on.
• Clearly mapping which products and services you offer at each interaction point.
• Removing friction from one stage to another without causing negative sentiment.

Segment customers from a behavioural perspective

In order to create superior CX experiences, it’s crucial that you segment customers not just from a demographic perspective, but more from a behavioural perspective. No two customer personas are the same: some customers are big spenders, whilst others are bargain hunters. Some are tech savvy; some are tech averse.

A key step in understanding the customer persona is harnessing knowledge and data about the voice of the customer.

Leading brands are expanding beyond the use of traditional surveys to include insights generated from utilising contact centre communications, customer interactions with sales and marketing, and indirect data. They’re turning that data into knowledge of their customers’ sentiment, context and experiences.

The good news is that recent acceleration in process automation and sophisticated self-service capabilities are driving a greater availability of customer data, and therefore, better access to customer needs and behaviour.

Conducting qualitative research and repeating it at regular intervals will help you to understand the voice of the customer, as well as changes in their behaviour and sentiment.

Map out the emotional makeup of a customer journey

We often come across customer journeys that look like incredibly complex pieces of wall art that are updated too infrequently.

There are a number of steps worth considering in order to create a living, breathing tool to plan your CX roadmap:

• Map out the emotional makeup of the customer journey: This would include how a customer arrives at the start of their journey, the history they have with your brand, and any preconceptions or barriers around brand values, such as sustainability and social values.
• For every stage of the journey, clearly map out: What your customers are expecting ? What they are feeling? What they are thinking ?
• Consider what type of interactions a customer has with your brand at each stage and what the general sentiment is at each stage.
• Think about the journeys of your partners, those who are delivering the end experience to the customers. If the customers don’t directly interact with your company and instead interact directly with a distributor or a partner, then you need to map not just the customer journey, but also the distributor journey.
• Identify the micro journeys that cause friction. For example, in an order-delivery journey, is it the fulfilment part that causes the longest delay and negative experience?
• Map the entire ecosystem, and identify key people, processes and technology:

- How does the data flow in this journey?

- Where are different departments getting their information?

-Where are the low-hanging fruits where you can get on the same page? In a fully mapped- out ecosystem, it’s easier to communicate throughout the entire customer journey.?

Gaining understanding of the above would allow us to create a journey roadmap that aligns with our customer’s values and would move customers to more neutral positive stages. One of my personal favourite rite example is from NorthFace where they truly understood the values and behavioural patterns of their consumers and embedded themselves not just in their journey with their brand but their outdoor journey where they will be using the North Face products. They launched a loyalty program, they follow the consumers on their adventures outdoors and reward them for purchases, referrals, going to national parks, shopping recycled collection, using the app, and previewing new products?