Put your business in the lead with Aion Tech customer experience strategy

Customer experience (CX) is everything related to a business that affects a customer’s perception and feelings about it. What is essential for any organization looking for growth is to define not only a good experience, but a great experience, for each customer, every time, and with repeatability no matter which part of the organization is touched by the customer. Whether it’s a call to a contact center, exposure to an advertisement or even something as mundane as the payment of a bill, every exchange between customers and businesses builds (or damages) the relationship. By ensuring an organization-wide focus on the customer experience, a CX strategy can be pivotal to an organization’s ongoing success.

Following are the 3 key components defining great experience:

• Empathize – Listen to and understand your customers- To stay relevant, we need to be two steps ahead by knowing what customers want before they do. We can start to do this by observing and empathizing with their needs, pains and jobs to be done.
• Analyze – analyze and aggregate insights - By mapping customer insights to your organization’s value propositions, products and services we can find gaps and opportunities.
• Strategize – design a strategy to delight customers - Design a strategy to upgrade the customer experience and evolve your value proposition to meet it. If customers continue to be delighted, they’ll keep coming back.

Why being customer-centric matters?

Customer-centric organizations have robust business models that rely on delivering excellence in customer experience over all else. This has built customer loyalty by focusing on the customer’s lifetime value over any short-term gains that could diminish their experience. When an organization loses its focus on the customer, it leaves itself at the mercy to dynamic customer-centric players. Complacency seeps in and an inward focus becomes the dominant narrative.

We have seen industries such as media, retail and travel disrupted beyond recognition, with others such as financial services, utilities and health being during game-changing transformation. The common thread that links these industries, was the lack of customer-centricity from the established players. While their customers’ expectations of what great customer experience looked like had changed significantly, they were in thrall to what had worked for them in the past being good enough to secure their future. Poor customer experience just doesn’t cut it anymore. Customers now have a range of options to choose from and will go elsewhere if their expectations aren’t being matched.

Customer Experience vs Customer Service

The difference between customer service and customer experience is that customer service is one factor in the customer journey while customer experience is the sum of all a customer’s interactions with the brand.

The trend these days is for customer-service personnel to ask “Is there anything else I can do for you today?” this, in reality, creates a negative customer experience. It is a non-sensical question. If there was something else that could be done, the caller would ask for it. If there isn’t, and usually there isn’t, what is the point of the question?

In order to achieve great customer experience, great customer service must be provided. Conversely, great customer service might be provided while the overall customer experience is very poor.?Customer experience is your customers’?holistic?perception?of their overall experience with your business or brand.

Only by driving the optimization of customer experience throughout all areas of an organization, can it truly claim to be customer-centric.

Defining a great customer experience

There is no single universal checklist to follow to guarantee good customer experience: every organization is unique and so are their customers. However,?a poll of 2000 CX professionals across many industries?(hotjar.com) lists some of the key takeaways:

• Make listening to customers a top priority across the business.
• Implement a system to help you collect feedback, analyze it, and act on it regularly.
• Reduce friction and solve your customers’ specific problems and unique challenges.
• It’s not rocket science: a good customer experience comes from asking your customers questions, listening to their responses, and actioning their feedback.

In their book?“The Power of Moments”, Chip and Dan Heath define a “peak moment” of customer experience comprised as one or more of the following:

• Elevation- ?Moments of elevation are experiences that rise above the routine. They make us feel engaged, joyful, surprised, motivated.
• Pride - Moments of pride commemorate people’s achievements. They are showing us at our best: when earning recognition, when we’re conquering challenges and showing courage.
• Insights - Moments of insight deliver realizations and transformations.
• Connection - Moments of connection bond us together.

Customer Experience Strategy is an organization’s overarching plan to enhance the experience of their customers both when interacting with the organization generally and when using its products and services. Key elements of a Customer Experience Strategy include in-depth qualitative customer research, customer journey maps, culture change. The strategy is critical for building customer-centric organizations that will retain and grow its customer base and respond nimbly to changing customer needs and preferences.

?6 Key elements for CX strategy:

• Understand what is important for your customers - usually best delivered by an external company. First, customers will be far less inhibited in opening to an independent organization. Second, there should be no bias when questioning, something that often creeps in if it is done by organization itself.
• Insights generation from interviews - businesses with quality data are more likely to collect actionable customer insights, which can help them grow their bottoms line in the long run. When consumer insight research is conducted properly, it will improve the effectiveness of how a company communicates to its customers, which is likely to change consumer behavior, and therefore increase sales.
• Journey map – is a visual representation of that customer journey. It helps tell the story of your customers’ experiences with your brand across all touchpoints. The trick here is to generate the journey map from the customers’ lens, not from the inside out. The other important element in this process is to ensure the journey map includes the “emotional” journey i.e. how did the customer “feel” along the journey, where were they happy, where were they frustrated. Journey maps also?gives managers an overview of the customer’s experience. They will see how customers move through the sales funnel, helping them identify opportunities to enhance the experience. The map will show how enhanced customer service can differentiate the organization’s digital experience.
• Elevate the highs and mitigate the lows - identify those high and low points and create strategies to accentuate or remedy accordingly, creating a much more robust and meaningful journey.
• Re-image the journey and experience - imagining a clean slate can help you change perspective and think outside the box as to what the customer journey could look like in an ideal world. An example of this could be how your organization could engage with your customers using new digital technology.
• Embed the strategy into the organization - Leading organizations must ensure they approach transformation as an ongoing process for continuous improvement – rather than a one-off, linear change. The customer holds the keys to unlocking growth for any organization. Through championing the voice of the customer and delivering a truly great customer experience, your organization can identify and unlock areas of unforeseen growth and future-proof your business model to beat off competition.

As the market becomes more and more competitive, businesses need to work harder than ever to maintain their customer base. A clear CX strategy will help you get ahead of your competition by positioning your business as a brand that is focused on delivering both excellent products and great service.