Tips to improve your CX

Over 4 in 5 customers now rate the customer experience above the product or service. This is a massive eye opener for every organisation and reinforces that your customer experience matters!

To help you on the path to mapping and improving the experience you offer, I'm providing a few tips and insights to get you started.

Where to start

The foundational step, and it is one I see overlooked time and time again, is to define and know your customer. If anyone in your organisation has a differing view or perspective, then that will lead to misaligned initiatives and a failure to deliver a seamless experience.

In order to define your customer, you need to look at data, engage your frontline teams and build a profile. Some elements will be straightforward and easy to define, others elements will require a deeper dive.

In defining your customers, you need to understand who they are (attributes), why they contact you (needs), and how they prefer to contact you (preferences).

This will help you validate the customer experience later on.

At this stage, and depending on the size of your organisation, you may need to form a coalition inside your organisation of sufficient experience and seniority to engage and approve a common definition. This might involve briefing a Senior Leadership Team, and Executive Committee or a Board so you need the right coalition.

Once you have defined your customer and have clear attributes, needs and preferences, you can move onto the next step:

Create Your Customer Persona

Customer personas will help you as they stand in for your customers, and can help you design services and experiences with your different customers in mind. the persona is a fictional representation of your customers that helps you to understand their needs and pain points.?You will likely need to develop a number of personas to match up with your customers.?

Map The Journey

This includes all the touchpoints with your business, from first awareness to post-purchase support.??This example map is a simplistic approach to mapping and tracking key information, including emotions.

Map Emotions

The experience you deliver will create a range of emotions for your customers throughout their journey. By mapping emotions, you more readily identify where the customer experiences friction, and where you can focus attention to improve.

Improving friction points or road blocks

As you map the experience, and track emotions, you will find points of friction or road blocks that prevent your customer from moving forward. If you've ever tried to buy online and found the shopping cart won't update, you've hit a road block and point of friction. In finding these, you can identify a range of improvements including making your website easier to use, providing better customer support, or offering more personalized experiences.??

Get Your People Involved

You can't create a meaningful map without collaboration. Your frontline teams have the best insights into the customer experience because they see and hear it day in and day out. Likewise, other parts of your organisation have key information to help.

Invite team members from across the business, including sales, marketing, customer service, and product development. Their insights are crucial.??

Map your employee persona

Once you have your customer personas and identified opportunities for improvement, it is also useful to understand your people and the skills, attributes and capabilities best needed to help your customers.

By creating employee personas, you can help with decision-making in how you create the customer journey and where to send customers, and also help create an effective recruitment, training and onboarding plan.

Ask your customers

We regularly ask our customers for feedback, whether that is satisfaction surveys, measuring Net Promoter Score, or even simply the ability to provide feedback or complain.

You should look for opportunities to share the journey map with customers. Their opinions will validate whether the map is accurate and reflects the customer’s feelings, it will also give you insight when you are off-track.

A useful measurement in this space is to explore Customer Effort Score. This measures the effort the customer must take to resolve their issue.

Don't let your map become shelf-ware

We have all seen the documents, plans and strategies that end off on the physical or virtual shelf. They get created, published and promoted and then they disappear.

Your customer journey is an ever evolving process. You need to make sure you revisit and update your customer map regularly to reflect changes in the market, new products and services and importantly to reflect the changes and evolution in customer expectations and needs.?

Are you ready to go?

Now that I have shared some tips and insights, if you are ready to go and looking for help, please get in touch and see how I can support your customer experience improvement pathway.

Who is Michael Clark?

Michael Clark is not the famous former cricketer! Michael is a veteran of the Contact Centre and CX Industry and was recognised this year as one of the Top 100 Influencers in the Contact Centre Industry in APAC, and as one of Australia's Top 50 Small Business Leaders for 2022.

Michael is the co-founder and Principal Consultant at CXTT Consulting.?

Who is?CXTT Consulting?

CXTT is a 50% Aboriginal owned company providing consulting, coaching and facilitation services.?

We deliver solutions across CX, Transformation and Technology helping you get ahead of the competition and navigate today’s challenging business conditions.??

Our existing client portfolio covers a range of sectors including Government, NFP, BPO, Utilities, Financial Services, and Technology providers. Why not book an obligation-free discussion and see how we can help you:?Book an obligation-free discussion