Transforming your organization's Customer Experience
The most successful CEOs and top executives regularly ask themselves the question: “what do customers want?” It’s probably the most important question an organization can ask of itself since it is what determines how much business it does and how successful it ultimately becomes.
Unfortunately, too many executives and CEOs get bogged down in the day-to-day operations of their companies. They ask themselves how they can automate their marketing or streamline their customer relations management, without going back to basics and actually thinking about what it is that their clients want.
Their competitors, on the other hand, are quickly getting savvy to the advantages of enhancing the customer experience. According to Forbes magazine, we’re seeing a whole raft of major innovations, including AI bots that assist the customer experience, a focus on value rather than price, more investment into customer service (which is driving ever higher expectations) and personalisation of services.
Organizations, therefore, need to focus on enhancing their customer experience. But how
See The World Through The Eyes Of The Customer
Research suggests that the customer experience is more important than ever. With today’s “everything-immediately” culture, nearly three-quarters of people expect companies to be able to deliver solutions to their problems in a matter of minutes, even in the B2B setting. Thus, managing customer expectations and providing services rapidly is increasingly important.
One of the things that companies are doing to transform their customer interactions is designing better “customer journeys” from initial marketing channels to final sale. At the moment, many companies have complex journeys which involve mountains of paperwork and multiple meetings. It's clear that change is needed. Some brave innovators are redesigning the process from scratch, rather than tinkering around the edges, to make the experience more enjoyable. Research from Amazon and Google shows that 25 percent of customers will bail with just one bad experience of a customer journey.
Use Metrics To Capture Customer Feedback
Customers don't experience your enterprise as a set of discrete interactions. Rather, they get a general feeling or impression of your company as a whole from multiple interactions. As such, you need indicators which both describe their overall experience as well as those which enable you to drill down into the details and assess whether you’re being effective. Start off with a top-down metric which measures overall satisfaction and then capture key performance indicators all along the customer journey, giving you information about how much they liked a particular part of the experience. Use this feedback to identify opportunities to improve.
Show Off Your Success
Businesses often fail to transform customer experience because they fail to demonstrate how improvements are creating value. Progress then stalls and the whole project loses impetus.
Executives, therefore, need to focus on bold initiatives which both delight customers and produce tangible results. By focusing on the customer experience issues with the greatest ROI first, you can convince the rest of your team that transforming your customers’ experience is worthwhile.
As a final note, it’s worth pointing out that engaging customers at all levels of your company is beneficial. Everybody from the CEO to the sales clerk should be geared towards making sure customers get what they want.