What is Customer Experience (CX) ?
Customer experience refers to the overall perception that a customer has of a brand or organisation based on their interactions with it over time. It encompasses every touchpoint that a customer has with an organisation.
It also includes perception of the brand when they hear about your brand even though they have not used your brand. Like perception of Mont Blanc pen or Tesla. It also includes their perception when they think about your brand. For example when we think about Peta as a brand.
For most organisations, it is the accidental result of their culture, process, or technology. Which leads to interactions that are meaningless, inconsistent or frustrating. In current world, you not only need to understand your customer experience but also need to design and manage it.
Organisations which are leaders in CX are able to reap better ROI as compared to CX laggards. They have better relationship capital to vouch for even in case of any bad interaction. Thereby they are able to take more risk and grow faster as compared to their peers.
Why does it matter ?
Stronger the relationship bond, higher the chances that you will be leading your market segment.
Benefits of improving CX :
With improved CX, you attain customer loyalty. You don’t need to spend on user acquisition. They have a high rate of returning customers. And these customers become their brand promoters and drive their organic growth through word of mouth publicity. With loyal customers, you will always receive constant feedback and would be able to innovate faster and fail early. One such company who was able to leverage this was Giffgaff (Giffgaff is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO)).
Giffgaff has been successful in leveraging its customers as promoters by creating a sense of community, incentivising referrals, being transparent, and actively engaging with customers on social media. These strategies have helped to build a loyal customer base that is willing to promote the brand to others.
Cost of inaction :
If you don’t care about your customers then they don’t care about you. Organisations lose out on customers due to customer defection. Inaction increases chances of brand damage. And probability of incidents related to compliance and safety increases thereby leading to paying for legal and compliance costs.
Considering all this in mind, let’s see what supports and strengthen customer experience.
What are the pillars of customer experience ?
Basis the lecture series by Brad Cleveland, Customer experience service is broadly divided into 5 major blocks:
Foundational Block
This is core or the foundation on which the whole organisation runs on.
Vision & Goals : The vision and goals of a company can significantly impact the customer experience. A clear and compelling vision can help to align the organisation around a common purpose and create a customer-centric culture. Goals can provide a roadmap for achieving the vision and help to prioritise actions that will improve the customer experience.
Employee Engagement : If employees feels that their work matters then their engagement with their work would be high. They will be willing to go the extra mile to help their customers. Leading to first class experience.
Listening Block
Listening and being attentive of what your customer is saying or doing forms the basis of this block.
Voice of Customer : VoC is the process of listening to your customers and understanding their needs, frustrations, and feedbacks. We need to be listening in all the co-places where our prospective user is providing feedback or venting out his/her frustration. We need to capture the themes and prioritise their problems. Sometime a simple acknowledgement that they were heard provides sign of relief to end customer.
Customer Service : Customer service plays a crucial role in defining the customer experience. Customer service is often the first point of contact that customers have with an organisation. The quality of the customer service they receive sets the tone for the entire customer experience. A positive interaction with customer service can create a sense of trust and confidence in the organisation. Providing effective and personalised customer service, resolving issues in a timely manner, being consistent across all channels, and continuously improving processes and systems can all contribute to a positive customer experience.
Customer service should not be just looked at as support but they play a strategic role by being the face of the customer and providing feedback along the workflows definition and process improvements stages.
Design Block
Once you have viewed and listened to your customer, how you interpret their experience/pain points and how you convert them into actionable are talked about in this block.
Customer Journey / Stories : By mapping the customer journey, organisations can gain a deeper understanding of their customers needs, create empathy, demonstrate value, inspire innovation. This can be achieved by creating empathy maps which traverse through user’s journey or it can also be done through by sharing customer stories within the organisation. By sharing customer stories, organisations can develop a more customer centric culture and create a more positive and memorable customer experience.
Process & Technology : Everybody wants to use the tech stack of Amazon, Netflix, Googles’ of the world but the funny fact is most of the technology which these innovators use are available in open domain. It is not the technology availability that determines their experience but how they use their technology innovation to define their process. If used correctly and prioritised basis customer needs in focus, experience which will come out will be phenomenal.
Inspiration Block
How to inspire and innovate keeping the customer at the center drives this block.
Customer Advocacy : Building the culture of customer advocacy where ideally everyone in every role is advocating for customers. Customer advocacy consists of the actions you take to focus the organisation on what's doing best for customers, which in turn rewards you with loyal customers who advocate for your products and brand.
Innovation : One thing is constant about customer needs which is it is ever evolving. And only with innovations one can stay ahead of competitors in meeting customer needs and expectations. Innovation doesn’t need to be technology innovation, it can be an innovative way of doing the same thing, process change, business model change etc. And also innovation doesn’t always something like moving mountains or creating generative AI. It can be as simple as pre approving entry for your delivery boy when you order item from your fast commerce players.
Momentum Block
All well and good but if you don’t have the push and investment from this block then everything falls in places. Hence, this forms the critical pillar for CX.
Investment : Well everything we want to do needs resources and investment. But not everyone in the organisation will be the decision maker for investment/ budget allocation. We need to give both cost and benefit analysis of the initiatives which we want to run to improve customer experience to the decision makers so that we can broaden the view point of looking at the outcome. Outcome of the projects should be driven by both CX goals and Business goals.
Leadership : Leadership is the cornorstone. Leadership requires courage to push for the change. Leaders doesn’t mean top management. Anyone who can influences others is a leader. Leader defines and drive experience rail across the organisation. And each and everyone in the organisation who moves this rail is a leader.
If we focus on all of the above right and able to nurture the culture of customer centric experience then the organisation will be well in their way of being the leaders in their market segment. And creating a relationship bond with their customer which is ever lasting.
Thanks for reading. And Happy learning.