Focus on Customer Experience
While out talking to business leaders one common theme continues to come up across industries - Customer Experience. Not in a good way. A focus on differentiated experiences has become stagnant. This complacency is attributable to many things, including: a strong economy, elevated demand, personnel turnover, and general lethargy.
When was the last time that your team stepped back and reviewed your approach?
Often when business is humming along people are trapped into just working to keep their heads above water. Across the board - in manufacturing, services, hospitality, healthcare - everywhere! Understand also that the shadow effect of shifts required during the global pandemic linger on. The environment has been changing faster than ever which only amplifies the shortcomings. Heading towards the dramatic changes we will see in the 2030’s it is the right time to focus on rethinking customer experience approaches, it will be your key differentiator.
Define expectations and review current state
Your organizational view of customer expectations never completely aligns to the real customer expectation. The objective is to minimize that gap through the phases of engagement:
Acquisition: Before a sale or contract is done there is some explanation of the deliverables as well as a perception established of the engagement. All about setting up-front expectations and communication paths. The opportunity here is explaining your differentiation to win.
Delivery: All of the steps and communication points that happen along the customer journey. In a simple sale they are clear-cut unless something goes awry, in a more complex transaction there are many points of interaction that need to be planned for. This is where your value is established and will define your reputation.
Completion: The acceptance criteria of the minimum deliverables is straightforward. The expectation criteria between excellent vs. dreadful is the work that your company has done throughout. The report card on performance is more often subjective than objective with the differentiator being the experience.
This is where the opportunity for improvement is important to focus on. It is hard work that can be best served by external experts applying design thinking with additional bandwidth that your teams don’t have.
Mapping the customer experience
When forming the approach it is best to think in terms of a map vs. a prescriptive process. Safety critical items deserve strict process, all other experiential designs have structure with flexibility. “Design thinking” is overused as a term, although by any definition it is human-centered based on needs and possibilities. Applying this to customer experiences:
Take the time to understand how your product and service capabilities solve the customer need. Document the points that need interactions to improve understanding of status, next steps, and progress towards completion.
Map the current state using the 80/20 rule (i.e. intentionally divert edge cases to escalation), with clarity on what should be happening. When done right this takes some time to eliminate noise and get to reality. Anecdotes can be helpful here, but can also become overstated as “the norm”.
Evaluate if your delivery of customer anticipation meets your definition of excellence. Having the self-awareness to document where your teams fall short is important, transparency and recognition are key.
Identify the gaps to focus on improvement opportunities. This is the long list of things that might be right for implementation. To get to action prioritization of the specific changes to is required to create momentum.
The effort for this exercise is frontend heavy, which is where using an external expert can be very helpful. The bandwidth from internal teams can remain focused on the day-to-day business while creating buy-in for change.
Implementing action
Using this approach there will be some early changes that can be implemented without much effort. This helps re-establish a customer focused culture as well as delivering quick wins. The leader that is championing this effort builds consensus and establishes the implementation team framework for longer term embedment.
With the external advisor leading the activity streams individual team members take on actions. Having the additional resource ensuring that actions are completed and aligned to the overall improvement effort accelerates deliverables. Using agile techniques much of the high impact activity can be implemented within a few months.
Wide-ranging impact
Improving your customer experience will certainly have an immediate impact on customer interactions. The additional benefits of marketing messaging, sales story telling, brand reputation, and account expansion are even more impactful. Working now to differentiate with superior customer experience will set your company up for success heading into the doldrums of the 2030’s.
Let’s have an extended conversation about your customer experience to explore an approach to deliver success. An engagement with Economics Designed expands your ability to evaluate your strategic actions.
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