Stepping up and sustaining the momentum of your Experience initiative

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Rethinking your experience strategy to step-up growth: Keep doing what works best and aim to improve  

– discover and prioritise your roadmap to achieve successful outcomes

One of the stumbling blocks in a customer experience initiative is convincing the organization to prioritize customer issues and committing to building a sustainable experience agenda with the customer at the centre of the conversation. As you go past that hurdle you now have a great opportunity to address customer issues with a focus on the “outside-in” view of the customer. Once there is buy-in you can then focus on how to influence mindsets and draw attention to customer-centricity as a dominant culture. It includes identifying flaws and opportunities worth investing in and focusing on initiatives that will deliver optimum value cost-effectively.

By listening to customers, we gain a better understanding of issues or changes required to pursue the list of possible improvement initiatives. It’s about identifying key interactions (Moments of Truth) to focus on and determining actions to take to address these interactions. One way to address the needs of your customer is to develop effective channels of communication. By, listening to improvements customers are asking for, you are better able to develop the capacity to identify pain points and take the necessary action to address customer concerns effectively.

It also includes a review of what went well and what did not, lessons learned is the expression used commonly to explain the process. Armed with valuable lessons one is well-placed to address the challenges ahead with insight from past experiences. A key approach in this situation is to keep the channels of communication flowing back and forth. What are the improvements your customers are asking for again and again? What are their biggest pain points? As customer experience lead you will be facilitating customer experience management competencies across the organization to bring the customer’s concerns to the attention of all.

Ian Golding offers some advice on how to drive this process seamlessly. According to him “the capabilities required to deliver the roadmap are not purely customer experience strategy capabilities. They, are the wider organisational capabilities which underpin the customer journey and make up the business ecosystem.” To enhance these capabilities, he highlights the following areas to pay attention to. First, a customer-centric culture where mindsets are customer oriented. Second, Voice of the customer encompasses customer insight and understanding. Third, organisational adoption and accountability where ownership of customer issues is widespread.

Fourth, developing and adhering to a customer experience strategy that has buy-in across the board. Fifth, experience design, improvement, and innovation, and finally a look at metrics, measurement, and return on investment.

Customer-Centric Culture

According to recent research cited by the Harvard Business Review, “only 14 percent of marketers say that customer centricity is a hallmark of their companies, and only 11 percent believe their customers would agree with that characterisation.” Getting customer centricity right appears somewhat daunting to a wider spectrum of companies. The volume of data regarding this is overwhelming to organizations. Especially in the developing world, a good many companies lack the systems and technology to segment and profile customers effectively.

Many also struggle to develop the processes and operational capabilities to target customers with personalized communication and experiences. This notwithstanding there is evidence that in our ecosystem the quest to drive customer centricity is receiving great attention among industry players. A key player in this segment is African Bank, South Africa. They deployed a pioneering approach to optimize their customer service efforts on social media. By focusing on digitisation, and leveraging social media platforms more as customer service touchpoints than as a marketing tool, they have optimized their workflow with a great impact on operational efficiency.

Businesses now have enhanced capabilities to influence customer-centric thinking across touchpoints. According to Diane Gherson head of HR at IBM, employee engagement drives two-thirds of her company’s client experience scores. That proves what Gherson and her team knew intuitively: If employees feel good about IBM, clients do, too. According to Temkin Group a customer experience consultancy, a $1 billion company can gain $775 million over three years through modest improvements such as reducing customer wait times or making a transaction easier for the customer. Making customers satisfied has great value.

Voice of the Customer

By consolidating feedback into formal integrated and actionable insights you are developing capabilities to intuitively listen to and address customer issues productively. As customers journey across various channels and modes of interaction, (touchpoints), and as you capture their expectations, needs, aspirations, and subjective opinions among others you are listening to their concerns proactively. By implementing a VoC initiative you develop capabilities to spot dominant trends across your intended customer base and invest in product or service improvements attuned to mutual benefit for the business and customer.

Typically, VoC involves collecting feedback from a range of channels to give you a balanced view of customer sentiments. Feedback from customers’ preferred digital and analogue channels would aid you to obtain some comprehensive results. They range from SMS questionnaires, mobile app surveys, on-site customer surveys, social media, live telephonic surveys, focus groups discussions, email questionnaires, and physical feedback forms. The rationale here is to ensure alignment between your product and/or service and the customer’s needs, expectations, or desires so that there is a maximum chance of adoption.

Consider the following use cases. A pharmacy using samples from a survey with the aid of AI and machine learning analyses data using the clustered samples as models for automated filtering and presents a highly accurate and detailed picture of the pharmacy’s performance across a range of business concerns. Second, to get a clear view of incoming guests a hotel can present a pre-arrival survey, speed up check-in by gathering the necessary information on preferences, and allergies, and upsell certain services on offer. Follow this with a “how is it going survey” and a final questionnaire to see areas where the hotel can improve.

Organisational Adoption, and Accountability

The average organization would typically tread cautiously when it comes to transformation. Today’s world has made this stance untenable. As Ruth Crawley a CX consultant puts it, “The future is now”. Current industry trends, economic headwinds and not least the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic which began as a health crisis ending as a business crisis with its human and economic impact have changed the narrative for business planning. There is now a need for urgency and immediate acceleration of plans. Today we are in an era known as the technology Darwinism. Technology is moving faster than businesses can keep up.

Deepak Chopra the Indian-American alternative medicine advocate said, “Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future”. An effective CX adoption will require cross-functional engagement. This means breaking up organizational silos and leveraging cross-disciplinary expertise if you want to succeed in your CX drive leading ultimately to business success. Leaders must set the example in this new norm cultivating a purpose-driven, learning mindset. A couple of weeks ago I touched on Action Learning as a great learning strategy to encourage organization-wide learning.

Action learning strategies make learning much more valuable than solving the problem itself. An Action Learning environment creates, develops, and captures learning at the individual, team, and organizational levels. Blue chip companies have used this to good effect. Boeing for example used this strategy to develop critical skills for their executives in skills including adapting, thinking, fostering open and effective communication, driving execution, inspiring, and empowering. If the learning culture is strong teams within the business operate optimally. There if a feel-good factor about engaging with customers both internally and externally.

Customer Experience Strategy

In reality, experiences are random however to make this consistent and intentional you need a definite plan. Your goal as an organization is to develop a distinctive personality and sophisticated delivery capability which allows you to deliver flexible personalized journeys by continually adapting to customer behaviour. Jerry Angrave of Empathyce provides us with a clear template to follow in developing our customer experience. it starts with random experiences where there is very little product focus or measurement of exceptions. At this stage, there are unintended consequences and employees are disengaged.

At this stage, we carry unnecessary costs. The next stage in this process is intentional experiences. At this stage, we develop a shared vision, think of customers, solve problems, develop measurement programmes, and adopt cross-functional governance. This is where it becomes profitable. The third stage is about differentiated experiences. Here the organization emerges as one that is easy to do business with. Where there is a culture of thinking and acting as “customer”, i.e. empathy. We are quick to fix mistakes and are focused on delivering Brand promise, finally we are self-regulating.

Ian Golding sums it up this way, “It is impossible even to get to the middle intentional state unless everyone in your organization is aligned and contributing to the experience”. Being deliberate about strategy offers some great advantages. Favourable lead times from order to shipment. Including delivery, and quick response times making you the preferred choice if the customer has to choose from a menu of service or product options. My daughter ordered some items online a few weeks ago for a wedding and she got it a day or two or so after the event with no explanation for the delay after assurances of quick delivery times. Poor strategy execution!

Design, Improvement, and Innovation

Every interaction with a consumer offers a unique opportunity to deliver an unforgettable experience to turn the customer into an advocate. Getting to this level as we learned earlier requires deliberate action. CX design is about facilitating high-quality interactions with people before, during, and after they become customers. Note that in every interaction the customer will be less willing to engage in something that is of little value to them. As a business think of how usable the customer experience is for everything you deliver. Empathize with the customer’s mindset, and ensure that you create the best possible solution for their needs.

There are a plethora of ways to improve the customer experience, we are unable to exhaust the tall list here. However, a few of these are worth mentioning; first, empower your employees, companies that are excellent at delivering out-of-world experiences start with their employees. Airbnb’s commitment to treating employees with the same respect and consideration as would be given to a paying customer so that the company can provide the highest service to all its guests has earned them a spot on the best places to work. HP has created an environment where employees concentrate all of their efforts on raising the company’s revenue.

Employees on the frontlines interacting with customers are in a unique position to deliver on your brand promises, and they’re equally pivotal when it comes to perceiving and communicating customer expectations, mood, and perceptions. Listening to them provides a channel of valuable insights and understanding of your customers and their perception of you. Employees who feel valued are more engaged at work and more willing to help customers. According to research by Epsilon, 80% of consumers were more likely to make a purchase when brands offered CX and 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better.

Metrics Measurement and ROI

In the mathematics of business, the equation Revenue – Cost = Profit is central to everything transaction. Justifying anything within the business must centre around its role in generating revenue. Revenue after all is the direct contribution from customers to the business. As much as metrics such as customer lifetime value, annual recurring value, and market return on investment have their merits undoubtedly, these often distract us from seeing the true results of CX investments.

There are several methods and tools that you can adapt based on your unique requirements. A few examples are calculating the Net Promoter Score (NPS). It is a metric used in customer experience programmes. to measure the loyalty of customers to a company. Subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters yields the Net Promoter Score, which can range from a low of -100 (if every customer is a Detractor) to a high of 100 (if every customer is a Promoter).

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is for determining satisfaction levels. It measures happiness with a product, service, or support interaction through a customer satisfaction survey that asks: “How satisfied were you with our company?” Satisfaction levels are favourable when they measure from 25% upwards, the average threshold across the industry is 15%. There are a few more that we can explore depending on our context. These include analyzing customer journey analytics, determining customer churn rates, the percentage of customers that stopped using your company’s product or service during a certain time frame

The Writer is a Management Consultant (Change and Customer Experience). He can be reached on 059 175 7205, [email protected], https://www.linkedin.com/in/km-13b85717/

 

 

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