Managing customer experience to attain and maintain competitive advantage

– launch and sustain an out-of-this-world CX strategy

Years ago, I learned something profound in my strategy module. As we researched a definition for a strategy, I chanced on the following description of what strategy is. The author used the following words: direction, consistency, concentration and flexibility. The first word, direction, was about the fact that strategic planning was about choosing a direction and applying planning initiatives and activities with consistency, concentrating on your choices, and maintaining a focus that will lead you to anticipated outcomes.

The word flexibility comes in to warn us about the need to be aware of the possibility of failure and be prepared to adjust when things don’t seem right. Prof Eddie Obeng of Pentacle, UK highlights the importance of ‘Smart Failure’ and goes on to explain this phenomenon as the ability to fall forward. In other words, failing in a way that enables you to draw lessons to help you grow or improve. According to him: “You need to confront situations in which you are going to be stretched and that will result in some failure. You need to fail fast and learn faster”.

Customer experience can either be random or intentional. Ian Golding makes the point about expectations in CX, ranging from minimum to maximum expectations. Minimum expectations play up in situations where the experience is random, where the focus is more on the product with no measurement, and where exceptions are the norm, with unintended consequences in an environment where employees are disengaged. This situation, according to him, carries an unnecessary cost. The next level is where you have intentional experiences, where there is a shared vision.

In this environment, the customer is the main focus; and the tendency here is to fix own problems and deploy a measurement programme with cross-functional governance. This, in essence, leads to profitable outcomes. The optimal level in this process is where you work toward differentiated experiences. In this environment, it is easier to do business, think and act like customers, fix customer mistakes, and deliver on the brand promise in a self-regulated regime. This experience is more sustainable as the focus on the customer is more deliberate and the business is determined to keep improving.

Being deliberate about how you deliver experiences to customers is essential in ensuring that you provide unique and memorable experiences. The following requirements must be in place as part of any good strategy. First, a communication plan to ensure that all stakeholders – internal and external – are aligned with the customer agenda. Second, a focus on the internal (employee) experience to ensure a turnout of satisfied employees willing to deliver a superior customer experience. Third, a measurement system to keep everyone focused on delivering at the highest level.

Fourth, to be intentional about the experience, you will need to think through the experience that you want to deliver at key times. This requires a deliberate effort to design the desired experience. Your goal is to deliver it by design – not by accident. Fifth, you need a resourceful individual who will use both operational and experience data to measure, track and improve the customer experience.

Communication

Important information about the customer needs to be relayed to the right people in the organisation through internal and external communication channels. To enhance the efficiency of your teams and to ensure alignment with the customer agenda, all employees must be on the same page. Customer experience must be a shared goal, and to achieve this effectively, the customer conversation must be effectively communicated across all levels of the organisation. It is all about raising awareness, influencing attitudes, and motivating people to act on the customer agenda.

With customer awareness ingrained in the DNA of the business, customer interactions become opportunities for eliciting valuable data. Teams can quickly discover customer pain points – specific problems faced by current or prospective customers at your touchpoints; and armed with the right information, they are better able to increase customer satisfaction and etch out steps they need to take to improve the overall customer experience. A tour operator can understand the needs of its customers by conducting customer surveys, analysing customer feedback and reviews, and studying customer behaviour data.

When you understand what your customers want, you can then tailor your services and offerings to better meet their needs and expectations. According to research consultants Forbes, 58 percent of people are willing to pay more for good customer service. Additionally, 80 percent of consumers switch brands because of negative customer experiences. An effective communication system will ensure that all stakeholders are well-prepared and can sing from the same hymn sheet about the customer.

People

According to research, 87 percent of business leaders identify CX as their top growth engine. Esteban Kolsky (CX Evangelist) posits that 72 percent of customers will share a positive experience with 6 people or more. Conversely, if a customer is not happy, 13 percent will share their experience with even 15 more customers. Therefore, CX must be top of mind for every employee. Empowering your employees is crucial to delivering a superior customer experience. They must be equipped with the right tools and resources to deliver your CX agenda as they engage them on the frontlines and across the organisation.

An empowered workforce is one equipped with the right tools and technology to perform their roles. In their day-to-day work, they are well-equipped to focus on providing excellent customer service. Tools will range from customer relationship management (CRM) software to chatbots and holistic Enterprise Resource Planning solutions. Additionally, offering training and development opportunities will help them improve their skills and knowledge. Training must encompass new technologies, communication techniques, and customer service best practices.

Employees must be encouraged to bring creativity to their roles through the facilitation of a work environment that gives them the freedom to express themselves through the introduction of new ideas and solutions. They must have fun with their work! By supporting them to create a positive work environment, employee satisfaction is achieved. This can lead to happier and more motivated staff who are better equipped to provide excellent customer service. Another important effect of a motivated customer-focused workforce is that there is high morale and a low turnover.

Measuring (metrics)

The journey map is a visual representation of the customer’s engagement with your brand. It is a useful tool that gives you a clear picture of how the customer is behaving at your touchpoints. Furthermore, it offers you a great opportunity to assess whether your engagements are positive or otherwise. During the interactions, you will focus on Moments of Truth – points in the journey where a key event occurs, and the customer forms an opinion about the brand – and the effect of the actions you are taking to improve the experience. According to Ian Golding, there are 3 main voices of CX measurement you need to focus on to learn from the perception of customers.

These are the Voice of the Customer (VoC) – how customers experience your journey, the Voice of the employee (VoE) – colleague perception of your business, and the Voice of the Process (VoP) – which correlates performance inside your business (cause) with the quality of the customer journey (effect). Measuring is pivotal to customer success. The fact is that customers have their perceptions about our brand or service. It is not in our place to judge whether they are wrong or right. This is why measuring the experience is so important. As your goal as CX lead is to influence customer behaviour, our focus is to ensure that CX strategy achieves KPIs.

Your measurement approach must, therefore, allow you to see how customer experience quality drives the business metrics you have committed to deliver. You must demonstrate your VoC results correlate with behaviour. For example, your net promoter score (NPS) measurement – which measures customer experience and predicts business growth – may show that your promoters are 15 times more likely to repurchase, or a 2 percent increase in CSAT drives a 5 percent improvement in customer behaviour.

Designing

The goal here is to design and redesign customer-driven experiences. According to Pennington (2016), to deliver ‘wow’ experiences, you must ask yourself these questions broadly. First, how can you move from ideas into action by integrating outside-in thinking with inside-out processes of the company (VoP)? Second, how do you truly innovate and design experiences that meet your customer’s expectations? How can you learn to think differently? This approach enables you to develop a prioritised list of improvement opportunities. As you engage with the customer, take the opportunity to identify weaknesses in the experience and redesign these experiences.

To think differently you need to view things from the customer’s perspective. Here is a typical scenario of arriving at the airport. Years ago, we travelled to Singapore for a programme. We arrived on Sunday and did not have an arrival party waiting for us. we were eventually connected to the facilitating ministry by the front desk at the airport, and managed to sort out our initial hitch on arrival. This worked out well because the experience had been thought of and addressed so that our challenge could be resolved effectively. We were linked to the officer in charge after the security officer at the ministry had made contact on our behalf.

The security officer knew enough to signpost us. Creating wow moments must be intentional. Usually, wow moments could be a failure somewhere else in the organisation that drives an individual to go to full lengths to recover this. An insurance company has found that a claim is available for a bereaved family and goes out of its way to communicate and advise on how the claim can be made and even take the trouble to deliver the documentation at its own cost. These stories, if they are true, create a picture of how a business goes out of its way to keep customers satisfied. Experience design is about thinking about and addressing issues empathetically.

Leadership

One consultant coins the term Lead-er-ship to describe the role of leadership in any situation. When the ship is on the right path, everyone is safe. The contrast is not one to write home about. The leader’s role is to empower followers to do what they need to do to achieve the vision of their leader. Achieving a noble cause is very satisfying, but it requires dealing with the challenges that stand in your way. To succeed as a CX leader, you must be a strategic thinker – able to communicate a compelling vision of brand purpose and values that are meaningful to customers.

You must be an inspirational leader to influence a culture of open communication to keep employees engaged about what is important to customers and how this ties in with the CX vision. By creating a line of sight between employees’ roles and the company’s goals, you connect everyone around a shared common purpose. Pentacle UK’s leadership BEAT acronym for Behaviour, Emotions, Actions, and Thinking encapsulate the qualities that a CX leader needs to influence customer-centric thinking in the organisation.

Behaviour is about how one influences followers by acting in a way that makes them want to imitate you and do what is right. How you manage emotions helps in relationship building and keeping everyone in sync with the vision. You must get the balance right. How you turn moods around in crucial moments is key here. An employee is facing a challenge and all you do is force them back to work; this could be a turn-off if you don’t handle the situation well. Your actions are important – are you punctual to work and at meetings? These will influence similar responses from followers.

Finally, you must be innovative-minded and a great thinker. My days running a project in IT were great because I had a boss who was a bag full of ideas and always had something new to introduce to us to keep us on the move. You must be an empathetic leader who brings warmth and personality to your role to get the best out of people. When you genuinely care about what your people go through, and invest in making their employee experience more meaningful and rewarding, they will reciprocate by taking care of customers. Great employees influence great customer experience.