How to kickstart your customer experience transformation

Customer experience is the talk of the town and given its direct impact on your revenue figures and overall margin, it should be the talk of your boardroom too.

Transforming your customer experience to meet your demanding customers is complex, resource intensive and it can be difficult to know where to start. It would be sensible to begin with a large scale customer journey mapping exercise culminating in the creation of a service design model.

Instead of waiting for the full exercise results, analysing specific areas of the journey to identify quick wins can be an effective approach.

Take a multi-lensed look at your customer experience:

• What are the customers saying? Use your customer surveys, NPS and CSAT scores from different points in your customers’ journeys to understand where the biggest gains can be found and prioritise where to start. Listen to your call logs, talk to customers directly through focus groups of incentivised interviews.
• What does your data show you? Slice and dice your data. Why do you lose more customers from a certain product at a certain time of year? Why are a certain customer segment more likely to renew or repurchase than another? What does that say about your brand or your product?
• What do your frontline staff think? Those closest to the customers (your sales managers, service support, any direct contact fulfillment staff e.g. installation and setup) are bound to be hearing some consistent themes. Some of these things will be very well known by your organisation but some may be in specific areas and not readily escalated, offering you new insights.
• What are your back office staff spending most of their time on? Are your operational teams struggling to setup, deliver or provide the ordered product or service? Are your billing teams struggling to get payment, resolve charges or finding there are errors they have to manually resolve?

Having a quick peek under the covers in these areas can yield a plethora of simple-to-implement enhancements which can add up to big gains in your customer experience.

Here are a couple of quick win ideas to give you some inspiration:

Purchase

Position your products functionally – making it clear what they are used for and how they can help the potential customer.

You may think your cool product names and snappy marketing blurbs are making your products stand out, but if your audience can’t tell the difference between the Excellence 4.7 and thePerfection Enterprise Edition then you may have lost them before you’ve even started. This doesn’t need to kick off a huge programme in product naming and reclassification. Instead, consider building your marketing site and sales material around some simple functional titles and copy to direct the customers to the right products for them.

Put the power in their hands. Allow your customers to build their products in a way that works for them and understand what they are buying.

Service

Negative interactions will have the biggest impact on your customers’ overall experience with you.

Many customers will want to solve their own issues. Self-service support should be easy to navigate, help articles clearly signposted and tilted and the content focussed towards a resolution.

Find some friendly customers to test your support offering on, iteratively learn and make immediate improvements using minimal resources.

For more ideas on how you can implement quick wins to improve your customer experience, gain further insight through this Gartner research here: