Customer Experience (CX) is the sum of all experiences that customers have with a brand as they engage across its lifecycle. CX is no longer just a nice to have – high growth organizations have incorporated it as an intrinsic part of their business strategy and operations. In such organizations, it is in fact linked to the compensation structure of CMO’s and is closely tied to revenue growth.
The starting point though is to get a real sense of the expectations that customers have with the brands that they experience, vs. their feedback in terms of how these brands are currently placed. This is easier than we think. After all, this means that customer satisfaction metrics and surveys will need re-alignment to get a full visibility of the current customer experience scores. Based on the insights so received, the next step is to identify goals, put together a time bound action plan linking it to phases to establish quick wins and then test progress.
Every customer touch point across the lifecycle of the brand will need to be re-evaluated to understand the quality of engagement across the customer journey. Customer satisfaction survey scores may reveal great results as they are evaluated in isolation across individual business processes, and yet, customers could be unhappy with the overall engagement with the brand. While customers may not reveal unhappiness in the way specific support requests or enquiries are managed, they could still have poor overall experience in dealing with brands across multiple channels during the engagement lifecycle.
Driving this change in favor of better CX starts internally with empowered and engaged employees who fully understand the goals that the company is set to accomplish. This transformation needs to happen in a structured way by putting in place a clear strategy and high-energy change agents who take ownership to make the change happen.
Customer experience technologies help accelerate the change by measuring not only the as-is but also on-going customer and competitor feedback from various engagement channels to drive intelligent decisions and further build momentum in the right direction.
As a famous quote goes: “If you’re not serving the customer, your job is serving someone who does”. There is no escape to great customer experience for propelling your business.