COVER STORY OF THE MONTH
Unified Customer Experience
Delivering a great customer experience is beyond just training and empowering customer facing employees. Rather it should be a part of the company’s DNA. The internal structure of a business should be designed in a way that supports in the creation and delivery of excellence in customer experience. The enterprise should adopt technologies and processes that enable easy and consistent cross channel experiences for its customers. Above all, the enterprise should put in place processes to close the gap between data and action to ensure agility in delivering on its customer experience goals.
There is an overwhelming body of research that indicates the impact that customer experience has on the reputation, sales and profits of a brand. A recent study indicated that customer centric companies are 60% more profitable compared to companies that are not focused on the customer. A “totally satisfied” customer contributes 2.6 times more revenue than a “somewhat satisfied” customer. Statistics apart, delivering a unified and consistent customer experience is walking on a long and hard road. It requires persistence, energy and resources. Even an organization providing repeatedly superior customer experience can have just one poor experience lead to the demise of a long standing customer.
Customers prefer to interact with a brand through multiple channels in any given moment. Enterprises need to ensure that they provide a coherent customer experience irrespective of the channel. Customer experience is not necessarily only outward facing. It is the aggregate of all brand experiences pre and post-sale. Delivering great customer experience just showcases best practices in terms of the way an organization is structured internally to make this happen. Investing in training customer facing employees to be more customer friendly or handling irate customers is important though it can only provide superficial gains. Harvard professor and author Rosabeth Moss Kanter likens this type of change-effort to putting lipstick on a bulldog.
In order to deliver on its customer experience goals, an enterprise has to go a bit deeper to revisit their structure to cut silos, moving away from traditional, hierarchical structures and re-think the way they should be organized to deliver a unified and consistent experience. In addition to structure, enterprise systems should be aligned in such a manner that the appropriate teams have access to information and are able to transact efficiently as and when needed. Integration and data issues need to be addressed to ensure a 360 view of the customer. Processes should be simplified and streamlined to support customer profitability and cost to serve. Enterprises should adopt tools and methodologies to get a deep understanding of customers, their past history and preferences in order to segment them based on priority and offer differentiated experiences. Such experiences for instance could include delivering tailored ads and discounts to a more personalized rewards program. This calls for actually listening to customers irrespective of the channels via which they interact – it could be a call recordings, social media feedback, emails, web information, structured data lying in various applications, feedback provided during a service ticket resolution etc. A wealth of information can be derived from such data including demographic, social, behavioral and financial information. Analytics that mine this data will drive actions for contextual personalization, process improvements and internal employee training programs. Such analytics sits on top of a wide range of third party products, aggregates disparate pieces together and draws inferences via listening and sentiment engines. There are also tools that provides contextual view of the data that can be used for more targeted personalization experiences. What’s better, with data and insights, enterprises can also predict their customer’s next move and proactively reach out to them with offers and related content.
Multi-channel seamless experience on their fingertips and their terms, is something that customers take for granted these days. A perfect multi-channel experience allows agility and ease of use in enabling transactions while at the same time providing a customized, engaged experience for those customers who would like to browse for longer. The other interesting consideration enterprises need to have while they provision technology for such cross channel experiences, is the distinct difference in customer’s behavior based on the channel they are on. For instance, a customer interacting via mobile may just be interested in conducting a quick transaction or get specific information hence the bounce rate may be higher vs on a website where the engagement cycle could be longer. Some of the strategies used by enterprises to create an omni-channel experience include easy store and on-line returns, free in-store pick up irrespective of the channel where they were purchased from, continuity and consistency of customer service across interaction channels and an attractive rewards program to retain customers. Starbucks for instance has seen a tremendous success in its multi-channel loyalty program that also offers mobile payment technology integrated with its reward program.
Finally, acting in a timely way on insights from customer analytics is seemingly a no-brainer but still waiting to be done by several enterprises. This includes right from timely response to issues raised to aligning the entire business in line with customer experience goals. Customer experience after all is all about resolution and engagement.
Aristotle said “We are what we repeatedly do”. Delivering a great customer experience entails instilling a habit within the organization to enforce process discipline, ensure the right technology and infrastructure, commitment from employees irrespective of levels and alignment of priorities to meet customer experience goals. Consistency is paramount. Customers can become promoters when they consistently have a positive impression vs what they have experienced elsewhere.