New Blog Series: Improving the Customer Journey
Customer experience is your customer's perception of their interaction with or about any and all touch points across your organization. The experience doesn't end after the marketing brand promise has been made or the sale is complete. One weak touch point can negatively impact the customer's entire perception.
Each area of your organization makes an impact
Each day, decisions are made throughout your company that affect customer experience, including:
Social media posts
Customer service policy changes
Hiring decisions
Changes in shipping and freight vendors
Technical tool evaluations
New partnerships and acquisitions
Our team regularly engages with customers to understand where the experience could be improved and what those improvements would require - from small tweaks to deep organizational changes.
We engage with our clients' customers to understand their current experience. The feedback we collect is correlated with customer behavioral data, financial data, and operational data. Buried in this data are valuable insights; focused analysis uncovers hidden trend clues, critical issues affecting customer engagement, warning signs prior to customer defection and what drives customer satisfaction.
New blog series
As a consultant for over 10 years, I have consistently had leaders share their organization's commitment to customers coming first. However, most couldn't see a clear path to building a truly customer-centric culture, with customers at the heart of every decision made. Customer-centricity requires putting every decision under the customer lens, and evaluating the potential impact on the customer experience before every decision.
Building an aligned customer experience requires organizations to:
Understand customer expectations and desired experience: You need to incorporate these expectations into your organization's processes and technology. Don't forget to inject your organization's creativity, innovation and secret sauce. This is how your branded customer experience is developed. First, understand customer needs, then over time, use those insights to predict wants and needs before customers even recognize them.
Synchronize and integrate customer-focused processes: You need to understand the most impactful processes, where consistency and reliability along the customer journey need improvement, as well as where you can inject innovation to differentiate the experience you provide.
Define desired employee behavior: This behavior needs to align with customer-focused processes and technologies in order to create a consistently positive customer experience. How you hire, train, engage, motivate, coach, reward, and recognize employees is vital. Employees who are inspired by their organization's branded experience will deliver in ways that will energize those around them. Culture, employee engagement and brand promises are linked through the experience your employees deliver.
Empower employees with technology designed around customer expectations: Visibility into key customer information, including recent interactions, can improve service consistency and facilitate improved response times and response accuracy. Technology can improve experience consistency across channels (phone, web, email and social) and can capture collective customer insights. Data (surveys, operational data, customer behavior, and financial performance) can guide decisions on future improvements.
If your organization is struggling to understand how to deliver an optimal customer experience, it is vital to start thinking about the entire journey from beginning to end. If any aspect of your organization (team or channel) is delivering an inconsistent experience, you risk undermining the great experience provided elsewhere and losing valuable customers.
In our new blog series, we'll explore a variety of opportunities to improve the customer experience with thought leaders in finance, supply chain, marketing, business analytics, business transformation, organizational change, and technology.
Stay tuned for upcoming interviews. In the meantime, to learn more about how your organization can improve customer experience, reach out to us to help.
