Elevate Your Brand with Exceptional Customer Experience

The transformation to the experience economy is underway and those who embrace it are positioned to reap the rewards. What is the experience economy? It is built around the concept that customers value enjoyable, easy and useful interactions with a company (both in-person and through digital channels). Customers are willing to pay for that experience with premium pricing and loyalty leading to a higher customer lifetime value to the company.

The core of this transformation to the experience economy is CX, or Customer Experience (Citizen Experience in the public sector). CX includes all customer interactions, no matter where, when or why. CX puts the needs and desires of customer at the center of all interactions, valuing what they value. While this seems obvious, it is hard to do well and often requires a quantum shift in how we think about customers, ourselves, our tools and the ways in which we bring value to our customers.

According to a recent PwC survey, about one-third of customers would consider moving on from a company after a bad experience. If you are successful at winning in the experience economy, you will get paid back handsomely. Those organizations who are successful at CX can command a higher premium than their less advanced competition. Good CX leads to higher customer loyalty, less churn and better overall lifetime value (LTV) per customer.

In all interactions, work to make your customers' lives and interactions with your organization as simple and straightforward as possible. It takes careful thought and planning to make sure you understand the myriad of offline and digital touchpoints, across many departments and through many different avenues, that your customer will interact with and build those into a cohesive, easy to intuit customer journey.

Understand the Full Context

The key to good CX is understanding your customer's journey in its entirety and from their perspective. You must understand and capture the customer's journey to positively impact it. Too often, the customer's journey is pigeon-holed into a narrow process that only considers a small portion, leaving much of the context and inflection points ill understood.

Identify Key Inflection Points

In any customer journey there are a few key moments when your customer faces a point of action and interaction that has an outsized impact on their experience. What are those critical points where the whole arc of the experience can change? What are you doing to influence their decision and make their choices easy to understand and execute?

Your solutions can be technically complex on the backend, but must be very simple and straightforward when it comes to the customer. Never push the complexity of your system or the segmented nature of departments within your organization onto the customer. It is not your customer's duty to understand your systems or your organization structure.

Show your customers that you know them. Everyone wants to be heard, understood and treated as an individual. While the gold-standard of treating everyone as a singular individual is the goal, the truth is that in order to deliver CX at scale, you must segment. By understanding what is most important to your customers and designing ways to treat customers who care about similar things into cohorts, you can manage the complexity and deliver experiences that feel personalized.

Know What They Want

At the center of good CX is knowing what your customers want. We often make assumptions about what our customers want without the requisite data and research. Why do they need your service or product? What drives their emotions and decisions? Don't assume that what your customers want stays the same at all times. Context matters.

Know How They Interact

Knowing that your customers want to interact with you through different channels is critical to meeting your customers where they are. This means you must account for all the various ways your customers connect with you, whether through your website, over the phone, through social media, or in person. Adapt your services to the specific desires and expectations your customers have for each channel.

Communicate and Reinforce

Show them that you know them. Communicate to your customers that you hear them and are making improvements based on their feedback. People support what they help create or influence. Tell customers why you've made changes, especially if it's in response to their feedback. Never let a good CX crisis go to waste.

You are responsible for delivering a superior experience based on the information customers provide you. Customers share information with you with the expectation that you will use this information to make their lives better and easier. Not just to market to them.

Predict Their Needs

Good CX knows before you know. It intuits your next actions without being intrusive or limiting your options. Use data and analytics to understand your customer's actions and then design your interactions to make every step as seamless as possible. To do this well, there needs to be a mash-up of good human centered design with appropriate technology.

Personalize at Scale

Deliver personalized experiences offering consideration of what you know about them and what data they have shared with you. Use this information to make their interactions with you efficient, effective and relevant to their specific needs. If you already know something about them, don't ask them to tell you again.

Be Proactive

Always be thinking of more value-add ways to be proactive and make their experience with your company memorable. Prior to a recent federal government shutdown, a financial institution that served government and military families proactively reached out with pre-approved loans and other financial programs to support their customers who would lose paychecks during the shutdown. They understood their customer's needs and turned a potential difficult situation into a positive experience.

Design Thinking is a critical component in developing and refining the optimal CX for all those who interact with an organization. Design Thinking is an effective approach to help solve complex problems through rapid prototyping and learning to create creative solutions, services and products.

This process is more important to businesses now because of the speed of change necessitating innovative solutions that every sector faces. The reason many successful businesses such as Apple, Amazon, IBM, MassMutual and Fidelity have embraced Design Thinking is because they see the benefits it has across multiple areas of business.

The Discovery Process

The discovery process in Design Thinking is often the most critical and difficult step. During discovery, user experience experts look at all the ways that your organization interacts with its users, society, technologies and other businesses. This is the most critical step for designing a stellar user experience and an overall exceptional customer experience.

A key to formulating a better CX strategy is fostering a culture and processes where these discovery findings are shared across departments within a company. This ensures a consistent CX approach and philosophy across every user touchpoint with every department. Without a uniformly high level of attention to CX across the company, an organization risks being defined by its weakest link.

Digital Experience (DX) Technology is part of the design. Technology can power customer experience by delivering information quickly and should be part of the ecosystem to improve the customer experience for internal and external stakeholders. Digital customer experiences rely on technology the most.

When engaging in digital channels, customers feel everything is within your control, so there is no excuse for a poor experience. When great digital CX is achieved, much of the brand experience will occur without any human interaction, saving an organization's time, resources and cost to deliver quality CX.

The Human Element

However, the human touch remains enormously important to your customers. PwC found that 59% of customers feel that organizations have lost touch with the human element of customer experiences. When technology fails users, they look to have a conversation with a real person about their problem.

Incorporating a CRM system or service software into the customer experience design can alleviate the need for customers to repeat themselves, if the CRM tracks all customer interactions and ties them together across multiple channels. A connected system improves the customer experience and your internal stakeholder's experience as well.

Customer Journeys and User Journeys sound like the same thing. In terms of the customer experience, they are different and both matter. Customer journeys are used in CX; User journeys are used in UX. But UX and CX are related so it is important to understand the impact each has on the other.

A user journey details how you want people to complete specific tasks for a specific situation, such as purchasing a train ticket. User journey maps are typically created early in the design process and focus on the objectives of every interaction, every step, every page, key functions and features in the process.

Customer journeys are more fascinating. The customer journey doesn't begin when a customer first interacts with your product, service, or organization. It actually starts way before that. Something triggered your customer to engage or reach out. You need to know why and what the initial catalyst was so you can understand how to keep them engaged over time.

Mapping their customer journey by plotting their actions and emotions across entry points, all stages and key interactions of their journey, across all devices and channels, gives a high level understanding of how customers use and experience your service or product before, during and after they actively interact and transact with your company.

Good CX is actually simple. As you think about the experiences you want your customers to have, always keep your thinking in context of their whole experience. And at each juncture where you need to make a CX decision, make sure you can square your decisions with the three rules of good CX.

A final parting thought: the journey to good CX is just that, a journey. It's an iterative process that is the only way to truly gain insight and understanding and become a CX expert.

AgencyQ is a full-service, award-winning digital transformation company. By focusing on the intersection of technology, strategy, and design thinking, AgencyQ delivers innovative digital experiences and technical applications that drive measurable impact. Contact us to learn how we can help transform your customer experience.