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Customer experience
Customer Experience (also known as CX) is not just one of the most important distinguishers of a brand, it is also an area that builds sustainable competitive advantage.
That is why it is so important that it should build business, and not just be make-up used at particular points to cover up ineffective processes.
- What does “Customer Experience” really mean?
- How to design customer experience?
- Designing Customer Experience Step by Step
What does “Customer Experience” really mean?
If the idea of CX were to be described using quotations, the two most important ones would be by Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, and Sam Walton, founder of Walmart:
Design is a funny word. Some people think that design means how it looks. But of course if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.
There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down by spending his money somewhere else.
Customer experience is the sum of all the customer’s interactions with the company at all touchpoints during the customer journey, from the moment of realizing there is a product / brand / service until ceasing to use the company’s products / services.
It is a fallacy to assume that taking care of customer experience is principally a matter of aesthetics, and what the physical stores and websites look like. Improving CX does not mean getting a new logo or a new layout for your website, introducing a new design for the store’s floor space, or even providing employees with tablets to make the experience more digital or perhaps even in the spirit of omnichannel. Nor does improving customer experience mean hiring friendlier employees who, thanks to the data, are able to provide a more personalized experience. These are just the blocks from which you can start building better CX.
How to design customer experience?
Customer needs change rapidly. With easy access to information – and some that companies do not always have control over – customer awareness of available services and products is now greater than ever. To ensure revenue growth, brands must keep up with customer needs and put them at the centre of their activities.
By stepping into the customer’s shoes, companies can look at their business, employees and processes from the most important perspective. Unfortunately, working everyday with a product or system that you know inside out numbs your senses, so you need a methodical approach to protect the organization from the failure to notice key problems, and against cognitive errors.
Designing Customer Experience Step by Step
Identify all customer data sources that your company already has. Data is usually plentiful and also provides additional information about the customer and his experiences. These can be the results of surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, reports from the customer service office, social media sentiment analysis, UX audit results, customer segmentation, financial reports, information on the loyalty program, etc. If you are able to manage this data and amalgamate it where possible – all the better. Thanks to tools such as the Customer Data Platform, your organization can acquire valuable insights and optimize customer experience on an ongoing basis.
Build a project team. It is important that the team includes representatives from each department, each organizational unit – preferably people who have direct contact with the customer and those whose work has an indirect impact on what the customer comes into contact with – including the accounting department, or the warehouse.
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. This should be done by every person who is part of the project team – look at the entire path taken by the customer, from start to finish. You can be sure that it will provide you with many interesting insights and it will definitely allow you to identify quick wins – activities that require little effort and makes things much easier for the customer.
Decide which customer segment (or persona) you want to cover based on the data. It is impossible to satisfy all customers at the same time, so it is worth focusing on those that are, for example, the most valuable for your business, and deal with the other groups later.
Identify all channels and points of contact between the customer and the company and establish the steps through which the customer moves from point to point.
Define the emotions that accompany your customers at each point of contact – love points and pain points will allow you to create a heatmap. At this point, it may be necessary to ask for help from the customers, i.e. conduct quantitative and qualitative research. Small steps such as a few telephone interviews, a simple survey or talking to people who made purchases on the store’s website for the first time will provide a valuable perspective. The work will help you identify moments of matter (important moments on which to focus – both positive and negative).
Identify activities that affect customer loyalty. If you can, use statistical techniques such as factor analysis and correlation analysis.
Define the pain points. Based on the loyalty analysis, decide which pain points need improvement and which love points can be further improved. Consider whether there are any points lacking on the customer path that could have a positive impact on your business. There will always be pain points, but designing means we can minimize their impact by designing experiences that provoke positive emotions.
Set your priorities. Take into account indicators such as revenue growth, cost reduction, upselling and cross-selling opportunities, customer and employee satisfaction rates, and retention levels in relation to the cost, duration and complexity of the change.
Group the priority actions into areas. This can be done from the perspective of customer expectations, for example, “Make it easy for me”, “Let it work”, “Involve me”, “Surprise me”. This will allow you to optimize your work or to put together several teams responsible for specific topics.
Establish a schedule for implementing the optimization measures. Even the best ideas will not improve customer experience if you do not have an action plan.
Establish success criteria and KPIs. The implementation of changes should be monitored – as with any tests affecting your e-commerce, you must be able to say what works and how it works. In addition to customer satisfaction, always monitor indicators related to sales and the level of returns.
Communicate an action plan to the organization and provide management support for this initiative.
Implement, measure, optimize and communicate the effects within the organization. Take care of change management, because improving customer experience will certainly require changes in various processes or the employees acquiring new skills.
Observe how the customer becomes the heart of your organization and your employees become their best advocates.
Return on Experience, or knowing what to invest in?
When designing customer experience, the key moment is making a decision – what should we change not only to please our customers, but also to have an impact on our business’s key indicators.
ROX is a new performance management metric that takes into account CX (customer experience) and EX (employee experience) and combines “soft” investments in organizational culture with “hard” investments in technology and analytics.
However, it is not a simple and universal indicator, nor is it a generic scorecard ready for use in your organization. It should be designed for each organization separately, taking into account its specific character, its level of maturity with regard to customer-centricity and the set business goals. ROX takes advantage of the interdependencies between existing systems and highlights the connection between many specific metrics across the company that all contribute to the bigger ROX picture.
Due to ROX’s broader view (internal, external and cross-business), it can provide powerful information about the experiences companies should focus on and which key activities can best improve customer experience and value.
- ROI
- ROX
ROI
ROI is measured across media channels in terms of eyeballs, impressions and reach
It consist of all passive measures of engagement
It improves to be a solid measure for ads, but fails in assessing the impact of physical experiences
It has a simple and easy to understand equation
ROX
ROX measures and captures the entire sort- and long-term impact experiences have on consumers
These are less passive
It uses combination of digital and analog tracking methods to measure
It is quite complex but a more reliable and competitive tool
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