Relook at Customer Experience with New Lens
Customer Experience origin dates back to at least a couple of decades. The term itself has evolved over the period of time starting with primarily in-store, face to face interactions to building service delivery capabilities with access to phones and service agent 24x7. Over a period of time as Internet services picked up it flared the e-commerce industry allowing customers to choose from multiple providers and order from comfort of home. The emails, smartphones, social media, CRM systems pretty much led consumers to have access to multiple channel and landed to where we are today, highly digital, personalized and omni-channel experience.
James Baldwin quoted “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them”. This quite fits into the context of our blog “Relook at Customer Experience with new lens”.
Lot of us are still catching up to today’s advanced customer experience and still stuck with its history of delivering quality products, 24x7 customer support or efficient customer service. It is also fair to say that it is surely quite a task to hold on to every thread of this concept and that is mainly because every aspect of business, be it people, policy, process, product, every part is integrated into the concept.
Here are a few insights on how we need to change our lenses to understanding and interpreting Customer Experience.
Magic of Customer Experience (CX) lies in its wholesomeness and not an isolated initiative that runs in silos. Like we said interdependencies in our policies, people, products or processes cannot be ignored when we adopt CX for growth in our business. Consider a top down view and assess every component for its current state and what it may take to bring it to a desired state. As a CX enabled organization imagine your business structure where customer centricity is the focal point and entire organization leaning to this center.
Just focusing on the excellent product features may not be enough anymore for a brand to beat the competition. Delivering over and beyond and retaining customer, calls for an understanding of customer behavior and their emotional drivers. We will agree that most often the “make” or break” decisions in any relationship are triggered by an emotional impulse and consumer-brand relationship is no different. Customer Loyalty built on strong foundation of “Trust” is one of the key variables to know how our consumers are associating with our brand.
Consider technology and digital transformation as means to attain stellar customer experience and not a goal. There is no denying of the fact that technology is intrinsic part of our existence both personally and in business. As business leaders we must understand that any transformational success relies on how well we understand and manage the change. While we are excited about the new and sophisticated means of conducting our business with advanced concepts and technology we should also spend as much time and effort it may take to fully gauge its integration with existing systems and tools and the depth of impact it may have across the board
Budget restrictions or insufficient funds may not be the reason to completely reject CX transformation, however, organization’s lack of sincerity and commitment to the effort definitely is. Customer Experience is not a transactional effort rather a cultural shift. As we proceed on CX strategies and build a road map to change, Band-Aid approach is detrimental to its success. It is a shift that touches every aspect of an organization and hence one has to be patient with implementation and return on investment. It is absolutely possible to align organization objectives with Customer Experience outcomes within available resources by reallocating and/or reprioritizing.
Labeling current job titles with fancy and trending CX tags and glorified job descriptions rather than building a role or department that is aligned to organization vision and clear responsibilities and KPIs, will only lead to underperforming, confused and disengaged CX team. This builds an inevitable ripple effect of disengagement and negativity within the organization and ultimately customers. It is always advisable to outsource the work or invest in training and consulting the experts till we gain maturity in the process. The focus needs to be making significant difference and not just bring ornamental change for optics.
Expecting overnight changes and 100 percent customer satisfaction or Zero customer attrition is absolutely unreasonable even with a perfectly designed Customer Experience. There is no perfect world and the objective of Customer Experience is understanding and interpreting consumer behavior and defining strategies to keep them better engaged. CX teams or anyone for that matter is not capable of taking responsibility of human behavior and hence it is unrealistic to hold unattainable goals and set them up for failure. CX goals should also follow legacy SMART criterion and stay as real and aligned to company goals and outcomes.
Write to us to know more about Customer Experience, and how it can support your business success at contact @pinkguava.org