The secret of success is to do the common things uncommonly well. A secret? No, not really. Small things? Yes, certainly. Sometimes small actions or even inactions by a business can have the ability to improve customer service. And it is usually due to a lack of an explicit consumer experience strategy.
Related: 10 Laws of Customer Experience Design
Companies lose customers for a variety of reasons, some of which they never discover. Sometimes customers walk away after a single unpleasant experience.
Other times they’re frustrated by a series of small perceived problems. Is a lack of a customer experience strategy costing your company customers? Do you know the answer? It is not rocket science, is it? It is a key secret to your success, however.
Before we continue, let me ask you a question.
What works best for customer experience design in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? It would be greatly appreciated by our readers and us.
With the advent of the Internet, the number of marketing options available to both budding and experienced entrepreneurs has become staggering.
The truth is, it usually takes significantly more time and energy to find new customers than it does to lose them. So you can be sure a strategy to build a positive customer experience can pay off when done well. All the marketing in the world cannot make up the damage when it is done poorly or ignored.
Customers today interact with businesses in many different ways, leading to numerous touch points and tremendous opportunities for positively influencing their customer experience.
If one considers the hundreds of interactions each client has throughout his/her life cycle with a company, how do you define a client experience to focus their limited resources? Here are some priorities to consider:
Set Customer Segment Targets
Always start by asking: For which segments? Although this may sound obvious, when striving to improve customer experience, it is critical to define the segments in the marketplace that you want your business to focus on.
Map the Consumer Experience Steps
Define the steps of the consumer journey. Remember to think of the entire trip, not just the steps your company is involved in. For example, for the home movie entertainment businesses, these steps would be: define the occasion, select a title, get, watch, and return the film. Mapping these steps for each of your priority segments is important.
Also necessary for each step of the journey is to understand the time spent, the activities performed, the criteria used to make a decision and move to the next phase of the journey. And finally defining how to make each step as short and easy as possible.
Understand Influencers
Define the categories of influencers at each step of the journey. Touchpoints are opportunities to intersect with and influence the customer experience. In the home entertainment example, the influencers would be self, retailers, external resources, friends, family members, and movie studios.
Remember that the activities performed by a consumer fit at the intersection of an influencer with each step of the journey. For example, a customer may go to Netflix and view recommendations and retailers would be the influencer.
In this example, providing online recommendations that are trusted would be the touch-point. For each priority segment, understanding the relative importance of various influencers by steps of the consumer journey is the key to success.
Customer service tips … experiment with collaboration
An efficient way of ensuring that experiences meet customers’ needs is to bring customers and frontline employees into the design process through collaboration. And yes, in our opinion many customers would welcome this approach.
When they are face-to-face with a design team, customers can provide valuable input, including firsthand accounts of what they want seeds of ideas to build upon, and feedback for real-time prototyping.
In a single-day workshop, the Fidelity Charitable team gave employees just one hour to create pen-and-paper prototypes for ideas that they thought would fill a particular donor need. Customers then joined the group for a mocked-up fundraising cocktail party that enabled them to test out the prototypes in a realistic setting.
Through this process, the Fidelity Charitable team got multiple rounds of feedback that focused its work on the most valuable solutions. Intuit has likewise embraced a hybrid of design thinking and “lean startup” to do rapid experimentation and prototyping across the organization
Types of customer service … align customer-facing employees
The quality of customer experience depends on a complex interdependent set of employees, partners, processes, policies, and technology. Firms like USAA, Apple, Zappos, and Starwood Hotels are companies that do an excellent job of orchestrating across their enterprise.
USAA has identified approximately 100 important experiences associated with customer business engagements like buying a car or preparing to deploy abroad, all of which have owners and cross-functional teams responsible for detailed customer processes.
For one of those car buying experiences, the company manages auto dealership relationships on behalf of clients, understanding that customer hesitation haggling with dealers for pricing slows its ability to provide loans and sell insurance.
