Does your business strive to satisfy customers? Our agency often runs customer experience design workshops and this question is a key thought exercise in the workshop. Most companies strive to satisfy their customers. That’s why they run customer satisfaction surveys to see if they are succeeding.

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

–Maya Angelou

But is customer satisfaction a worthy goal? I believe satisfaction is the bare minimum of what a customer should get in their experience.

The Four-Step Customer Experience Framework:

1. Define Priority Segments
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.

2. Map the Consumer Journey
Define the steps of the consumer journey. Remember to think of the entire journey, not just the steps your company is involved in. For example, home entertainment (i.e. watching a movie at home) these steps would be: notice the need, define the occasion, choose a title, get, watch, and reflect on the experience. It’s important to map these steps for each of your priority segments. Also important 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 step of the journey, and the consumer’s perceptions of how the activities rated on the criteria.

3. 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, in the notice the need stage, a consumer may go to Netflix and view recommendations which would be an activity at the intersection of notice the need, 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.

4. Activate Ideation
Now for the most critical touchpoints you could generate ideas for improvement. In the example above, an activation idea could be to develop a studio agnostic website that incents consumers to state their preferences, tracks their viewership, and accordingly makes highly relevant recommendations for what to watch next.

 “WOW” Customer Experiences

Keeping your best customers happy and making them your advocates is a top priority for any business. Your service and the experiences customers derive from your superior service are critical in this regard.

Consider these eight ways to create ‘WOW’ customer experiences:

Understand what these customers value most … align your products and services to these needs

Respect the value of customers  time … save them time and convenience whenever you can

Make commitments and deliver on these commitments. Exceed and do the unexpected whenever possible

Be flexible and easy to work with … minimize rules for the business and your staff

Get all of your staff engaged … solicit their ideas and encourage initiative

Set and communicate your service standards … measure and publish your performance both to your staff and your customers

Actively solicit feedback and make it easy for your customers to provide inputs. Learn from these inputs and make changes where necessary

Pay special attention when errors are made … go out of your way to make things right .Turn negatives into satisfying encounters. 

Improvements in cex

Do you and your staff:

1. Focus on a good first impression?
2. Engage customers on a social level … get to know them personally?
3. Use product and service knowledge to help customers make choices? You can never have enough information on your products and services.
4. Pay attention to the smallest of details?
5. Empower everyone to over-achieve on problem recovery.
6. Continually add new product and service features and improvements?
7. Use speed and convenience as important customer priorities?
8. Focus on visual effects and signage to create the end state vision customers want.

Customer Experience Basics …

1. Being remembered beyond the name. When customers’ preferences are recalled in real time … there is a sense of belonging.

• Easy to do business with. The definition of easy varies by customer base including generations, occupational focus, educational background. Everything online may seem easy to one generation and maddening to another. Nonetheless, easy will always be at the top of the list.

• Flexibility! When company procedures can flex and bend to the customers’ needs, customers experience the ultimate in care. Why? Because it fits them, their lives, and their businesses. It’s obstacle free.

• Prevent disasters. Customers are glad when you don’t have problems in delivering service. They are elated when your knowledge, experience, and foresight, prevent disasters in their business or life.
• Deliver welcome surprises. In everyday life, customers rely on themselves. When they must reach out, they wonder what will happen. When the happening is beyond their expectations, the experience shines.

• Memorable in uncommon ways. Quick story: I go for a yearly mammogram. I ask for the same technician each time because her interpersonal skills and sense of humor turn a stressful dreaded ritual into a memorable experience. She makes a difference. I could go to a center closer to my house yet I might end up with Rhonda the compression robot. I’ll pass on that thanks.

Do you know what your customers think? Would you get the same answers from all your teams? From the customers?