Game Changing Strategies From Customer Experience Experts On This CX Day

It’s delightful that our CX community has a day to celebrate. Every year on the 4th of October, we celebrate CX day with a unique theme.

“CX Drives Success!”

We know CX indeed drives success, and this is the theme of this year’s CX day. And this theme pivots on how a customer experience strategy can fuel business growth and success by empowering customers, employees, and the whole organization’s efficiency.

There are other teams and departments that are directly or indirectly associated with CX initiatives. Some are well versed in customer experience knowledge and have a great ideology. But, some don’t.

So, on this CX day, 2022, let us celebrate by sharing 10 fundamental customer experience lessons and their importance in business growth. Let’s go over the top 10 CX expert opinions from various industries that are abstracted from Clootrack’s 102 CX study.

1. Understand the Exact Customer Needs

You should be like a designer here, hear all your customer requirements and build that product exactly how your customer wants and perfectly fits into their requirements.

Instead of thinking about how a product should be to you and your company, learn from them by listening to their voice, texts, CRM tickets, reviews/feedback, etc. Alter the products/services as per the customer requirements you learned from their feedback, implement it and acknowledge them that you did it for them, as they like. Moreover, make an extra effort voluntarily to exceed the customers’ expectations. This will take their experience one step forward.

Dan Gingiss, Chief Experience Officer, The Experience Maker, LLC, said, “I would suggest establishing a Voice of Customer (VoC) program; one that is a virtuous cycle of listening, learning, acting, and acknowledging customer feedback. By consolidating the feedback and analyzing it for common themes and trends and pinpointing the deeper root cause, they’ll enable a more intentionally designed solution that serves the broader customer population’s needs, instead of the needs of only a few. And by consistently communicating with their customer base and acknowledging the feedback received and improvements delivered, they’ll build greater trust. With greater trust, customers will be more willing to continue providing valuable feedback that will continue to strengthen the products and solutions offered. It’s a win-win for everyone!”

2. Importance of Customer Insights

Jorge Calvachi, Director of Insights at La-Z-Boy Incorporated, stated that “Everything about your customer experiences starts with a good foundation of insights. Hire somebody to do segmentation and figure out how the brand fits in within a persona and into a customer journey map. We need to have a lot of empathy for the customer. Not everybody is close to the customer. The consumer insights need to create that empathy. We can do storytelling and analyze personas to develop empathy”

Developing empathy towards customers is necessary. But we don’t need to put effort and time into all customer segments and aspects of customer experience. Realizing your target customers, what they like and dislike, what factors drive positive and negative experiences, and what needs improvements and what needs to be eliminated on the products with a deep analysis of customer insights will be effective.

If it’s too tedious for you to go through millions of customer feedback to capture insights, consider third-party customer insights tools. It will help you save time and deliver more precise insights.

3. Develop a Customer-First Culture

Different departments deal with different functionalities and operations. Employees often focus only on yielding results in their assigned areas instead of aligning their activities with the customer-first goal. This happens especially in the departments where the CX functionalities are not directly connected.

Developing a customer-first culture will help to get better results because all functionalities in a firm will produce output with a single goal: offering what customers want. If members from other departments know how their contributions will lead to customer success, everyone will be on the same track together to work towards the goal.

“The internal organization needs to orchestrate around the customer— strategically, creatively, technologically, and operationally. Bringing different teams, processes, tools, and information to deliver a memorable brand experience is a constant, evolving goal. The customer’s needs and desires should be the unifier to help guide CX decisions, but making that really is quite complicated.”, said Jared E. Fink, Group Director, Experience, Siegel+Gale.

4. Remove the Silos

Jim Sterne, President at Target Marketing of Santa Barbara, said that “Understanding who your customer is and what your customer wants is a moving target. If companies are divided by functionality silos, then the customer experience will be crazy. Many brands do not really listen to customers due to lack of vision, politics, too many customers, and lack of resources.”

Departments working in closed silos will hamper delivering a unified customer experience, and the experience will feel fragmented to customers. To break down silos, ensure that the data flows back and forth from departments to take the proper steps in customer experience initiatives. For example, a product developer should know what complaints about the products are raised by customers frequently to the customer support team.

5. Executive Commitment

Suppose your top management only talks about sales and ROI and does not at all mention anything about customers, their experience, and their perception. In that case, your business will eventually end up in trouble.

The c-suite should understand the importance of customer experience and take over the responsibility for aligning customer-first culture across all departments. For long-term improvements in sales and ROI, a brand must work on customer experience as one of its priority functionalities.

Annette Franz, Founder, and CEO of CX Journey Inc. stated that “The biggest challenge still today when it comes to the customer experience is executive commitment and alignment. There are still too many executives who live the old management mantra (maximize shareholder value) first without realizing that’s an outcome and to achieve that outcome, you have to focus on the reason you’re in business: your customers. Beyond that, once they have that commitment, they often focus on metrics rather than on customers. They do what it takes to move the needle on whatever metric they’re tracking rather than doing what it takes to understand customers and to improve the experience.”

6. Measure your CX Initiatives

“Most programs measure the customer experience through surveys, and increased survey scores is their goal. Change Makers measure the journey through data. They look for a successful conclusion to the journey, measuring in financial terms, and then follow the data to see what caused the strong or ineffective outcome. They also use surveys, but the surveys are diagnostic.” - Jim Tincher, Founder, CEO & Journey Mapper-In-Chief of Heart of the Customer, LLC.

Measurement and assessment are vital for any initiative to examine whether an initiative has got the expected results; if not, leaders need to check what went wrong and what could be the reasons. This will lead to continuous improvement on the CX initiatives until they can produce the expected results. Using the right CX metrics is essential here.

As Jim Tincher mentioned, organizations should not only depend on surveys like NPS or CSAT as the metrics; they should be considered as the diagnostic tools that can indicate the current status of customer experience. Leaders should use multiple surveys and measuring tools as CX metrics to measure performance and figure out the root cause of problems.

7. The Power of Personalization

Each human is unique, and so are the customers. Each one has unique tastes and preferences, and one feature will be positive for one customer; at the same time, its absence will enhance another customer's experience. So satisfying all customers with one global experience won’t work. Segmenting customers into different groups and offering curated experiences for each segment will work.

Customers will return to a brand if they get what they want. So put more time into offering personalized experiences, or your rivals will deliver it to your customers.

Michele Steele, Creative Experience Advisor at Reaction pointed that, “Every person has unique needs and wants. It’s tough to scale to full personalization for all facets of your business. It’s also hard to measure the squishy stuff and story tell the impact you’re having to the c-suite and board because it’s about loyalty and how people feel. It’s not also easy to hear the real story on how their business is performing from the customers’ eyes and adjust company priorities accordingly.”

8. Map Customers’ Journey

Daniel Lafrenière, Multichannel Customer Experience Strategist at Daniel Lafrenière, said, “Identify the moments of truth, those do-or-die moments. Businesses must have a 360-degree view of all the customer interactions on ALL channels (face to face, phone, web, mobile, SMS, chatbot, etc.). To do so, they must draw customer journey maps to see the channel(s) used on a specific touchpoint and make sure that the transition from one channel to another (e.g., from the web to the phone) is seamless. Businesses must then analyze each touchpoint, gather data, and design human/digital/material/procedural solutions.”

There are multiple touchpoints where customers connect with a brand. You need to make sure customers do not encounter any pain points, and there is not any single friction in their experience. To figure out the pain points at the earliest, it is ideal for executives to walk in customers’ shoes and experience the customer journey as a customer. This will help bring out the customer issues and resolve them even before customers encounter them.

9. Employee Experience Matters

Only motivated, enthusiastic, well-paid, and treated employees can be productive and enthusiastic about delivering an experience that will impress customers, especially the front liners who deal with customers in person. To encourage employees to work towards customer experience goals and treat customers that exceed expectations, the top management should offer a positive employee experience and employee-friendly work culture internally.

Jane Treadwell-Hoye, Founder & Chief Experience Officer at Necto said, “The main challenges in delivering any lasting customer impact is ensuring that the very people who deliver those experiences, even in a digital first world, your employees are fully aware of the designed brand and customer experiences you are trying to deliver. If your teams understand the oganisation’s ‘why’; how each of them, regardless of role, aligns to the experience delivered to customers you are already ahead of many of your competitors. CX is not something that is owned by only the CX or Marketing teams. It is something that everyone in the business need to own and embrace.”

10. Be Consistent in CX Initiatives

“One of the biggest challenges companies face when trying to improve Customer Experience is not getting the basics right. There is no point designing an all-singing, all-dancing, mega-experience when your basic journeys are broken. Sometimes it's not about delivering the 'best' but delivering 'good' consistently.”, said James Dodkins, CS Ambassador at Pegasystems.

If you work hard to offer an experience and your customers are well impressed, you should keep doing that and make improvements over time. It should not be like a one-time practice and should not stop when you get the desired result. For the long term success of your brand, consistently offer delightful customer experiences and stick to the customer-first culture.

So, I hope this CX Day will be a delightful start to learning more and more about customer experience and let your colleagues from other departments know they are contributing a lot to customer experience.

Check out our complete 102 CX Study report to explore more advanced customer experience aspects.

Happy CX Day!!!

Game Changing Strategies From Customer Experience Experts On This CX Day

Do you know what your customers really want?

Clootrack