Each of us understands what it means to be disappointed by a poor customer experience or delighted by the employee who goes above and beyond. Given the potential upside, dumping money into the customer experience (CX) seems like a no-brainer. But is it, really? Can you engineer an excellent CX by throwing resources directly at the customer or by demanding that your employees deliver service with a smile?

Many businesses certainly seem to think so. The market for customer experience management services and technology is expected to grow to nearly $17 billion by 2022. Companies are spending lavishly on comprehensive CX strategies and building or buying high-tech systems in order to mine what they see as untapped veins of growth. And the data insists that this preoccupation with CX is justified.

However, the methods that many organizations are using to try and duplicate those glowing figures just aren’t delivering. Only 37 percent of businesses surveyed said they were able to tie CX activities to revenue and/or cost savings. That means the majority are, in effect, just spending a lot of money on CX — and keeping their fingers crossed.

When it comes to the customer experience, keep in mind a simple equation — EX = CX

The employee experience (EX) equals the customer experience (CX). A superlative customer experience is the direct result of a solid employee experience. Yet, many businesses jump right past this simple fact, opting to address the CX as if it were something they could conjure up solely as a result of products, process, placement, pricing and profit.

So, you want to take care of your customers? Start by taking care of your employees. Employees interact with your customers, make them smile and carry your brand message. If your employees are having a great experience, so will your customers.

What, then, do we need to keep in mind when we consider the EX = CX equation, and why is the EX side so important?

1. Your company is your people. People, not legal entities, get things done. Who makes the sales, does the hiring, takes care of the customer, buys the media, teaches the student, tends to the patient or takes out the trash? Does the company do that? We cling to the delusion that corporations take action, make decisions and even have personalities. But, that’s a distorted perspective. It’s the people.
2. Your employees are closest to the customer. They are closest to your customers’ needs, challenges and wants. They are best positioned to resolve a concern or to delight a customer. They are also in the best spot to feed this information back up the chain so that your products and services hit the mark.
3. EX = CX. Some organizations spend a fortune on elaborate customer service safety nets designed to keep employees from damaging the customer relationship. Why? Because their employees don’t care. They’re having a lousy experience, so they’re not motivated to provide anything more than that to the customer. Employees will deliver a customer experience that matches their own experience within the organization.
4. Employees are your brand. “Brand” is the Holy Grail of business; we’re always growing, maintaining, repairing, protecting or defending it. But your employees create it. Not your marketing department. Not PR. If your brand is your promise to your customer, then your employees are responsible for keeping that promise. Your employees are your brand. It lives through the performance, interactions and genuine care of the people who bring it to life on the front lines every day.
5. Design your EX. Many consider the employee experience in the same vein as company culture — it’s just “the way we do things around here.” But, instead of simply “letting the EX happen,” design the EX you want to create and that will impact your customers in the way most instrumental to your organization’s success. Instead of orienting all ideas around the customer or organization, focus on the employee, with the thought that if the organization has an extraordinary EX woven into its DNA, an extraordinary CX becomes inevitable.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE    CX       GLOBAL CX    EX=CX     EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

Consider the rise of customer success. Because 70 percent of consumers feel contacting customer service is a frustrating experience, few speak up until they’ve had a truly bad time. The trouble is, just one negative experience is all it takes to send more than half of consumers packing for a competitor. 

That’s why, instead of waiting for customers to call in, customer success managers monitor usage data like average session duration and login frequency. Although customers might hesitate to reach out about a page that won’t load, constant refreshing can signal that they’re struggling.

But customer success isn’t the only area where leaders need to pay attention. By sleuthing out signals in audience data, entrepreneurs can identify unmet needs, root out unwanted functionalities, and discover new ways to monetize existing products.

With almost any product, highly engaged users make up a small percentage of total users. Among those talking about the product, however, engaged users tend to dominate the conversation. As a result, companies often assume that what engaged users want is what the user base as a whole wants.

Shared some insights for every type of company to consider when it comes to improving CX.

• To the customer, it’s all one big team: Customers don’t care which department they talk to when they need help. They just want to get their questions answered and their problems resolved. A company may have different teams, but the customer doesn’t care. As mentioned above, the solution is to bring all interactions and data into one place. When technology doesn’t work together, neither can teams. When teams can’t work together, they can’t give a personalized customer experience. This frustrates both customers and employees.
• Create consistency in your processes to create consistency for the customer: When companies get big, they often have multiple teams with multiple processes. This can become painfully frustrating for customers who end up talking to different people in different departments. There could be conflicting information and explanations. That leads to confusion, and often a loss of confidence. Ultimately, that can lead to lost business.

The company may define its brand promise, but it is the customer who decides whether or not the company delivered on its promise. There’s a lot riding on delivering a positive customer experience. You hire and train good people, but you must also give them the tools they need to deliver a CX that not only meets the customers’ expectations but makes them want to come back. Be there for them – no matter how they reach out to you – be consistent, and build your brand through satisfied customers.

Consumers interact with brands across a multitude of touch points through the buyer’s journey. Every interaction makes an impact on your prospects that will set the stage for the relationship, making it crucial to ensure that every touch point comes with a positive experience, but above all, companies must monitor the big picture: the total experience customers have from end-to-end in doing business with your company.

In order to gain more meaningful insights into the results, we had respondents categorize themselves into one of four levels: ignore, novice, competent, and mature.

• 
  Ignore – These are companies that don’t view customer experience as a crucial differentiator. There are no efforts towards developing a CX strategy or measuring CX initiatives.
• Novice – These are companies that recognize the need to improve a customer’s experience. They’ve put basic steps in place to identify and measure CX-related issues, but don’t have a clear CX strategy in place.
• Competent – These companies make an effort to deliver a high-quality experience for their customers. They have a clear CX strategy with processes firmly in place to measure results.
• Mature – These are the cream of the customer experience crop. Their CX strategy is embedded in everything they do. Customer feedback forms the core of their strategy and decision-making, and they continuously iterate their CX practices to meet customer demand.

Only 12% of companies identify as being Mature CX companies, while 38% identify themselves as Young, 40% as First Steps, and 10% as ignore.

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CXREFRESH CX STRATEGIES CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE GLOBAL CX CUSTOMER SUCCESS

In the light of the fact that  customers are becoming more demanding and comparing different companies against each other when they base their decisions on where to purchase based on their experience. … A lot of companies want to make sure they do well on customer satisfaction by increasing the observed performance.

Some of the instant boosters for ensuring your organization’s focus on CX gets moving are:

• Figure Out What the Customer Really Want ?

“Figure out what the customer really wants, if you can solve the problem they will pay; the value is often not in the discount you can offer but rather in the solution you can provide.” which is fairly under the timelines what the customer would have thought it should take.

• Focus on Company Culture

The best of the companies put a genuine focus on developing and to implement culture. They implement training programs around their cultural values to ensure everyone shares the same values and that they are consistently demonstrated when dealing with customers.”

• Stay Current on Customer Reviews

In a world that is heavily dependent on the internet, consumers are quick to get online and share how they feel about a product or service.  Please ensure to  log onto the internet and observe what people are saying about your business or the product at above all the services. Find out what people enjoy, as well as what they’d like to see improved. The reviews you stumble across might surprise you and introduce you to areas of improvement that you had not previously considered.

• Offer Proactive Customer Service

“The key here is to contact your customers before they need to pick up the phone and contact you! To be effective, these contacts should be timely, personalized and relevant to the consumer.

The best proactive strategies  include getting in regular contact throughout the consumer lifecycle. Examples include: payment reminders, fraud monitoring, and personalized loyalty and reward schemes. This strategy can reduce inbound calls and improve agent efficiency. This proves that offering great customer service isn’t just good for the consumer, it’s good for the business as well.”

• Get a Social Media Plan in action

“Customers in this era are increasingly demanding speedy responses—sometimes as quickly as in real time—to their complaints and queries  on social media. Any company that isn’t paying attention can wreak havoc with its reputation.” Being active on social media would play a pivotal role.

• Benchmark Customer Satisfaction

“Benchmarking is the process of comparing your own organization or operations against other organizations in your industry or in the broader marketplace. You might compare your most successful competitor’s customer processes and satisfaction with your own. Or, you might look at a firm outside of your industry known for remarkable customer service practices. Establishing a benchmarking initiative is an important component of measuring and improving your customer service and satisfaction  and coming out as a winner.

• Set Clear Expectations and Exceed Them

“Nothing is more frustrating for a consumer than wandering around in a digital world unsure of what to expect from a business, or when. One should Let customers know up front what your standards and practices are. How long will they wait for a response or a callback? Will that response truly be on target and accurate? Removing the customers’ uncertainty about such often repeated issues in customer service lets them know that a company is committed to their success and satisfaction, especially when the business builds in enough leeway that it can routinely exceed expectations.”

• Ask for More Feedback

It is true that sometimes, it can be difficult to find ways to improve customer satisfaction. But there are always more customers who have valuable insights that they haven’t given to you. It’s up to you to go fishing, not for compliments, but for criticisms. In your survey, after asking customers how satisfied they are, you should provide a form where they can type out a response. You have a few different options here. It’s most common to ask customers to explain why they gave you the score that they did. You can pick more customers’ brains by phrasing your question/statement more clearly. For example, you could ask: “What could we have done differently to improve your experience?” By being upfront about what you’re asking, customers will provide you with more insightful responses.”

• Omnichannel Engagement Across All Touchpoints

A consistent experience across all touch points, from mobile to social media to video, is paramount to a good customer experience along the entire customer journey. It is not productive to focus on any one single area – the complete journey is the bigger picture that you have to understand. The Harvard Business Review may have said it best when they stated, simply, “More Touchpoints, More Complexity”, but they also note companies that are able to successfully manage the entire journey enjoy greater customer satisfaction, less churn, increased revenue, and higher levels of employee satisfaction ^[5]. There is also an enormous potential to gain valuable insights specific to each channel every time there is a customer interaction.

• Transparency

Social media ushered in an era of authenticity and transparency, and those rules apply more than ever. Customers expect fast service and an authentic explanation communicated in a genuine, personable tone. Companies that ignore this now widely-accepted principle risk damage to their reputation or negative word of mouth spreading like wildfire, which can mean losing out on a lot of business.

• The Customer is Always Right (Even if They Aren’t Really Right)

The old adage has some merit when it comes to the Customer Experience. That doesn’t mean customers should be humored even when they are on the wrong side. In fact, avoid that at all  since consumers have a knack for sniffing out a lack of authenticity. What it does mean, however, is that customers have to be heard when they go out of their way to project their voices across multiple channels, platforms and devices. So utilize modern technology to deliver an experience that will delight your customers and inspire them to talk about it if you want to grow and retain your customer base.

• Mapping Current Performance

Once a company has identified its key customer journeys, it must examine each one in detail in order to understand the causes of current performance. This deep dive involves additional research, including customer and employee focus groups and call monitoring. Combined with the initial analysis, it allows the company to map the most significant permutations of each journey as the customer experiences and would describe it, revealing the sequence of steps she is likely to take from start to finish. The mapping exercise also exposes departures from the ideal customer experience and their causes, and often reveals policy choices or company processes that unintentionally generate adverse results. For example, many companies charge for phone-based technical support, thinking that imposing a fee will steer customers to self-service options. But the consequence may be numerous callbacks or inadequate do-it-yourself fixes, both of which degrade the customer experience.

• Redesigning the Experience and Engaging the Front Line of your business

Once a company has identified its priority journeys and gained an understanding of the problems within them, leaders must avoid the temptation to helicopter in and dictate remedies; indeed, they should refrain from any solutions (including ones from outside experts) that don’t give employees a big hand in shaping the outcome. Even if a fix appears obvious from the outside, the root causes of poor customer experience always stem from the inside, often from cross-functional disconnects. Only by getting cross-functional teams together to see problems for themselves and design solutions as a group can companies hope to make fixes that stick.

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CXREFRESH CUSTOMEREXPERIENCE

Delight Customers

If you are trying to build a business that grows in the future, remember the only way is to delight your customers. More importantly it is to create delight with meaningfulness. If you don’t genuinely love your customers and want to solve an important problem, you will only burn money and feel that you have bought customers loyalty.

But money will not buy you loyalty, ever. This is why customer experience is more important than ever.

This is why we started CXREFRESH. It is the community of global CX leaders that are changing the way businesses are readying for growth in future.

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