The CX space has seen significant movement over the last few years – between multibillion-dollar acquisitions, advancement in AI, and continuously evolving core software, the industry is experiencing a renaissance.

Yet despite these technological advancements, it appears that many of those charged with leading these initiatives are too focused on polished, buzzword–laden tools, and are in turn losing focus of why these programs exist in the first place – to enhance the customer experience.

What do customers really want?

Customers want their interactions with your company to be as easy and friction less as possible.

They want to talk to empowered brand representatives who have the answers they’re looking for and the ability to solve problems quickly and efficiently the first time they call. They want your physical space to be welcoming with employees that are easy to find and identify.

Above all, customers want to feel empathy towards their buying experience. Using chat bots and employing staff without the authority or knowledge to solve problems, while scalable, is also the quickest away to erode customer loyalty.

Why are we measuring engagement but not resolution?

Almost every business has some sort of customer experience management (CEM) program. The majority are measuring transactions by using metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or CSAT.

However, these data points don’t always expose easy-to-action insights. If you want to marry CX feedback data with actionable insights, you’ll need to measure:

• What are you customers asking and how frequently?
• Are your customers getting the answers they need?
• When are your customers escalating issues or moving to another channel?
• Are your employees empathetic to customer challenges?

Uncovering the answers to these questions will lead your organization to improvement areas where specific and measurable actions can be taken.

Customer service (CS) is critical for delivering a great customer experience (CX). All too often, these terms are used interchangeably, but they are not synonymous—CS is not the same as CX.

Customer service is part of the overall customer experience, not the entire customer experience. It is vital to understand the difference between CX and CS as you implement Voice of the Customer (VoC).

What is Customer Service?

Customer service is probably a more familiar term — it’s also the more narrowly scoped of the two.

Customer service is the assistance and advice provided to a customer for your product or service as needed.

Customer service requires your customer-facing team to possess a particular set of skills, including patience, product knowledge, and tenacity, so they can provide the answers and assistance a customer needs. It’s the human element in the customer journey and the voice your customer will recognize as representative of your organization.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience, or CX, refers to the broader customer journey across the organization and includes every interaction between the customer and the business.

CX involves all the ways your business interacts with a customer, including and outside of traditional direct, customer-facing service. CX captures how the customer uses your product or service, their interactions with self-service support options, the feeling of walking into your retail store, customer service interactions with the team, and more.

Customer experience includes three main components:

1. Customer Service: This includes Customer Support, Customer Success, and self-service support — the points at which your customer interacts with your team.
2. Technology: This is the product itself — how it works and the interactivity points.
3. Design: This is the brand touchpoint — the marketing, the design, and the feelings your brand creates for your customer.

While those three areas are quite distinct, there are no hard lines between them. All of the pieces combine and work together to make up the customer experience.

Customer Service[CS] Vs. Customer Experience[CX]

The key difference between customer service and customer experience is that customer experience involves the whole customer journey, including customer service.

Customer service is limited to the interactions a customer has when seeking advice or assistance on a product or service. Understanding the customer experience, on the other hand, can involve analyzing data from non-customer-facing teams who contribute to a customer’s overall experience with a product or service.

Customer service and customer experience are both important pieces to an organization’s success, yet it’s not possible (or necessary) to draw hard lines between them. The line between how customers use a product and how they interact with the people supporting it are more blurred than ever. Customers consider the whole picture when thinking about your offerings, and you should, too.

CX is holistic and covers a wide number of touchpoints. Some of them are CS oriented, some are not. A complete VoC program includes all touchpoints, including those that are product or digitally oriented.

Zomato has been at the helm of things in the past few days and by far became the most talked about Food app in India because of few interesting and thought provoking ads and incidents. CX was the central point in both the incidents. Just to refresh memories, Few months back a video went viral where  a delivery guy from Zomato eating food meant for delivery went viral which prompted a strong thought among the customers whether to trust and order food from such companies.

The customer experience was in question where this incident was considered as a breach in the company’s delivery strategies.

The company off course took massive corrective actions and went on a fierce damage control campaign to ensure that the customer trust was regained and Customer experience was perfectly delivered.

Moving on with the incidents, the latest incident where a customer refused to take the delivery of the food from a delivery boy owing to his religion. Considering the customer experience focused of the organization, the company including the CEO immediately swung into action by tweeting promptly that “Food doesn’t have a religion. It is a religion”. A statement which found them in the middle of a lot of positive and negative reviews .  Infact the company refused for the refund.

Their CEO Deepinder Goyal even went further to quote that “We are proud of the idea of India – and the diversity of our esteemed customers and partners. We aren’t sorry to lose any business that comes in the way of our values.”

A bold statement issued by a leading foodtech unicorn whose roots are firmly entrenched in India catering to  the people of all diversities and religions. Such was the impact of this that even Uber Eats a rival of this unicorn supported them.

While soon after its tweet, there was a positive response on Twitter, with users supporting the “secularist” stand, the negative comments took over soon. Since then over 100K tweets have tweeted against Zomato through the #BoycottZomato and #ZomatoUninstalled.

In a world where brands are specifically told to avoid intentionally hurting religious sentiments or even commenting on such matters, Zomato’ s stance is definitely uncommon, but even though its heart may be in the right place, the ensuing backlash on Twitter might just come back to bite it at a later stage.

A heart winning advertisement was placed which was very cute but a very thought provoking one.  The caption read : “A well settled smart and loving brand looking for those who can’t cook. The statement straight away stuck the right chord with the customers as there a millions who cannot cook.  It explains the superb level of customer focused of the organization immensely”.

What is important to note here is the fact that the customer experience cannot be compromised and by far the most powerful tool for any organization to flourish and stand out from the competition.

The ethics, the values and mode of operations can always differ. The most critical element is placing the customer at the center while building your product or product strategies and ensuring the deliverance of a perfect CX.

We strongly believe that Zomato has undoubtedly come out as a perfect winner in terms of offering unique values to the customers and so has been it’s superlative CX quotient.

Today, businesses across the board-from agile e-commerce companies to those in the traditional manufacturing industry are realizing the importance of delivering a memorable customer experience. This can be evidenced by the way companies have been increasingly using their social media accounts to respond to customer requests for product prices and even address customer queries and disputes. When there are millions of things requesting your attention all at the same time millions of songs, millions of films, millions of books, millions of platforms to buy products from-delivering an experience that will help you stand out and be found is non-negotiable.

So how do you define and measure something as intangible as customer experience? It isn’t easy because it’s subjective and depends entirely on something as unpredictable and random as human behaviour. But as long as you’re asking the right questions about your customer experience strategy, you’re moving in the right direction:

1. Ease of access- Is your target customer easily able to access your product? How soon can your product be delivered to him/her?
2. Personalisation-Are you offering an experience that is tailor-made to your customer’s needs and preferences?
3. Guidance-Are you educating your customer to make the right choices and offering them continuous support along the way?
4. Quick dispute resolution-A customer has had an unpleasant experience on your site or with your customer service. How soon can you address this and ensure that he/she returns to your site in the future?

Needless to say, the best way to win a returning customer is to offer them a differentiated experience that goes beyond the transaction. Emails and calls with sales pitches that push your products will definitely turn them off. Instead, educate them about your products and services and present them with information that leaves the choice open to them. Placing power back in the hands of your customer will earn you their loyalty and trust and that counts much more in the long run.

Consistency in Delivery

There’s no reason to think that delivering an extraordinary customer experience is seemingly impossible. Technology has acted as a great enabler for consistently raising the bar for customer experience. Constantly improving your website and mobile user-experience in order to make them more customer-friendly and responsive plays a crucial role in defining a great customer experience and thanks to technology, all this is possible with quick fixes today.

Consistently delivering a positive customer experience can yield dividends for the long run. Returning customers are much less likely to drop off and are likely to convert better. You may call it the pitfall of the ‘attention economy’ but customers are no longer as brand loyal as they used to be. A 2013 study by Dimensional Research revealed that 59per cent of customers said they’d leave for good after having a bad experience. More than half said they’d go to a direct competitor. So no matter how many crores you spend on TV and newspaper ads, strong word-of-mouth is more likely to act as a better endorsement of your product and perhaps, even rake in more customers.

Delivering a positive customer experience should not be the KRA of your customer service team alone. It should be at the forefront of your thinking in all spheres of your business. The best way to get a sense of what your customer needs is to have your ears to the ground i.e. listen to your customers and map the journey on your website/mobile app from their point of view. Think of ways you can improve the user journey by way of refinements in content and design if the customer is encountering hurdles during the user journey.

Staying in sync with the ever-changing needs and preferences of customers may seem like an endless process, but if you’re in it for the long run, constantly evolving your business to offer a more personalized and positive customer experience will help your business to sustain and scale. With tumultuous changes like digitisation that have marked the financial landscape in the last couple of years aided by changes in the regulatory framework, delivering an unparalleled customer experience is now more important than ever. Putting your customers first in every business decision will go a long way in building not just your customer base but also brand loyalty.

Customer Experience    CXREFRESH    CX   Brand Loyalty   Customer Service   Customer Experience Strategy

While there is data showing how some industries, like airlines, continue to increase profits while continuing to disappoint customers with surly staff members (who aren’t necessarily being treated well themselves), the “secret” to any great customer experience is the people who deliver it.

Profits go up in those industries because there is not enough competition or disruption.

Make no mistake. When the challenger comes along, it does take market share from the companies who don’t get it. Southwest Airlines, Zappos and Amazon were all the disruptors of their day, and they all focused on delivering exceptional customer service. Companies that figure out how to hire the right people win.

But it starts earlier.

Know what your mission is.

It’s easy to say “we hire the right employees” but how can you measure it? How do you know you’re hiring right if you don’t know truly what you’re hiring for? If a great customer experience is your goal, then you better have a customer experience mission. If a candidate says they can deliver on skills but falls short on mission, then it’s time to find another candidate.

If people understand what they should do, great. If people understand why they should do it, better.

Scale to fit.

As organizations grow, the mission and hiring to it becomes even more critical.

Google often comes under fire for taking actions not representative of their well-known corporate motto of “Don’t be evil.” As Google grew and grew, they took this motto to be a mission of sorts, even including it in their founder’s letter for their IPO.

The company has changed course after criticism of actions not fitting this motto, including blocking search results in China. Really this is about taking action based on who they are, not necessarily what they do. The leaders know this is a long-term strategy and they might miss out on short-term gains. Getting the right people involved who can innovate and support these ideals trumps hiring based on resume credentials.

When China’s government attempted to block Google results for politically sensitive topics, Google China redirected users to Google’s Hong Kong results. China recently blocked Google completely and appears to be shutting down the service for millions of users. The way Google attempted to release free information is about the users, not the government, and their motto stays true to that.

There are so many tricky situations we simply can’t anticipate when we develop interview questions or write training manuals. Finding who you are and the people who live those ideals is the best way to truly deliver on a superior customer experience.

Customer Experience   CXREFRESH   CX      CX Strategy          Global CX      Southwest Airlines