It’s no great secret that companies with great customer experience are generally more successful and thanks to the increasingly prevalent digital technologies and savvy customers, customer experience is reaching new heights. Despite the fact many businesses are happy to accept the need to improve customer experience, it’s easy to get stuck in a long, drawn-out process of increments, gradually improving their customer experience. Needless to say, guaranteeing a good experience will require more than a handful of small fixes so why do companies so often stick to this mindset? And perhaps more importantly, what needs to be done instead? There are a number of simple misunderstandings that often get in the way of a revolutionary CX transformation.
Naturally, before you can think about outcomes you have to know what to look for to measure where your customer experience is standing now. Customer satisfaction surveys are an obvious port of call, and they can certainly provide some valuable insights, but that won’t be enough. Surveys are held back by the simple fact that it’s all in the past, and a company won’t manoeuvre at its most effective by only looking in the rear-view mirror. With a thorough understanding of the key customer journeys a business can go about defining core metrics, with these you can identify the issues along the customer journey and begin to proactively address sticking points for the customers experience.
One of the major traps for businesses is the habit of getting too focused on treating these specific pain points. Again, this seems like an obvious decision to make; if the customer journey is often hampered at a specific point, fix that point, if there are clear inefficiencies, eliminate them. Even though it’s most likely done with the best intentions, this is an unnecessarily drawn-out procedure that uses up valuable resources for marginal gain. Sometimes the solution is a lot scarier, start from the ground up, or rather the future backwards. By defining the future state of your desired customer experience with human-centred design principles and working backwards you get the opportunity to identify solutions that can truly revolutionise the customer journey and provide significantly longer-term change than the smaller individual fixes. It’s understandable that this might seem an intimidating approach, but through it businesses can treat the underlying causes of pain points rather than simply addressing the symptom after the fact.
A major roadblock is often the misunderstanding of the need. More simply put, why transform at all? It’s understandable that some of the benefits of a CX transformation may not be immediately obvious, but a strong customer experience is key to a successful business. Perhaps the most obvious is the benefit of customer loyalty. A customer with a good experience with a business is significantly more likely to engage that service again, in fact, an increase of retention by as little as 5% can increase profits by more than 25%. The conversation that might be generated from a customer who has recently had a positive experience could introduce others to the service, generating new customers and converting others. Finally, a customer who has a good relationship with a business is more likely to reach out with complaints directly, providing an opportunity to address the issue and reducing the chance of bad public relations.
Customer experience transformations aren’t necessarily an easy process, but there is rarely a time when they won’t be beneficial. It’s important, when going into the transformation process, to avoid getting caught up in the minute details of fixing individual problems but rather stepping back to assess what the root cause might be. Sometimes, CX doesn’t simply need a transformation but a revolution. It’s easy, and frankly not unusual, to feel overwhelmed with the process, to mitigate this it can be beneficial to find a partner to help navigate on this journey. Experts, like those here at Customer Science, by bringing with them their experience and their passion can be the difference between a costly and inefficient transformation and a revolutionary, high-value transformation.
If you’re interested in starting your transformation, or you have stalled and you’re just not sure what to tackle next, we’d love to give you a helping hand on your journey. You can read more about the services we offer to help people on their transformation journey, or please reach out to us – we love to bounce around ideas.