Customer experience (CX) programs are an indispensable part of the feedback loop of any organisation. They involve a systematic approach towards methods and techniques to discover, manage and improve areas where customer interacts with a business. It is important to understand here that surveys and feedback alone are not methods of discovering customer experience. A CX program is more than a mere tool to gather data and feedback. It is the link between organisation and customer that helps organizations understand the difference between expectation and reality of their business as observed by their customer. CX programs help in creating an overall level of satisfaction and enhancing the perceived value and loyalty towards a business, in customer’s mind.
Building a Customer Experience Program
1. Why build a customer experience program?
All industries, whether business to business or business to consumer, need a CX program. Your business needs a fully automated and effective CX program that collects data without any manual intervention and then, analyses data to produce correct patterns an insights, that help accelerating the success of your business firm.Customer experience program integrates operations, services, support, marketing, research etc all under the singular roof of customer experience and satisfying customer needs.Viewing all departments collectively as a reflection of good customer experience is highly essential because the business thrives on the customer.Building a CX program will help you in following cases:
- Your organisation has a single survey and wants more.
- You need to understand what drives your customers to purchase.
- You need to find how much money your customers take to your competitors.
- You want in your organisation the provision of a more specific front line employee feedback to improve customer experience.
A CX program will help you increase your revenue and customer lifetime value at the same time.Mid-sized and larger businesses essentially need a CX program to understand the requirements of their diverse customer base.
2. Essential ingredients of an effective CX program
- Sound Business Objective: All CX programs must have a strategic plan and a purpose.Without a tangible and achievable objective, it is impossible to implement a program that helps improve customer experience.
- External and Internal Branding: Keep in mind to give your program a brand name that is positive and fun.Create buzz among the organisation by having a good launch and regular communication among the employees regarding your program.Keep your program on top of everyone’s mind.Make it a priority in the business policy.
- Effective Surveys and Operation Data: All CX programs need reliable and solid customer information to perform effective analysis for improvement.Systems such as Customer Relationship management (CRM), operations system, financial systems etc also provide customer data.
- Reliable customer insight: The goal of collecting all that customer information through surveys, feedbacks etc is to understand behavior patterns that drive customer buying your product.This insight is essential to effect any change within the system.
- Empowering the employees: Share fast the collected data and information regarding analysis, among employees to ascertain that the insights apply to them.People who use the program to effect a change are the ones who decide the speed and applicability of the program. Hence, it is essential to make the program available to right people at the right time.
- Profit oriented approach: All effective CX programs make clear financial linkages between program and its profit building possibilities.Make clear the impact of the program on the revenue and other important outcomes.
3. How to build an effective customer experience program
After considering the above indisputable benefits of a CX program, many organisation want to achieve them by building one, but they don’t always know how to get there.Here are five simple steps that help business build CX programs to provide superior customer experiences:
Step 1- Analyze current scenario and establish a paradigm
The first step to building a customer experience program is to consider what is the current opinion of your customer and where they stand.Find about the standards and metrics being used by your organisation to measure creation and delivery of a good customer experience and determining success of those activities.Consider the point of focus of your customer relationship surveys and how to improve it.
Step 2- Conducting analysis of key drivers
Now that you have established the paradigm of your current customer program, conduct a key driver analysis of the data collected for the paradigm.Determine the standards that best reflect your business goals and objectives, such as product delivery ratings and customer satisfaction ratings.
Step 3- Construct a map of customer experience
Construct a customer experience map that puts together all points of interaction of the customer and your organisation.Collect information from employees and customers through surveys.Create a customer experience lifecycle to understand how a general customer will interact at different steps.Experiment with different personas of various customers to expand this map.
Step 4- Determine the critical point to roll out the transactional survey
The customer map will give you information about the most significant situation of interaction between business and customer.This critical situation determines whether the customer experience is good or not and hence, is the best opportunity to roll out a transactional survey.The feedback that you get at this point is crucial to knowledge of how the process, service or product is working- and hence how it can be improved.
Step 5- Bridge the gaps and Draw linkage analysis
Assort and accumulate all the information collected in aforementioned steps and perform a linkage analysis.This will help you understand the behavior patterns that lead to dissatisfaction or disappointment for the customer.Hence, you will have opportunities to improve or create new services/ products that fulfill customer needs.
4. Results of building a CX program
If you build a CX program as directed, then it will definitely return with exponential value in profits.Through building a good CX program you get great results like:
- Product improvement recommendations, Performance Reporting of products and services
- Overall customer loyalty, Potential of a new and loyal business
- Improved Employee attitudes, Support from all departments
- Front line and online experience for quick change
5. Conclusion
If you build a CX program then you become eligible for provision of quick and reliable insights, information, and new opportunities in all respects. Building the CX program is a fairly simple process with major steps of Selecting the baseline, Recording valuable and relevant, Examination and analysis of data to find patterns, Finding the optimal time of doing survey and Providing improvements wherever necessary.
Every company thrives and depends on their customers having a good experience, that compels them to return again. With all businesses providing similar services and products at comparable rates, the main competitive advantage comes from giving the customers a stellar experience. But, without the aforementioned essential ingredients, it is impossible to establish a successful CX program initiative. Determining a reliable framework and giving employees power by branding your program helps you build the program with perfect structure. So consider all these points while building customer experience program and success is guaranteed!