Customer Experience Program

1. What is customer experience?

CX, also known as customer experience, is the overall experience your customer receives from your business or brand. It influences the result of every interaction your customer has with your business. It includes:

• Navigating on your website
• Talking with your customer service team
• Pre-sales experience
• Post-sales experience, etc.

The whole customer journey influences your buyer’s decision and hence a good customer experience is very important.

2. What is a customer experience program?

The customer experience program involves:

• Gathering information
• Analyzing the customer
• Taking necessary action 
• Monitoring customer insights.

This program helps you in planning and strategizing solutions to provide a good customer experience at all times. It also helps in finding the loyalty drivers which can be later used on building a loyal customer base for your business.

3. What best practices do brands need to follow to build an effective customer experience program? 

Customer experience improvements need to focus on objectives rather than finding solutions to ensure the right efforts are put in the right places. To do that companies need to have a clear understanding of their business goals and objectives.

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Some of the best practices and solutions used for building a customer experience program are:

(i) Actively Listen to Your Customers:

Brands need to actively listen to their customers at all times to build an effective customer experience program model. For some companies, it involves engaging with a 3rd party vendor to create a VOC program i.e Voice of the Customer program.

Using this program you can gather, analyze, take action, and then monitor your customer insights. VOC software tools can be used to achieve this. It also involves discrete customer research programs to keep a check on the loyalty drivers across your customer's experience.

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(ii) Understand Your Customers:

Brands need to understand their customers and the customer experiences which they are providing to them. Customer journey maps are used to gather information to understand customer perspectives and their current journey.

Software tools can be used as well for a better understanding of how your customers feel about your brand.

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(iii) Differentiate & Innovate on Customer Experience:

You need to have a proper plan in place to make sure your customers are receiving a positive experience from your organization. You need to differentiate and innovate new strategies to do that.

You may also take outside help from CX experts/consultants to help you define those strategies, and make them align with your business strategies.

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(iv) Have a Customer-Centric Approach:

The organization needs to have a customer-centric approach to support its goals and strategies built towards customer-centricity. If the employees in the organizations are not aligned with the strategies, the business model will fail.

Brands need to make sure that all their resources are aligned in a single direction to maintain a good customer relationship.

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(v) Focus on Delivering Good Customer Experiences :

Delivering good customer experiences usually involve a combination or subset of different objectives. It has 2 endpoints which are:

• Identifying and prioritizing closing the existing gaps in the customer journey.
• Working on the delivery of good customer experiences to those who initially weren't satisfied with the overall customer experience.

Innovating might help in meeting the unmet customer needs and in turn would convert them into your loyal customer base by providing them a good customer experience.

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4. What steps do organizations need to follow to create a great customer experience program?

To build a great experience, every interaction with your customer needs to be exceptional. In order to achieve that, the entire organization needs to work together and contribute to delivering a great experience.

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The essential steps/components to providing the best customer experience are:

• Deploying your customer experience using intent statement.
• Building customer journey maps.
• Redesigning those touchpoints.
• Actively listen to your customers.
• Training your employees.
• Motivating employees through recognition & rewards.
• Build a customer experience dashboard.

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a. Deploying your customer experience using intent statement:

The first step in building a good customer experience program starts with deploying your desired customer experience using their intent statement.

It is the defined set of criteria that the organization needs to manage and monitor to deliver an excellent customer experience.

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b. Building customer journey maps:

The second step is to understand who your customers are and how they interact with your business across various touchpoints. To gain this understanding you first need to map out your customer's journey. This will provide you a clear picture of your customer's experience with your organization.

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c. Redesigning touchpoints:

You might have to consider redesigning your touchpoints/customer journey map to constantly improve the overall experience of your customers. It might take around 4 weeks to come up with a new one.

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d. Actively listen to your customers:

Organizations need to actively take feedback and surveys from their customers and listen to their problems at all times. A chatbot can be an effective solution when it comes to collecting feedback or solving customer queries in real-time.

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e. Training your employees:

Your employees are the ones who regularly work on solving your customer problems and therefore they need to be trained properly to maintain the same level of service at all times.

They need to be informed as to what level of service is expected from them and then be trained to deliver those results in the best possible manner.

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f. Motivating employees through recognition & rewards:

Your organization needs to motivate its employees to deliver the best customer experience at all times. In order to do that, your employees must be recognized and rewarded from time to time. This will motivate them to maintain the same level of service and maybe even perform better at times. If your employees aren't motivated/aligned for the same cause, your customer-centric model might fail.

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g. Build a customer experience dashboard:

Organizations need to replace feel-good customer initiatives with clear and formal performance metrics. This will ensure driving accountability for improvement and cancel out all the misaligned initiatives.