Creating a Great Customer Experience

What does a CCXP do?

Most organisations want to deliver an excellent customer experience but sometimes can’t determine how the people, process and technology come together in an orchestrated and systematic customer-led approach. An experienced CCXP acts as a catalyst who enhances an organisation’s results by understanding, designing and improving experiences across the entire customer relationship. I help organisations develop a holistic customer understanding, shape the direction for their customer strategy and build the case for an experienced team and organisational design.

Do you believe customer experience can make or break business?

Customers are becoming more and more savvy; expectations are increasing and the experience they are having with leaders (i.e., Amazon or Apple) are setting the bar for all others. Customers want to be treated as an individual person – not as a series of unconnected product or service decisions. They want the experience to be humanised and deliver to their needs. When this doesn’t happen, they aren’t afraid to tell everyone about it. Social media and online reviews are now outstripping word of mouth as preferred recommendation sources. Combined with the increasing commoditisation of products and services, customer experience can be either a differentiator or the thing that breaks your business. 

How can you measure the customer experience you’re providing?

Using a combination of operational data and metrics, along with customer experience measures (such as CSAT, NPS or customer effort scores) and employee experience metrics should provide a strong measurement framework to measure and communicate across the organisation in a meaningful way.

What are the warning signs that your customer experience is sub-par?

Loss of revenue, increasing operational costs or churn, increasing call centre volumes, increasing complaint volumes are all red flags. Frontline teams such as call centre staff and sales teams will often see trends so ensure you tap into these teams. Employee engagement scores are also important as unhappy employees often lead to unhappy customers.

How do personalised customised experiences contribute to the success of a business and/or brand?

At the heart of human behaviour is the desire for connection; to be known and understood.  Businesses that can capture and leverage customer knowledge to deliver an experience tailored to that customer’s needs can build an emotional connection with the brand.

How we interact with brands and what we require from them has changed dramatically in recent times. What has driven this change?

Advances in technology mean customers are experiencing faster responses and better, more tailored experiences and so the bar gets set higher. The digital environment has given us more choice than ever, social networks and digital devices have enabled customers to share their experiences and opinions with others. The power has shifted from brands to the customer.  And if they are not happy, they can simply vote with their feet.

What do businesses need to do to be able to devise and deliver relevant customer experience strategies?

One of the initial steps I often take is to do a maturity assessment to understand the current state of CX in the organisation, where they are stronger, and where they should prioritise their effort. Are they strong in customer understanding but weak in metrics? Can they articulate the commercial linkage between the experience and business levers? Using this approach provides a compass to guide the evolution of CX and by engaging the leadership teams in this process helps to build understanding of what it means to be a customer experience-led organisation.

Do great customer experiences have the power to customer acquisition, customer loyalty, customer engagement and promote growth?

McKinsey found that across industries, successful projects for optimising the customer experience typically achieve revenue growth of 5 to 10% and cost reductions of 15 to 25% within just two or three years. Foresters’ analysis on revenue growth shows the growth in customer experience leaders is on average 14% faster than the revenue growth in laggards. And not to mention that employees in customer-obsessed organisations are 40% more likely to say they are happy at work.

Susan’s five tips to provide excellence in customer experience

1. Leadership buy-in and support for the customer experience strategy is critical to success.

2. Build a systematic way of listening to your customers and understanding their journey.

3. Understand how the experience generates value – how does the customer experience drive the key levers of the organisation?

4. Establish a clear set of metrics and governance and embed across the organisation with a clear governance framework.

5. Don’t forget that your employee experience = your employee experience is as critical as your customer experience. EX = CX

ABOUT SUSAN JEFFERY:

Susan is a globally certified customer experience practitioner (CCXP) with experience across many sectors. She works with organisations at any stage of their experience journey and looks to support organisations who need an experienced practitioner to step in and hit the ground running on a project or solving a problem, whether it’s facilitation, discovery or strategy development. She joined the global Customer Experience Practitioners Association (CXPA) to connect, share and learn from global experts.