Posted by Paul Anderson
Customer Experience – What, Why & How
If you wanted to buy an iPad, where would you rather go; a big box electronic shop or the Apple store?
If you said Apple store, you’re not alone…but why?
Both places offer the exact same product for the exact same price. Interestingly, when I ask people this question in culture workshops they say things like:
“Because the Apple store is cooler.”
“The staffs there are friendlier and really know their stuff.”
“They take their time and answer all my questions.”
– James, Priemer, VP of Sales, Growth & Evangelism Leader
These are the introductory lines that have been used for a blog on customer experience.
Before we move on how and why customer experience is important, let’s first understand what customer experience all about is:
Harvard Business Review explains:
HBR describes the customer experience as “your customer’s end-to-end journey with you…the cumulative impact of multiple touch points over time, which result in a real relationship feeling, or lack of it.”
So it’s about the multiple interactions that a customer has with a company and the collective nature of these interactions (whether good, okay or bad) that make up the entire customer experience. Right from the time a lead engages with a company till the time he continues to be a customer defines customer journey which makes the TOTAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE.
Why is it so important?
According to the Harvard Business Review Research, ‘’organizations able to skillfully manage the entire customer experience reap enormous rewards: enhanced customer satisfaction, reduced churn, increased revenue, and greater employee satisfaction. They also discover more-effective ways to collaborate across functions and levels, a process that delivers gains throughout the company.’’
So how can companies deliver good Customer Experience?
Reportedly, around 53% companies strive to deliver good customer experience. Out of which only 23% manage to do it successfully.
Reason: majority of companies focus on maximizing satisfaction at individual customer interactions, instead of the customer’s end-to-end journey. As a result, such an approach creates a distorted picture, suggesting that customers are happier with the company than they actually are.
To elaborate this further, here’s an example given by Harvard Business Review:
Think about a routine service event—say, a product query—from the point of view of both the company and the customer. The company may receive millions of phone calls about the product and must handle each one well. But if asked about the experience months after the fact, a customer would never describe such a call as simply a “product question.” Understanding the context of a call is key. For example, a customer might have been trying to ensure uninterrupted service after moving, make sense of the renewal options at the end of a contract, or fix a nagging technical problem.
A company that manages complete journeys would not only do its best with the individual transaction but also seek to understand the broader reasons for the call, address the root causes, and use CRM solution to create feedback loops to continuously improve interactions upstream and downstream from the call. Overall, they’ll use the CRM solution to understand the customer journey.
So what’s the solution?
Companies need to focus on cumulative experiences across multiple touchpoints and in multiple channels over time. They need to go beyond the crux of the customer service – to understand the underlying problems, the fundamental causes, and the cumulative effect on the customers.
Also, David Priemer asks to focus on company culture too. According to him, most companies who nail customer experience have discovered that the secret formula for nailing the customer experience works just as well in creating an awesome company culture.
Read his comments –
‘’When companies create an amazing culture for their employees, profits increase, turnover decreases, they become lightning rods for top talent. And the best part: that awesome culture invariably trickles down to their customers in the form of the experience.’’
If you want to create a compelling customer experience, ensure that you first create an awesome company culture by making your employees happy. Take a good cloud CRM solution to empower your employees with all the customer insights they require. Let them use the Cloud CRM solution as the single repository for storing managing and sharing all customer related collaterals and information.
To learn more about Cloud CRM’s role in delivering exceptional customer service, visit our website.
