In a webinar hosted by Gartner, Ilona Hansen elaborates on the common mistakes organizations make with respect to customer experience and why they should invest in good customer experience, and she offers solutions to those and how companies can improve their existing strategy with proven measures. Ms. Hansen is a Vice President of Gartner's CRM and Customer Experience research group. She manages research in the area of CRM application strategies, coupled with a focus on managing complex CRM programs such as multiple CRMs across an enterprise-wide organization, CRM vendor and tool selection process, CRM user adoption and AI-empowered CRM technologies.
“One of the fundamental experiences of Customer experience is that customer experience is outside in, not inside out .”The company must operate as per the customer’s needs and then work its way up, in contrast to how companies currently operate, where they work with the existing infrastructure to provide what the customer wants. However, the problem with the latter approach is that it doesn’t address all the needs of the customer. Organizations here lead with technology and put the customer experience in the backseat, hoping they’d follow. Emphasis should be given to stop thinking about the customers and start thinking like the customers.
There is a saying, “When a customer comes first, the customer will last.” a company that is willing to invest a fair amount in customer experience is more likely to witness growth compared to companies that don’t. The customer doesn’t see the individual as part of the company, even though the company has its own branches and internal processes, they are seen as a cohesive brand. Secondly, the customer plays a key role in making or breaking the company.
The voice of the customer is how one captures, stores and analyzes the direct, indirect and inferred feedback of the customer. Direct feedback is the feedback that is directly given to the organization in the form of market research and polls, where the customer expects a prompt response. Indirect feedback is the feedback that is received from the organization’s social media handle; in this case, the customer is talking about the company but isn’t talking to the company. Inferred feedback pertains to the data that describes the customer experience; this can be the usage rate of the application or the user activity of the user in the last 12 months with the application. Companies must see which of the three types is their strong suit and also see where they have room to grow.
“How can you design better customer experiences without first clarifying whom you are designing it for?” It is a common sight for organizations to be so excited about crafting good customer experiences that they jump straight into it. But, in doing this, they are overlooking one crucial step. That is, to whom they are trying to create a customer experience. To carry out this, the Persona is a useful and helpful tool. This is the perfect tool for empathizing with the customers; it allows you to walk in their shoes. It is no longer helpful to listen to your customers. You must empathize with them. And that is a level beyond listening. This approach is valid for B2B and B2C enterprises.
One of the most important uses of a persona is customer journey mapping. There are two parts to this: the on-stage and the backstage parts. The on-stage experience is what the customer sees and interacts with, and the backstage is where your organization undertakes the task of making the on-stage activity a reality.
An example of this is a person taking a train journey, the customer picks the destination, sees the map, interacts with a computer for confirming the journey and payment of fare, these are the on-stage processes, the backstage processes involve the displaying of maps, making an interactive CRM software for the passenger to interact with and receive tickets, track their path to notify them on the arrival of their destination.
Many organizations have an over-corporate strategic plan, while only a few have a customer experience-centered strategic plan. While it is desirable to profit from a good customer experience, the organizations have a lot of customer experience activity going on, but more often than not, it comes off as uncoordinated. An ideal template to counter this problem would be to list out what are the ideal feeling you wish you make your customers feel and mention the list of pillars you can provide in your product or service to make them feel those experiences.
This is the most sought-after query every organization has, and it is about how to quantify something as complex as customer experience. There are various types of customer experience metrics, but the most unheard ones are the metric to measure the amount of effort for the customer and the metric to measure the confidence of the customer. Regarding customer effort, there are two responses expected here: do you want your customers to be delighted, or do you want them to go about their day with low effort? A suitable example to explain this is the tolling booth. Do you want to be delighted at the tolling booth, or do you want to spend minimal effort there and drive off and spend the rest of your day doing whatever you want? Chances are you’ll opt for the second option. This is one anecdote where an effort experience is better for the customer instead of making them feel delighted on the queue-filled road. Any customer interaction is 4X more likely to drive disloyalty rather than driving loyalty. In this case, effortless experience for the customer pays.
These are the five fundamental concepts that must be kept in mind to enhance customer experience. Another factor for organizations to keep in mind is this should not be done in silos, as it is a team activity. It must be done in collaboration with numerous departments. Co-operation with the CRM department is a must so data of whatever operations they have can be analyzed, and the current progress of your organization can be assessed to see which of the aforementioned five concepts need reinforcement. All this must be done while keeping a continuous rapport with the customers.
