Roadblocks to improving customer experience

Is customer experience (CX) is the new buzzword? There isn’t a company big or small that I visit on a weekly basis that isn’t talking about the need to improve customer experience.

Marketers have realised that the greatest way to find new customers is to provide existing customers with a second-to-none customer experience both pre-sale and post-sale, and they will tell others. At the same time, they end up spending more with your brand.

The probability of a return on spending is more in a brands control when they spend budget on improving customer experience, rather than on spending that same budget on media.

However, if a company has not got a foundation on which to scale, and to deliver amazing customer experiences, all the spending could be wasted (and you might as well have spent it on media and creativity).

Before embarking on a customer experience program, make sure you have the following in place:

• People

• CRM strategy, data, creative and technology

• Process

People need to be technology savvy

A whole bucket load of things that employees, agencies and consultancies used to do, are now better done by software. The type of people that need to be hired is those that can manage the technology, understand the analytics from the software and develop strategy that can be executed by the technology.

When it comes to customer experience, you need to be able to scale it (which means implementing technology). You need to be able to measure its impact (which means being able to understand analytics). And you need to be able to understand humans (your customers) and what might delight them (in other words strategy).

CRM is not just a piece of technology, it is not just something that sales uses to manage deals and it is not just about loyalty programs

Ask people from a variety of different job roles what CRM is, and you will get a different answer for each. In all likelihood, they are all correct, but if CRM is implemented just for one job function or by only one department, it will not be useful enough to be used to increase customer experience. If you want to know all about all the different use cases for CRM and how they all fit together, we’ve got a great guide here.

Don’t leave customer experience to chance, and get out of email

For every situation that your customer experiences, you need to map out a customer journey that plots out the steps that you want the customer to follow. Whether they have a complaint or issue, or whether they want to upgrade their service. If you lead this to chance, the probability they will have a bad experience is high. Once this is mapped out, build the associated internal process to ensure that when the customer is following this customer journey, everything happens as planned in the back office.

Secondly, do everything in your power to stop using email and instant messaging. Build and implement systems and applications, where work can be better managed, contextually.