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Customer Experience (CX)

Historically, companies strive to provide their customers with a positive customer experience to differentiate their company from competitors, build loyalty, expand their customer base and reduce customer churn. These efforts typically focus too much on just the Customer Service department interactions while establishing goals for KPI's like First Contact Resolution, Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) as a measure of success. The presumption is, if your company does a "good job" responding to your customer's based on these KPI's the company will derive benefits. These simplified approaches are missing many important factors. In addition, the Customer Experience goes far beyond the Customer Service Department and should therefore take a holistic approach to customer interactions and engagement. A partial list of questions requiring decisions to design key process capabilities are listed below.

Key Questions and Decisions

  • What should you aspire for in a Customer Experience future state vision and how do you define good?

  • How can you link capabilities to value?

  • Unless you have a homogeneous set of customers, the approach listed above will not be effective, your customer engagement may need to vary based on the type of customer.

  • Depending on how the customer's view your firm, simply meeting a CSAT threshold may not build loyalty, it may only be the minimum requirement.

  • For those customers that view your products / services as a commodity, do you have a strategy on how to engage with your customers to move up the continuum from a commodity vendor to more of a strategic vendor when possible, so you do not have to compete primarily on price?

  • A large percentage of customer interactions are driven by a defect or failure event. This means they are avoidable, so what action are you or should you take to prevent these from happening?

  • Do you differentiate the way you engage with stakeholders who have different roles within your customer’s organization and should you?

  • Do you provide your customers with a choice of how to engage?

  • Since quality is a key component to meeting your customers needs you should be able to optimize your investments in quality capabilities known as the Cost of Quality (see the link to a PDF file above for further detail).

  • Do you capture customer interactions from departments besides Customer Service that engage with your customers? You can derive significant value from building a 360-degree customer view for target marketing, customer retention, product and service offer management and creating a proactive CX.

  • Can you provide a holistic "Customer Scorecard" for your Sales team to conduct effective quarterly reviews with your key customers?

  • Do you have any Knowledge Management tools to reduce repeat calls, call times, training duration  increase first contact resolution and other benefits

  • Can you use advanced analytics to create a process to warn sales when they are at risk of losing an account to trigger proactive measures?

  • Is there a mechanism for the different team members who interact with customers to collaborate, so customers do not get frustrated by repeat questions or differing feedback from your company?

  • Should your company "personalize" customer interactions 

  • Does your strategy include building emotional engagement with your customers?

  • Is there significant variability in customer needs and a corresponding approach to manage the "peak needs" and how to fully utilize your resources for other tasks when demand is low?

  • Have your CSR's been trained on soft skills?

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Experience / Qualifications

  • Worked on and led Customer Experience at four global corporations and several clients while consulting   

  • This includes leading CX Strategy and co-leading CX Transformation with a team exceeding four hundred team members  

  • Lead role in creating Cost of Quality (COQ) measurement processes and strategy at two Fortune 100 corporations. These COQ efforts determine the optimal level of investment in key capabilities to reduce failure (quality) costs and improve the customer experience (more details on COQ below).

  • Establishing several Voice of the Customer (VOC) measurement processes

  • Leading the integration of multiple overlapping use cases like Commercial Intelligence (customers, competitors, consumers, etc.), Product Development innovation, improving Sales with holistic and actionable data related to their customers and much more.

Example Future State Vision Summary 

  • Your CX is a differentiator, and you are easy to do business with

  • Highly loyal and referenceable customers with low churn rates

  • Some customers now view your company as more of a strategic vendor (as opposed to a commodity vendor) so your company competes less on price (improving margins) and enables you to compete for new business in adjacent products / services 

  • You provide customers with a choice of how to interact with guided services, personalized interactions and omni-channel capabilities

  • Automated and efficient internal processes = a low-cost provider

  • Your CX team is an employer of choice with low turnover

  • CX teams generate valuable Voice of the Customer (VOC) information for Sales, Marketing Innovation / R&D and Product Development via a 360-degree customer view with actionable insights. These insights can be used for target marketing, customer retention, a proactive CX and your product and service management.

  • Your team knows which customer stakeholders they should engage to create opportunities for future business expansion opportunities

  • Continuous improvement (CI) and defect reduction quality work prevents customers from needing help with problems before because they no longer occur

  • An increase in customer loyalty / reduction in customer turnover

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