The challenge racing across businesses today is how to improve, scale, and sustain an excellent Customer Experience (CX). Customer Experience is the sum of all the customer’s interactions, with a company’s products, services, and other support services. Activities as benign as the placement of the company’s search engine, how well search results mirror Google search results, and how easy it is to process a billing dispute seem insignificant to a great product. In fact, these little “pin pricks” can damage a brand and damage a product’s standing when easy tasks become hard, frustrating, and take a long time to successfully complete.
Digital innovation at the customer level is how companies improve and grow a great CX. Improving and growing digital interactions is how companies create, improve, and sustain great CX.
How Digital Builds Great CX
It’s led by the voice of the customer (VOC). The VOC leads and prioritizes the digital improvements to the customer journey, i.e. the typical path a customer takes all the way from the discovery and research of the product through the purchase process to the repurchase of the product.
Analyze, categorize, and visualize the customer journey using the actual words, observations, and data from the actual customer behavior.
- Where does the customer stop?
- What takes a long time?
- When does the customer request help?
- Do customers return to a new process or try it once and then never return?
These points of customer frustration are where digital improvement need to be directed. Monitor the existing customer surveys to ensure that digital improvements are heard in the VOC.
If the customer complaints are still there, it’s back to the drawing board!
Personalization and Consistency
For customers, inconsistent levels of service are one of the major “pain points” in any step of a customer journey. Consistency, even if a process is not perfect, is far better than one that is inconsistent. Customers, increasingly customers of any age and demographic, want the ability to have powerful tools to research and solve their own problems. So, give customers the power, insight, and consistent delivery to find, research, and solve their own problems through web, mobile, and voice enabled digital applications.
Even for seemingly similar products and services, customers have different needs and requirements in their customer journey. Personalization gives customers the ability to use a common set of digital tools to create and use to their own preferences and needs.
Conducting deep analytics of how customers set their personalization preferences can help build both a product recommendation engine and a self-help recommendation engine to help customers solve problems before they even realized they were experiencing difficulties.
Surveys Detect Pain Points
Customer surveys are a part of this but drive to deliver ongoing great CX is a passion for customer success. The passion for customer success dedicates itself to constantly looking for ways to improve CX no matter how small.
Digital is a powerful tool for improving CX, but it is far from the only one.
Small sessions of 10 to 15 customers grouped into the same segmentation categories discussing their “journey” of how they use (and don’t use) a company’s services to solve their problems allows digital improvements to sustain company bright spots and improve company “pain points” that customers may have. In addition, advanced analytics can help identify and target customers that need a new product or service.
CX not only helps maintain the bottom line, it allows helps grow the top line revenue. Create loyal customers by using self-service, easy-to-use, fast, personalized, and powerful digital technology to enable a great customer experience.
