Three Simple Steps to Improve
Your Customer Experience
By Patricia B. Seybold
CEO and Senior Consultant
Patricia Seybold Group
What's it really like for customers to do business
with you?
Let me guess. As your customer attempts do something
— to shop online or in a store, or interact with your contact center — she
encounters obstacles as she unknowingly crosses organizational boundaries.
Your employees and business partners would like to be helpful, but they're
thwarted by customer-unfriendly policies or missing infrastructure. Your
executives are frustrated, too. They know the customer experience is
suboptimal, but can’t move quickly to improve the situation.
Sound familiar?
Our only real competitive differentiator is the
quality of the customer experience that customers associate with our
brand. The only sustainable engine of organic growth comes from delighted
customers who tell their friends and come back for more. The problem is,
we can't seem to get out of our own way to make this happen.
Managing and continuously improving the quality of
your customer experience is mission critical. In order to deliver a
differentiated brand experience to your chosen customers, you need to
redesign your organization from the "outside in," learning to see things
from your customers’ vantage points.
Examining the Problem
At the Patricia Seybold Group, we’ve been hearing a
consistent litany of concern about customer experience issues from clients
in many different industries — from financial services firms to telcos,
retailers to manufacturers, and from pharmaceutical companies to
consulting firms.
Here’s what they tell us about their current
relationships with their customers:
-
Business process
redesign isn’t improving the customer experience. Customers and
partners tell us that they still can’t get quick, accurate, consistent
answers.
-
Cross-channel
experience is still fragmented. Despite substantial investments in
state-of-the-art Web sites for customer self service, customers
frequently still can’t find the answers or options they need for their
particular situation.
-
We prioritize from the
inside out. We give lip service to being customer- focused, but we
still make decisions that are optimized for our business — not our
customers. We can't seem to figure out how to work from the customers'
point of view.
-
We can’t seem to walk
the talk! We all say we want to do what’s right for our customers.
But when push comes to shove, we can’t actually bring ourselves to
radically change the way we do things. It’s just too hard.
Despite our best efforts,
what we’re doing today to improve our customers’ experience simply isn’t
working well enough to keep them from defecting. Our progress in becoming
customer-centric and customer adaptive is too slow. We’re still too clumsy
in anticipating and responding to customers’ changing needs.
Envisioning the Ideal Customer-Centric
Organization
Good news. Many companies have appointed executives
to be explicitly “in charge of” customer experience. If you ask these
executives how they'd like their customers to feel, and how their
organizations would ideally behave if they could wave a magic wand, here’s
the picture they paint:
-
Customers Like Doing
Business with Us
Our clients are happy to do more business with us, to pay a fair price
and refer colleagues. They’re profitable, repeat buyers who give us
great ideas about how to
-
Our Products are
Clearly Differentiated and Highly Valued
Because we’ve worked closely with customers to anticipate and meet their
needs, we have a differentiated set of offerings that our customers
really value. All of our products and services are infused with our
unique brand experience which competitors cannot duplicate.
-
We’ve Lowered our Costs
to Serve Customers, and are growing our business organically.
-
Our Employees and
Partners are Empowered to Delight Customers
Channel partners and staffers are both integral members of our
experience delivery team.
-
We Know What We Do
Makes a Difference to Customers — and to our Bottom Line.
Our staffers share stories about issues that specific customers raised,
and how they were able to delight them by taking proactive actions to
anticipate and address their concerns. They share the customer’s
outcome, how the customer felt about it, and tangible results for the
company.
-
Our Executives are
Accountable and Inspirational
Business unit execs take responsibility for moving the dial on CX and
profits.
-
We Reap Measurable
Results
Our Customer Experience Scorecard lets us monitor how well we’re
executing on the things that matter most to each group of customers.
-
We Excel in Continuous
Improvement and Customer-Led Innovation
We detect and fix customer issues as they arise, and continuously
improve customers’ experiences.
Making this Vision a Reality: Three Steps
To reach that lofty goal, it's necessary to gradually
transform the organization’s culture, processes, and behavior, to become
an “outside in” organization — a business so in tune with your customers’
current (and future) needs that they wouldn't dream of leaving you for a
competitor.
You need a framework that will allow you to determine
your organization's customer experience goals and monitor your ability to
meet them. It will reveal where customer experience should fit into your
overall business strategy, the critical stumbling blocks you’re likely to
encounter, and how to avoid or mitigate them.
The entire journey is far too long to explain in this
short article. But let me offer several steps you can take today that will
start you down that path.
Forget your products and services for a moment. Stop
and ponder these three critical elements: your business, your brand, and
the customers you want to serve. Think about each of these essentials and
how they relate to your customers.
1. Describe
your Business Mission in Customers' Terms.
What is your organization in business to do? (Hint: To help our
customers do X.) A financial services organization, for example, might say
they're in business to help their customers achieve their financial goals.
Write it down.
2.
Describe your Brand
Experience in Customers’ Terms.
Describe the feelings you want your brand to evoke for your customers.
If you have multiple brands, repeat this exercise for each brand. For
example, if you're a hotel, perhaps you want customers to feel “welcome,
relaxed, and rested.” Important: Don’t make this up. Your company has
already invested heavily in its brand identity and its brand experience.
Just be sure that you know what it is, and that you can describe it in
terms of how you want customers to feel when they encounter your brand.
3. Describe
the Customers You Want to Serve.
What types of customers are the best fit for your business? Which
customer group is your organization best equipped to serve well? What
types of customers would you like to be able to attract? What types of
customers are most attracted to your brand(s)? Don’t just think of
categories of customer entities — middle income families in southern
France, small businesses in Hong Kong — but also in terms of groups of
individuals: Hispanic teens, IT architects, busy working moms. Don’t try
to describe all your customer segments at this point; that comes later.
For now, just think about the broad categories of customers and match them
up with the brands in your portfolio.
4. Now
Connect the Dots.
Link your organization’s raison d’etre — the things you help
customers do, with the brand experience you offer and the sets of
customers you’d most like to serve.
Completing this exercise
brings you to the beginning of the next phase: determining your customers’
ideal scenarios. What things do your customers want to do? What
outcomes do they want? How would they like to feel in accomplishing
those outcomes?
Your organization’s
business processes, policies, information, communications, and technology
must be optimized to delight customers while delivering operational
efficiencies and meeting regulatory requirements. Every project should
start with your end-customers. Projects should be prioritized based on
their impact on the customer experience as well as the bottom line.
Continuously transforming
your organization from the outside in, to meet your customers’ changing
needs, is the most effective way to sustain competitive differentiation.
-30-
Patricia B. Seybold
is CEO and Senior Consultant of Boston-based
Patricia Seybold Group and author of Outside Innovation: How Your
Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future. A recognized expert in
customer experience, customer-led business strategy, customer-driven IT
strategy, and customer co-design methodology, she can be reached at
617.742.5200. |
