If customer experience is about creating a different, genuine way for you and your customers to interact, then what can you do to really make a difference?
Trends come and go. Each passing year tests the durability of trends. Which ones will stick it out and which ones are already past it? Perhaps most importantly, what are the emerging trends that you need to stay on top of? Or in other words, how prepared are you for the next 12 months?
Here are the 3 tactics for a customer experience board to really start to make a difference to your customer experience:
They will make it easy for your customers to be your customers.
This is about making the whole experience for the customer as easy as possible. The example many people use here is Amazon. People keep going back to them time and time again because everything about their service delivery makes it so easy to be a customer. They can get what they want within seconds.
As long as customers get what they asked for when they ask for it, then they're not really looking for much more. It’s about making everything customer-centric with minimal effort on their part - they don’t have to call in and chase for updates because you’ve already communicated with them and they know what’s going on.
They will have an agile approach to customer experience.
Remember the old days of IT? You had an analysis phase. Then you used to define the documents and the requirements before anybody would start building any code. What you'd then find is that the users had already changed their opinions before the first release was eventually churned out.
Agile, as an IT methodology, was brought to life to overcome this challenge and help work through very difficult and complex change processes.
This approach is now being adapted in the customer experience space. Rather than looking for and defining a big transformation, which is the traditional approach to change management in large organisations, you see a more agile approach for making smaller, faster changes.
Many organisations have already made a big shift towards embracing customer experience. Now it’s time for these organisations to move from good to great. It's about marginal gains, it's about those micro transformations in their business that slowly push the service levels beyond expectations or certainly in-line with rapidly changing customer expectations.
Customer feedback fits really well into this because it allows you to have a more evolutionary approach and shape yourself and your processes around what your customers are telling you.
They can support the emergence of your Chief Customer Officer.
In more and more companies, we're seeing the emergence of Chief Customer Officers or Chief Experience Officers. They're being tasked with putting together teams that are really concerned about the customer agenda and, often, represent the customer in the boardroom. Having someone in this role means that the CX board will have the senior support to see things through.
To be effective in this role, they have to truly have the backing of the board. They also need to be the type of individual that is able to rally all of the different business units that are involved in delivering the service. Unless they are an extremely influential individual that has the political clout and backing to be able to make significant changes, they will find it tough to create lasting change.
