The “product” of any service business is customer experience.
Keeping “what matters most” to customers top of mind must drive the design and implementation of any customer or business strategy.
Know Your Customers
Everything begins with your customer. Customer Experience Design requires a thorough understanding of your customer – both existing and targeted; their preferences and behaviors, needs and expectations, requirements and values. Design your business around your customer. Market research, surveys, focus groups, interviews or simply qualitative observations all inform your experience design.
Continuously capture, understand and act on customer information. Customer knowledge allows you to deliver an experience, not simply a transaction.
Craft a Customer Experience Strategy
Your entire organization must understand and value your commitment to the customer experience. A crisp and clear customer experience strategy will guide both the experience design as well as the eventual delivery and future decision making.
Set Experience Characteristics
Experience characteristics become the lens through which all future customer experiences must be viewed. Collectively, not individually. Customers bring a set of expectations to each interaction and successful companies deliver on all of them to varying degrees. Most experience characteristics are not mutually exclusive. “Convenient” and “accurate” can co-exist as equally important and valuable “experience characteristics. It requires a thoughtful and skillful experience design to identify, accurately define and prioritize the characteristics of the “right” customer experiences.
Map Out Enabling Capabilities
“What” must your organization do or possess to deliver on the promise of the future experience model? What new processes or systems? What new know-how, resources or skills? From specific experience features available via self-service to support practices and ingredients such as specific content within training or reporting metrics that will drive behavior. These are all important, experience enabling “capabilities”.
Differentiate the Experience
You can create a retention lock. Drive profits. Convert customer knowledge into strategic capabilities. Create competitive advantage. Characteristics and their underlying and enabling capabilities must not just be designed to satisfy customer expectations – but to truly differentiate in a way that creates a strategic advantage.
Our clients are capitalizing on the ‘customer’ as a means to differentiate themselves from the competition and drive profitability and growth, and they are not leaving that customer experience to chance.