The challenges of creating a great customer experience extend from the tactical to the strategic, from remaking processes to encouraging innovation and from building new skills to integrating an array of technologies.
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Despite the varying maturities and consumer habits that are bound to exist on a regional basis, the criticality of customer centricity has remained consistent. The challenge is for organizations worldwide to create memorable experiences that also make a difference to the bottom line.
Further evidence of the ubiquitous focus on customer experience can be found in Figure 7. More than three-quarters (78%) of company respondents are attempting to differentiate through CX, with 28% strongly agreeing with the statement. In comparison, only 5% of companies are not trying to use customer experience as a point of differentiation.
It is clear that the coming year will see plenty of activity in this area. Organizations have spent considerable time getting their respective houses in order. The next step for many is execution; pulling together mobile, content, data and the various other building blocks and deploying them in a harmonious fashion.
Creating an excellent customer experience is a complex process, but the respondents’ enthusiasm and dedication to using it as a point of differentiation bodes well. Companies have committed to customer experience for the long term. This is critical, as a commitment to customer experience means a commitment to a structured, longterm view on delighting the customer.
Simply put, customer experience isn’t simple.
For many organizations, the goal of turning customer experience (CX) into a competitive advantage means recreating themselves. That’s because the customer’s experience is the result of every part of the company working together, or failing to. Decisions made in fi nance and human resources can have just as much impact as those in marketing and product teams.
This interconnection is one reason that a cultural shift should underlie any strategic priority around CX. It’s not easy to get hundreds or thousands of employees to realign their thinking, but it’s essential if the shift to the customer is genuine. Here are some fundamental building blocks necessary to create a CX culture at your company.
- Unified Team or Company - Perhaps the most powerful element of culture is the potential for unity. When teams or entire companies are unified around a vision, it energizes them and can counteract some of the normal tensions between departments.
- Common Customer Experience Perspective - In a business environment where there are far more options for how to spend time and money than the ability to follow through, nothing is more useful than focus. When the organization begins to share a common perspective that the customer experience drives growth, it focuses everything from budgets to daily priorities.
- Customer-Centric Business Organization - Declaring that CX will be a defining organizational characteristic is a choice that means prioritizing customer-centric qualities over other business goals. As this permeates the organization, this new direction can galvanize innovation. In a business, creativity is often at its best (or most useful) when it’s given context and boundaries. The move to build a great CX opens the door for creativity in every team and at every level.
The five-year plan…
How important is CX? Thousands of companies tell us that it’s the number one way they hope to differentiate themselves over the next fi ve years. The product and service commoditization in many sectors means that while offerings must be competitive, they’re less likely to be a competitive advantage. Even starker is the end of the price war; only 5% of respondents see themselves as being able to set themselves apart with their pricing strategies.
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Experience starts with strategy and culture
Strategy is the easy part. As challenging as it is to discover and define corporate direction, strategy is a malleable set of ideas that depends on the buy-in of a relatively small group of people.
It’s within the context of culture that strategy becomes practice. Its success or failure depends on whether the wider audience of employees, partners and other stakeholders understand and support it.
Redefining culture
A cross-team approach – building a truly customer-centric enterprise means working together. It’s not simply a marketing initiative. Product, fi nance, customer service, sales, marketing and management have to work together. The good news is that a cross-team approach that transcends the silos of the past is a powerful and more effi cient way to work.2 The bad news is that it’s very hard work to change internal structures.
Realignment through incentives – at the heart of any effective transition is using fi nancial and other incentives to reset priorities. For example, this might mean a simple redefi nition of how bonuses are calculated to include a customer satisfaction component. But, it could also be using a more sophisticated set of goals around cross-team cooperation and customer evaluation.
Supporting experimentation and understanding failure – a great customer experience combines existing best practices with new discoveries and innovations. One of the hardest challenges for some organizations to overcome is to make experimentation a part of the culture. Risk and failure-averse companies actually risk failure when they don’t embrace a vigorous campaign of experiments in the name of superior customer experience.
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Everything is part of CX. From the moment a prospect sees an ad the customer experience has begun and it doesn’t end until the relationship does. Although Figure 9 shows organizational priorities around CX, it doesn’t draw a line between what’s important and what isn’t. Everything is important, but some are differentiators while others are simply part of the new cost of doing business. Elements of the CX with the potential to separate a brand from its competitors:
- Personalization depends on technology, but it is human insight that moves it beyond the algorithms relating products and people. Great personalization can be fundamental to relevance, while bad personalization feels intrusive and unnecessary.
- Value is an expression of cost and benefit. The benefits to a customer are a mix of what they get and how they perceive it, which is why marketing has to be both the voice of the customer to the enterprise, and the voice of the enterprise to the customer.
- Making customer experience fun or fulfilling is a challenge and only 7% cite it as their path to differentiation (Figure 10). It’s powerful for those that can connect brand with experience in ways that delight customers3 but most companies should first focus on getting the basics just right.
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Fundamentals for every CX-focused company:
- Customers want to know what to expect. Consistency in experience should go far enough to make them feel safe and to fulfil on expectations set in other media. At the same time, every medium has its unique traits. A mobile site should be simple and useful above all, which should be balanced with overall brand consistency.
- Safety and speed are the first steps of customer experience. Digital customers who are concerned for their data will never buy, nor will they return if they find the experience slow or awkward.
- Similarly, while mobile can be a differentiator today, marketers looking at the future recognize that it won’t be one for long. The growth in visitors and buyers is forcing every digital marketing team to be mobile-ready.
2014 Temkin Experience Ratings
Bottom line, marketers know great customer experiences are good for business, and the 2014 Temkin Experience Ratings report shows consumers rank several grocers and fast food chains as the best providers of overall excellent customer experiences. The report, based on a survey of 10,000 consumers in the U.S., evaluates 268 companies across 19 industries— including everything from healthcare and cable service to airlines and hotel chains. Rising above the pack are grocer H.E.B. (88%), Trader Joe's (84%), Chick-fil-A (83%), Publix (83%), and Aldi (82%), each rated “excellent” by customers. Here's their list of the top and bottom organizatons:
Courtesy of eConsultancy's Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing Digital Trends 2015 and the Timkin Customer Experience Ratings
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