The most effective customer experience management programmes aren’t just about investing in the latest CX technology or solely about tracking popular KPIs. They’re about developing a strategic plan to help the organisation change, grow, and be more competitive. By harnessing technology, data and insight the executive team can understand customers’ needs better, improve their processes, services or products, and deliver an experience that matches, and ideally exceeds, the promises made. It’s for this reason we recommend clients adopt a holistic approach to customer experience.
In an increasingly digital-first world, service is being challenged, gaps and inconsistencies have appeared across channels, and it’s become more and more obvious that for many change is needed. The reliance on the latest metrics, technology or methodology in isolation won’t help you become more customer centric as an organisation.
A holistic approach to customer experience enables you to take into account a variety of internal and external perspectives, a clear understanding of the ‘jobs’ customers are trying to execute (see our blog, How can the ‘Jobs-to-be-Done’ approach benefit wider CX and Insight programmes?), the promises you make to customers, and the consistency of the interactions you have with them.
A lot of CX programmes have in the past been designed around the latest technology and a specific metric, so that the Board can have a simple measure to evaluate the organisations performance. However, whilst good to track, the value derived has often been minimal, with little to drive real action or change.
So what do organisations with the best Customer Experience have in common?
They don’t:
- set up their CX measurement programme because ‘everyone else has got one’
- just focus on the metric, or the latest technology
- hide behind extensive call routing and ‘cyclical channel referral’ (the kind where the web points you to call, the call routing says you can do this online, when you get an agent they say go to a branch, and the branch say we can’t do this, you can do it online…) – you know what I mean
- do meaningless repeated surveys at every single touchpoint, on every single occasion with question wording that really doesn’t match the customer experience
They do build a holistic approach by understanding:
- the external view; the needs and preferences customers have as individuals; frustrations during the customer journey
- how customer expectations are set by the promises that the business makes (in all forms of communication)
- how the way a business is organised internally can be experienced and ‘feel’ from the outside
- service inconsistencies at different touchpoints, or via different departments
- the internal view; staff experience of dealing with customers; the challenges staff face operationally; the messages staff get about customers
- the need for a Board level sponsor and CX champions
- how mature their organisation is and what they need to do to improve
- why it’s important to adopt an evolutionary approach to their entire programme
- all the data they have available to them, not just data from touchpoint surveys, such as:
- -how queries and complaints are handled to an effective problem resolutio
- -using AI and text analytics tools to quantify verbatim comments
- how to use advanced analytical techniques to correlate, identify and prioritise areas where an improvement in performance will have the highest impact on overall business success
A holistic approach to customer experience goes beyond the delivery of a siloed measurement programme. Using a variety of CX measurement methodologies and metrics is the most effective route to creating a truly customer centric organisation.
Embedded at the heart of your business, it will enable you to understand what drives internal and external stakeholder perception, where you sit on the CX maturity dial, and where to allocate the investment, resource and time needed to execute and deliver the improvements required.
You can find out more about Beehive’s holistic approach to customer experience management in ‘Promises, Expectation and how to avoid the CX Gap’.