Customer experience (CX) program

A customer experience programme is a methodical strategy for enhancing the quality of your company’s interactions with and value offered to its clientele. It entails tuning in to what clients are saying about you and then acting on that feedback. The first step in producing exceptional customer experiences is designing a successful customer experience programme.

Why set up a customer experience program?

The argument for spending money on the customer experience (CX) is as follows.

Customers are more loyal and less likely to switch brands when they have a positive experience with your company. Your company will benefit from their increased word-of-mouth advertising and their increased spending. Customers who are happy with their purchases are five times more inclined to make another one.

For this reason, it’s not shocking that businesses in a wide variety of sectors are beginning to see the value of focusing on the customer experience and the results that can be achieved via strategic customer experience management.

What exactly is meant by the term “customer experience management,” and how can businesses make it so that providing excellent service to customers is the norm?

We’ve established that the consumer also plays a role in creating their own experience, thus it’s impossible to have full control over the customer’s perception of your brand. The goal of CX management is to maximise the aspects of the customer experience that you have influence over.

The solution for many businesses and organisations is to create and sustain a customer experience programme. The goal is to monitor, analyse, and enhance the quality of your customers’ interactions with your company in every facet of operation.

Attributes of a great customer experience program

It takes a lot of work from a lot of people across the organisation to create the optimal customer experience programme. If you want a well-rounded plan, consider the following five factors:

1. Across-the-board company engagement

Every member of your company, not simply those in customer service or marketing, has some degree of influence over the quality of the service your customers receive.

Leaders will instil a culture of customer focus in their subordinates if they demonstrate such a value. The company’s top decision-makers, beginning with the CEO and working their way down to the front-line employees, must share a common understanding of, and commitment to, the company’s customer experience vision.

You can’t get anywhere without a plan, some support, and an employee engagement strategy that makes it possible for everyone on staff to carry it out.

2. Customer journey mapping

The success of your programme depends on your grasp of the consumer journey. When you map the steps a consumer takes to accomplish a goal or make a transaction with your company, you’re essentially putting yourself in their shoes.

You can’t engineer a customer’s journey because it’s different for everyone. However, you may create in-depth maps of the most common, or crucial, trips related to your organisation by collecting feedback and observations from customers.

Using the information gleaned from customer journey maps, businesses can better facilitate smooth, satisfying trips for their customers and enhance the quality of their experiences as a whole.

3. Digital customer experience know-how

The incorporation of digital activities like e-commerce and web-based services into your programme will necessitate some additional planning and development time. In terms of digital customer experience, you can think about everything from the design and functionality of your website to the connection between your call centre and social media. It will include interactions with businesses using wirelessly connected devices such as smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers.

If this is a digital-centric element of your business, keep in mind that the customer’s experience is likely not to be. Throughout the customer journey, customers are likely to move between online and offline venues, and may even do so simultaneously (such as shopping in store while consulting an app or website).

If you want to make digital customer experience a central part of your programme, you’ll need to put together a team and a procedure that can handle the complexities of a journey that spans several channels and devices.

4. The right kind of data

Information is the lifeblood of any customer service initiative. That includes not only responses from customers, but also fundamental business indicators like income, profit, and sales.

The majority of businesses have a plethora of useful operational data. You may learn about what has occurred in the past by looking at things like sales, website analytics, and customer behaviour.

However, the true power of customer experience is unlocked when experience data is layered on top; this is the information that reveals the human stories behind the growing and dropping numbers, providing context for the “why” behind the trends and patterns.

That’s why it’s crucial to incorporate customer feedback alongside operational data at the outset of any programme; doing so provides context for customers’ activities and gets you on the path to drawing connections and learning which levers to pull to influence operational metrics.

Systematically collecting and monitoring customer feedback is essential, and this includes gathering data from your website, contact centres, stores, mobile app, and even social media and online review sites. But it’s not enough to just get the data; you’ll also need to analyse it with methods like key driver analysis, text analysis, and simple statistical testing.

You can then begin drawing conclusions and identifying problem areas in the customer service delivery process. Here is where customer experience software (CX) comes into play.

5. Tech to turn data into actions

How has your company benefited from using CX software?

A high-quality CXM (customer experience management) software will aid your team in collecting customer experience data, structuring that data into actionable categories, and facilitating communication between departments.

The technology must also go the further mile by providing you with means of data analysis, reporting, and, eventually, action. By selecting a platform with sophisticated analytic features, you can get more out of your CX programme by identifying the primary behavioural drivers underlying your findings, prioritising your list of areas for enhancement, and even anticipating the course of events.

6 ways to kick-start your CX program

Good customer experience (CX) programmes aren’t thrown together; they’re planned and designed with aim. Here are some of the best practises, suggestions, and insights from Qualtrics XM Institute Head Bruce Temkin that will help you launch your customer experience programme with flying colours.

View Bruce’s presentation on (Re)Launching Your Customer Experience Program

1. Understand that better CX leads to more loyal customers

In contrast to popular belief, customer experience (CX) initiatives are not a frivolous expense but rather a strategic investment that can significantly boost profits. It is critical, however, that the value of your CX programme be made evident to the rest of your organisation through internal communications. When it comes to CX, it’s not enough to simply keep consumers happy; you also need to provide a transparent and quantifiable return on investment.

The results of our research suggest that a higher quality of CX results in a more loyal consumer base. Customers who have a positive interaction with a business are more inclined to use that business again and are more forgiving if an issue arises. They are also much more inclined to try out the company’s new products.

What this means is that the success of your business as a whole depends on your ability to consistently provide excellent service to your customers.

2. Focus on effort and emotion, not just success

There are often three perspectives from which customers view their interactions with your company:

• Success: to what degree did the customer achieve their goals?
• Effort: how easy or hard was it for them to achieve their goals?
• Emotion: how did interacting with your company make them feel?

In business, the primary goal is to help consumers achieve their goals. However, the time and care you put in will be even more memorable to your customers.

Additionally, client happiness can be explored in greater depth when effort and emotion are prioritised alongside results. An individual’s idea of a perfect customer service experience may not be the same as another’s, even in the same context. Therefore, if we want to improve the CX programme, we need to pay more attention to effort and emotion, which in turn needs us to add more thorough segmentation.

3. Implement CX across your organization

When it comes to providing a positive CX for your consumers, it takes more than just a select few heroic employees to go above and beyond. It’s about how you train everyone in your organisation to do their jobs well so that your customers always have positive experiences and your business achieves its goals. It needs to be a policy across the board at this company.

4. Establish a core relationship metric that tracks a key attitude

Customer sentiment is tracked over time in order to assess relationship quality. This is in contrast to a transactional metric, in which we inquire as to the customer’s overall satisfaction with the service rather than their experience with a single transaction, such as a phone call to the help desk or an online purchase. Relationship metrics, on the other hand, monitor sentiment over time, so that you can get a comprehensive picture of how your customers feel about your business. By doing so, we can ensure that the right experience is provided at the right time for the user.

5. Start small, with a mind towards building scale

Rather than attempting a large number of things that each contribute a negligible amount of value to the organisation as a whole, focus on a smaller number of initiatives with the assumption that you will learn how to scale their success as a result of your efforts.

6. Understand that better EX better CX

And finally, a focus on the employee experience (EX) leads to a focus on the customer experience (CX). According to a Qualtrics survey of over 1,200 top-level executives throughout the world, all of the executives who reported improved CX also reported improved EX.

In other words, the correlation between EX and CX is strong. When this happens, customers are more likely to remain loyal, which in turn boosts revenue.