Today, customer experience has become a key differentiator for organisations in an increasingly competitive world. In order to build durable relationships with customers, you have to start investing in active Customer Experience Management (CEM or CXM). What is this? Gartner offers a solid definition of Customer Experience Management: “The practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.”

But how do you get started with all of this? Here are 5 key Customer Experience takeaways to jumpstart your organization!

Step 1 – Define your personas

The first step towards active Customer Experience Management is to get a good view of your different customers and their specific needs. It is important that you investigate the different needs your customers have and write them down in personas – which combine the customer needs and behaviours in separate profiles. This way you can start recognizing customers and assign them to a persona, which allows you to start giving personalized experiences.

Step 2 – Discover your own customer journey

The next step is to have a look along the customer journey of your organisation. An organisation’s typical customer journey consist of 6 stages:

  • Awareness – Customers becomes aware of a certain need and passively wonder about potential solutions. For instance, a customer dreams about a holiday to Paris.
  • Consideration – The customers actively start looking for a solution to their need. They gather information, compare possible solutions, ask for a price, request a demo, etc. For instance, a customer reads travel blogs.
  • Purchase or Decision – The customers choose a company, based on previous research. They decide to work together with or purchases from an organization. For instance, a customer decides to book a hotel through the blog she found most useful.
  • Use – The customers use the product or service on a daily basis. Important here is to offer a good experience next to your product or service! In our example, this would be a customer actually going on a trip to Paris.
  • Support – The real differentiator. If something goes wrong and a customer is in need of assistance, your customer service will have to make the difference. For example, the customer would like to make last-minute changes to her itinerary.
  • Advocacy – When you actively invest in offering a proactive consistent experience your customers will become your ambassadors, recommending you within their network. For example, the customer might be very happy with her experience that she shares the information of the travel agent through an Instagram post.

Step 3 – Gather customer feedback

Once you have discovered your customer journey and your target personas are in place, it’s time to start gathering customer feedback. Instead of sending out long surveys once a year, it’s better to identify key ‘business moments’ you want to measure. For instance, after purchasing online, after receiving an invoice, after closing a ticket in the service desk. If you ask for feedback in a personalised way, close to that key business moment, a lot more customers will give feedback.

It is also important to think about which questions to ask. This is where Customer Experience Metrics come into place:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) – This is a simple metric where you ask your customer how likely they are to recommend your services to friends or colleagues. Customers can give a rating from 1 to 10. Depending on the score given, customers get called detractors (1-6), passives (7-8) or promoters (9-10).
  • Customer eXperience Index (CXI) – To know this metric, you need to ask three questions: “Was it effective?”, “Was it easy?” and “Did you enjoy it?”. These questions are also scored from 1 to 10 and can give you a lot more insights into interaction levels, where the real problem might lay. For instance, if it is effective, but not easy, you need to look at how the process can be improved. If it’s easy but not effective, then you aren’t solving the customer’s true need.

Step 4 – Observe your touchpoints

Besides gathering feedback from customers, it is also important to observe the interactions through the different touchpoints. Whether this is a phone call, an email, a log in the CRM, an online purchase or something else, it is worth investigating. If you actively start monitoring all of your touchpoints, you become more proactive. For example, if you see that a customer is struggling with his online payment, you might want to launch a popup that offers guidance through live chat.

Step 5 – Start improving

The real challenge is to combine the customer feedback with the touchpoint observations into one consolidated dashboard that gives you the perfect overview of your organisation. This enables you to actively start improving your customer experience –  exactly what Onsophic CX offers organisations.

Because you know what customers want (feedback), and see what they do (observation), you can launch company-wide improvement initiatives (action). All of your customer experience data is in one place, which allows you to measure the effectiveness of your actions along the way and link them to business KPIs such as revenue and churn. This way you can monitor the true effectiveness of investing in customer experience.

Now that you have a grasp on the basics of customer experience management, it’s time to start taking action! Let’s get in touch and see how Onspohic CX can help you jumpstart your customer experience management strategy.

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