Roy Barnes

To compete in a world where more and more products and services are commoditized more quickly than ever before, you have to up your game and deliver great customer experiences at every point of interaction in your business. A consistently great customer experience is very difficult to copy and may represent a sustainable competitive differentiator for your company!

Following are tools you can use to gauge your progress on each step of improving customer experience, enabling you to see what you’ve done so far and get a handle on what still needs to be accomplished. Feel free to copy these tools and use them in your efforts to improve customer experience in your own organization!

Mapping your customer’s journey can provide you with a clearer understanding of his experience with your organization. Essentially, you produce a visual representation or “story” of the customer’s interactions with your company. Journey mapping yields the following benefits: It enables you to identify whether (and where) you may be confusing customers.

Customer experience is a dynamic discipline. It's always evolving, so you have to make an effort to stay on top of things! Here, you find several suggestions for additional customer experience resources.You'll notice that a great many of them are blogs. Fortunately, the community of bloggers who focus on customer experience is extremely open and sharing!

Want to improve your own customer experience delivery in a hurry? Here are ten things you can change today that will make an instantaneous impact on your customer interactions. Be patient. Patience, as they say, is a virtue — and it’s one that people who deal with customers must have in buckets. Here are some tips for dipping into your inner well of patience when dealing with a difficult customer (or other work frustrations): Take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

Of course, the best way to deal with angry customers is to do whatever you can do to prevent them from getting that way in the first place. Barring that, you need a plan to deal with these unhappy souls. To help you remember what you should do when you’re faced with an infuriated customer, here's a handy acronym: RESOLVED.

While it’s recommended that you limit touchpoint redesign efforts to 20 days, some processes that affect customer experience are too broad to be tackled in that timeframe. So, what should you do about those big broken processes? Before getting the answer to that, consider the mistakes organizations have been known to make by tackling projects that were too big for a reasonably quick resolution — projects like fixing the entire order-to-cash process or reengineering the product-innovation-to-commercialization process.

Are you still trying to get a handle on what great customer experience looks like? Perhaps an example would help. Years ago, a young woman named Stephanie was hired to work the front desk at a Marriott hotel in Denver. Bubbly, energetic, and born with a desire to serve, Stephanie lived and breathed the customer experience intent.

The majority of customer experience problems arise in one of the four following areas: personnel, processes and technology, customers, and financials. For this reason, the following questions that pertain to your customers' experiences can be categorized accordingly. 5 questions about personnel Have you clearly articulated the experience you want your customers to receive, in a way that all employees can understand?