Customer Experience For Dummies
Overview
Gain, engage, and retain customers with positive experiences
A positive customer experience is absolutely essential to keeping your business relevant. Today's business owners need to know how to connect and engage with their customers through a variety of different channels, including online reviews and word of mouth. Customer Experience For Dummies helps you listen to your customers and offers friendly, practical, and easy-to-implement solutions for incorporating customer engagement into your business plans and keep the crowds singing your praises.
The book will show you simple and attainable ways to increase customer experience and generate sales growth, competitive advantage, and profitability. You'll get the know-how to successfully optimize social
media to create more loyal customers, provide feedback that keeps them coming back for more, become a trustworthy and transparent entity that receives positive reviews, and so much more.
- Gives you the tools you need to target customers more precisely
- Helps you implement new social and mobile strategies
- Shows you how to generate and maintain customer loyalty in order to achieve success through multiple channels
- Explains how a fully-engaged customer can help you outperform the competition
- Learn how to respond effectively to customer feedback
Your brand's reputation and success is your lifeblood, and Customer Experience For Dummies shows you how to stay relevant, add value, and win and retain customers.
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About The Author
Roy Barnes is one of the leading authorities on Customer Experience Design and Performance Management. He has more than 25 years of experience delivering world class results in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors.
Bob Kelleher is the author of Employee Engagement For Dummies and the Founder of The Employee Engagement Group.
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customer experience for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
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!
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Customer Service
What is meant by customer experience advocates? Simple — those employees who lead, direct, and foster change in the area of building and sustaining a customer-centric culture. Following are ten key qualities of awesome customer advocates.
They know their corporate culture may be the enemy
As you confront the realities of an intransigent corporate culture, an understanding of Newton’s Laws of Motion (albeit slightly modified) will serve you well:
A body in motion (your company) tends to stay in motion unless an external force (your efforts) is applied to it.
Customer Service
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!
Customer Service
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.
Customers. One day, they’re totally satisfied with your product line and customer service. The next? They’re ditching you for someone new. Their expectations change, seemingly every day! Unless your goal is to kill customer experience, you need to keep up with these changing — or, more precisely, rising — expectations.
Customer Service
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?
Customer Service
For customer experience to be great, every interaction at every customer touchpoint must be exceptional. In other words, the whole organization must work together to deliver a great customer experience. There are eight essential components to building a great customer experience program:
Developing and deploying your customer experience intent statement
Building touchpoint maps
Redesigning touchpoints
Creating a dialogue with your customers
Building customer experience knowledge in the workforce
Recognizing and rewarding a job well done
Executing an integrated internal communications plan
Building a customer experience dashboard
Step 1: Developing and deploying your customer experience intent statement
The process of building your customer experience program starts here, with a formal declaration of your desired customer experience through an intent statement.
Customer Service
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!
Customer Service
In 2011, Forrester Research built a model that predicted what would happen if a company improved its customer experience from below average to above average. Incredibly, this model revealed that in certain industries, a better customer experience could result in $1.3 billion in additional annual revenue. More than a billion dollars!
Listen up! Listening is important. These days, customers expect organizations — including yours — to act and communicate like people (and nice people at that). They expect to conduct conversations with you and for you to hang on their every word. That means you must watch and listen in on what’s happening at all your touchpoints.
Customer Service
The line between customer experience and company branding can be as thin as a supermodel. Even so, there are some important distinctions to consider. A company’s brand is an easy-to-grasp identifier that enables customers to quickly understand what products and services the company offers, as well as who the company is.
Your goal is to identify exactly what you want your customers to feel and experience at every point of interaction with your organization. This is your customer experience intent. Then you need to write it down. This becomes your customer experience intent statement.
Your customer experience intent statement should resonate with all the different parts of your business.
Customer Service
In many organizations, employees must interface with customers via phone. Often, however, customers are left feeling frustrated by these exchanges (or lack thereof). Following are some tips for easing their irritation.
Answer calls quickly
When answering a call, what is the optimal wait time? The definitive answer is, there is no definitive answer.
At the root of most frustrating customer experiences is decentralized, uncoordinated service. Exhausting cycles of telephone tag, endless explanations to countless service representatives, and circular referrals to rude, faceless, and uninformed customer-facing employees are all sure-fire ways for a customer to lose patience — and for your company to lose customers.
Customer Service
Odds are, nobody in your organization sees the entirety of your customers’ experience. Everyone in your employ is like a horse racing with blinders on. His field of view is limited to what is in front of him. “Race your own race!” people say. “Don’t worry about what anyone else is doing!”
While that advice might apply if you’re running the Kentucky Derby, it’s terrible for someone in business trying to holistically manage customer experience.
Customer Service
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!
Customer Service
Your customer experience intent team is charged with developing your organization’s customer experience intent statement. This statement — typically no more than a paragraph or two — should convey the experiential and emotional elements you want to deliver in a way that is inspiring, measurable, and easy to understand.
Customer Service
The question “why?” is a good one to ask when you’re trying to diagnose the root cause of customer service problems in your organization — hence this discussion of the Five Whys technique. This technique, often used in the “analyze” phase of the Six Sigma methodology, is easy to use, doesn’t require deep research or lots of quantitative data gathering, and best of all, is kind of fun.
Customer Service
It’s a fact: Customers hate to be ignored. And yet, companies do it all the time. This situation is made worse by the fact that customers now have a seemingly infinite number of channels to contact companies. They call, they text, they email, they snail mail, they post, they tweet, they blog — you name it. Your job is to respond quickly, regardless of which method they use to contact you.
Customer Service
As you’re designing your organization’s customer experience, your task is to forge an emotional connection with your customers. All customers move through a predictable series of stages in their interactions with your company.
They become aware of your organization through its media, marketing, and branding.
They find out more about you through your offline and online reputation.
Customer Service
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.
Customer Service
This killer quietly appears when an organization can’t step into its customers’ lives and understand their real needs — to walk a mile in their shoes, so to speak. The truth is, many companies suffer from the inability to get out of their own heads and put themselves in the customers’ mindset.
Too often, like ships passing in the night, what companies think is important to their customers isn’t.
Customer Service
What do customers want? Lots of things. But at the top of the list is for it to be easy to do business with you. Unfortunately, however, this wish doesn’t always come true, particularly if the customer runs into a problem. Often, something that seems like it should be very simple to fix winds up taking hours, days, or even weeks because organizations end up shuffling their customers around.
Customer Service
Sometimes, interactions with unhappy customers go beyond run-of-the-mill exchanges, ratcheting up to something more extreme. Even relatively benign customer conflicts can escalate quickly. When that happens, it’s up to you to take specific and focused action to prevent the situation from escalating even further.
You need more than a high-level view to sway your chief financial officer (CFO) to your way of thinking about customer experience. You also need some hard facts about customer experience in your own organization.
First and foremost, you want to convey how your customers rate you on three key metrics. (Note that you glean these ratings by conducting regular customer surveys.
Customer Service
Who should you enlist to support your customer experience efforts? Simple. The chief financial officer (CFO). Nobody likes the CFO. After all, the CFO’s very job is to shoot down hare-brained ideas generated by people like you. But they’re not bad people; they just require you to prove the return on investment for any idea you propose.
Customer Service
Perhaps author Edward Hodnett said it best: “If you don’t ask the right questions, you don’t get the right answers. Only the inquiring mind solves problems.” Here, you discover the right questions to ask to diagnose your organization’s customer experience woes.
The majority of customer experience problems arise in one of the four following areas:
Personnel
Processes and technology
Customers
Financials
Gather together a group of customer experience co-conspirators to review these questions.
Customer Service
So you know you need a plan for dealing with unhappy customers. But what should that plan entail? To help you remember what you should do when you’re staring into the bulging red eyes of an infuriated customer, try this handy acronym: RUN. Just kidding! Actually, the acronym is RESOLVED. It stands for the following:
R: Respond to the person who is upset
People need to be heard.
Customer Service
Your relationship with a customer is a little like a marriage. Keeping it on track requires hard work and focus. Sometimes, these relationships run like well-oiled machines. Other times, dirt, grit, and plain old neglect begin to gum up the works. And on occasion, the machine breaks down altogether. The relationship ends, and you’re left wondering, “What the heck just happened?
Customer Service
Merely knowing the core elements of a great customer experience is not enough. You must take steps to design that experience. Following are the five foundations of customer experience design:
Storyboarding the experience
Designing a great customer experience is a little like making a movie. If you want your customer experience to be as engaging for your customers as Avatar was for moviegoers, it all has to make sense.
Customer Service
A great customer experience does more than please your customers. It influences them to change their behaviors and do more business with your organization. (That means a great customer experience will ultimately make you more money!)
But how do you offer a great customer experience? Here are seven core elements:
Offering relevant solutions
In dealing with customers, you must leverage your understanding of what your customers are really trying to accomplish — that is, the series of actions they seek to complete — and of how they think about and react to what happens to them along the way.
Customer Service
Focusing only on finances misses the point of customer experience. This view that only finances matter, often referred to as “short-termism,” was the subject of an article in the Washington Post by journalist Neil Irwin, titled “How the Cult of Shareholder Value Wrecked American Business.” Irwin writes:
The imperative to boost near-term profits and share prices is a self-reinforcing cycle in which corporate time horizons have become shorter and shorter .
Customer Service
If you can’t persuade your chief financial officer (CFO) and other senior leaders of the value of great customer experience, then scare tactics may be your only option. In other words, you’ll have to show them how poor customer experience can hurt your bottom line — and help that of your competitors. Here are some handy statistics:
Studies suggest that failing to deliver a high-quality customer experience can result in an erosion of your company’s customer base by as much as 50 percent over a five-year period.
Customer Service
Many companies simply don’t see the importance of the ongoing customer experience over time as it relates to their product or service. Too many organizational leaders are myopically focused on one thing and one thing only: the product. How much does it cost to produce it? Is the product meeting our quality standards?
Customer Service
Naturally, you, your chief financial officer (CFO), and your chief executive officer (CEO) are probably wondering just how much you have to improve your customer experience score to move the three key metrics — recommend, switch, and repurchase. To figure this out, you need to perform correlation analysis.
Correlation is simply the relationship or connection between two things.
Customer Service
Nobody’s perfect. But some customers come pretty darned close. These so-called “perfect customers” behave in ways that save your company money. For example, suppose you work for a utility company. In that case, your “perfect customer” might behave as follows:
He’d never contact the call center. For some companies, the cost of running a call center can run $12 to $15 per call!
Customer Service
Pareto analysis follows the Pareto principle. In basic terms, this principle states that in all situations, 80 percent of problems come from 20 percent of causes. Conversely, and more importantly for our purposes, 80 percent of a problem’s resolution comes from 20 percent of the fixes. The challenge is to determine which fixes fall in that 20 percent.
Customer Service
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.
Customer Service
Touchpoint. What does it mean? Simply put, touchpoints are all the ways in which your customer interacts with your organization. Each of these interactions takes place at a particular point in time, in a certain context, and with the goal of meeting a specific customer need or want.
Customer experience begins to be manifested in one place, and one place only: at each of your touchpoints.
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.
Does your organization have a chief customer officer — one person who is responsible for ensuring that your customers enjoy a great customer experience? Or is there an ombudsman of sorts — someone who has the power and “air cover” to strongly advocate for the customer’s best interest? Probably not.
Only a very few organizations have this role, but most should.
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