When Amazon announced last year that they were moving to a customer-first business, they believed that they were unlikely to see profit for 2-3 years. In actual fact, from June 1 2015 to June 1 2016, they saw their share price almost double.
Being customer-focused isn’t just good for your customer, it’s also good for your business. So what’s getting in the way?
These are some of the biggest problems that we’ve heard from people trying to achieve customer experience success:
- Measuring impact– the solution to measuring your CX success is not a simple one; you need goals, experienced, confident staff and they need technology to support them. Without predefined goals of what CX success looks like to your organisation, how will you know if you’re kicking goals? Hiring staff with a passion for CX and giving them the resources necessary to report success back to you is the final piece of the puzzle.
- Illustrating the importance of CX – this problem is far-reaching, regardless of size or function of companies. Showing internal stakeholders how important CX is to the company is hard. Consider using case studies from other companies or testimonials from your own business that back up your case. Once you’ve got a CX plan in place, report back to stakeholders regularly to show them what impact it’s having.
- Linking UX and CX– many companies pour a great deal of time and energy into their customer experience and their user experience separately, but fail to link the two properly. If your call centre staff are hitting targets, and your website is running perfectly, but you’re lacking a good CRM, you’re missing out on opportunities to truly optimize the customer’s experience.
While some tricks for CX success can be found in your ability to create good processes and reporting, a significant portion of it is simply being customer-focused. If you put your customer at the heart of what you’re doing and ask yourself fundamental questions about why you’re providing certain services or products, you are well on your way to creating a great customer experience.
Here are six customer experience questions you should be thinking about:
Are there appropriate channels to hear customer feedback about their experience?
- Are we continuing to meet customers’ needs?
- Do we consider customer experience or efficiency first?
- Do we have the right team to be customer-centric?
- What do I want my customers to see/think/feel about their experience?
- Do our UX and CX plans need better integration?
