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Managing Customer Experience Part 2

Managing Customer Experience Part 2

In continuation of the above topic tagged Managing Customer Experience Part 1,  I am going to be discussing  how to design  a customer experience programme.
As clearly indicated in my post titled; The Imperatives of Managing Customer Experience on my linkedin page adewale Oluwayemisi there seems to be a greater need for willing organization to adopt managing customer experience as a strategic approach. 

Designing your customer experience programme should start with you having an adequate understanding of customer expectations at all time so you will need to be proactive at monitoring the external happenings and looking inwards to adapt to changing situations.

Planning 
1. Internal audit
Leaving to chance will not guarantee a consistent and expected results, you need to carry out internal audit to  determine the level of gap that exist in the area of capabilities, so as to be able to fine tune the ones that can be remedy through investment e.g Skills training, system and process enhancements and the ones that need to be outsourced. I will suggest you do a Mckinsey 7s audit in this regard to determine your strengths and weaknesses in comparison to other competitors, with this you would be able to determine your positioning strategy in line with customer expectations and the resources available to you. 


2. Set Objectives
Customer experience design is not and should not be seen as a 'short term measure' to increase sales, hence the need for commitment to it should long term, clearly defined, resourced and implemented. Long term objectives/ expected ROI should be fundamental to the adoption of the XC as a strategy rather seeing it as fad which needs to be copied as a result of it been a trending strategy. Marketers and organizations should clearly states what are the objectives to be achieved by implementing XC  in the short-long term period.

3. Get the necessary Buy-in
It is highly important to get the buy-in of the Board so as to make required resources available to finance the programme and also to give it the necessary support during each stage of the programme lifecycle, of equal importance is the buy-in off the staffs, don't forget that these are the people that are directly and indirectly connected to customers at various interface and touch-points, by implication they are critical to implementing a successful programme as they can make or mar relationship between organization and its customers.
Making your workforce happy will motivate them to give you more and you can only do this better by applying internal customer experience management as an internal marketing programme design to to retain and attract best talents.

4. Know Your Customer and how they prefer to interact with your organization
An effective customer experience programme can only be put together, if the people in charge of designing and implementing XC programmes are familiar with the customers they are to serve better. To develop a better understanding of your customers you need to adequately gather information about who the customers are, where they are, how they prefer to be engaged with,  their expectations of your organization and offerings, behaviour, buying power, lifestyle etc. However, there is need to avoid the temptation of drawing up a list of customer expectations by marketers, doing this will not give you the right picture of what really are customers expectations, rather than using laundry list classification, you need to directly engage the customer through research, direct feedback and social interactions. To do this better ensure your segmentation is properly done separate the apples from the oranges, keep an up to date database of your customers.

5. Reconfigure or design your touch points to reflect customer expectations
Having satisfy all the above, you can now re/configure your touch points value chain to reflect and  meet customer expectations at each interface for example where information is requested such information should given to customer with clarity, and where support is required such should be delivered according to laid down brand promise or above expectation, but not below the promise, you should always  remember that customer will always have expressed and salient expectations and that most human being are psychologically wired to feel emotionally satisfied with a high tendency to repeat interactions with a rewarding event, or to discontinue with     an event that fall short of expectations. For example, you will be more at home with a Telephone service provider that gives you a monthly itemised bill for calls than the one that lump all your call cost together.  

6. Delivery of Promise

We all value people that keeps promises, you need to work with your staffs to deliver on the brand promise you make to your customers, if not you don't have business implementing customer experience. The resultant effect of failed promise may be of disaster to your business and its performance so ensure that all touch points customer are left happy,  for example sending a wrong invoice and delivering of a blue shoe instead of a wine colour shoe ordered  to customer will create a nasty experience if the error cannot be promptly rectified.


 To be concluded in Part 3
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