Winning Strategies for Great Customer Experience — Part 3

The first part on “Winning Strategies for Great Customer Experience” was about DEFINING targets and brand purpose, and the second part was on DEVELOPING strategies for a comprehensive Customer Experience (CX) transformation roadmap.

In this part, I will be discussing the third strategy — the strategy to DELIVER new experiences that is adaptable and nimble to the changes in customer behaviours, preferences, and trends. There are 4 capabilities that I see critical for success:

1 // Customer-centricity

From the C-suite to the business front, employees must have the necessary tools and skills to deliver the best possible experience for stakeholders and customers.

Prioritise the development of new capabilities and integrate this as a part of Business-As-Usual on a periodic basis by combining digital courses, live workshops, and ongoing nudges to support the developement of new capabilities. Each learning journey on capability development is tailored to a specific role within the organisation. For example, business front roles should receive practical tips on the best ways to engage with clients and customers by getting trained on the best practices of leveraging on the consumer insights and Martech tools to demonstrate empathy and relatability, and be well-equipped with the solutions that they can offer. On the other hand, CX leaders and innovation teams should build skills on redesigning customer experience and deliver the same by receiving best practices on leveraging the empirical evidences brought forward through design testing and experimentations on customer samples to drive CX.

It is therefore critical to support, accelerate, and make it a habit to integrate customer-centricity within the organisation through design thinking in the early stages of the strategic planning process.

2 // Integrated Technology Suite

A technology suite that spans the organisation — that is accessible to all business units with tailored services catering to the specific business needs — is important to deliver exceptional omnichannel customer experience. It often takes the form of a digital platform built around microservices, API and customised software tools. These should be put in place with the purpose to enable employees to quickly and flexibly access information and knowledge on trends, empirical evidences, and solutions to help with having conversations with clients from different industries, and strategising processes, plans and roadmaps.

Similarly, to deliver services to customers it is important to have a seamless, single omnichannel platform that integrates the existing platforms with each other. For example, the customer on-boarding journey of a retail brand can be redesigned to deliver a simplified enrollment process by minimising the touchpoints, and terminating any paper-based processes. Instead of prompting the customer to enter their details that might already be available, you could retrieve the consumer data from your already existing customer database. Keep the look and feel of your brand consistent by providing a similar interface and experience when used on different platforms — app, website, or various social media channels. To deliver this reimagined seamless and simplified experience, it is important to rebuild the underlying technology stack. This requires the integration of the technology and strategy teams to innovate the omnichannel platform which enables to transform what had been set of disparate, paper-based, channel-specific processes into a seamless, digitally enabled omnichannel experience.

3 // Agile Operating Model and Governance

The autonomy to make decisions by the innovation teams is critical and makes a significant impact in delivering exceptional CX. This means implementing agile decision-making processes and assigning decision authority to individual teams at a level that accelerates operations, and removes any roadblocks. This requires internal negotiations, reimagined standards of procedures, and updated terms and policies to keep up with the dynamic market changes, and a governance system that makes responsibility, ownership, and control centralised to the CX team with reasonable caveats in place that together can deliver extraordinary results. For example, by reducing the employee request or approval backlog, or by delivering the content or implementing the design while the trend is still on, brand and audience engagements and customer satisfaction scores can increase and create the much needed awareness.

4 // Prescriptive Performance Management Systems

Organisations are now increasingly using predictive analytics, machine learning and big data to get a holistic and a representative view of the customer experience than relying on just customer feedback which often provides an incomplete, biased, and an inaccurate view of the actual customer experience. As a basic requirement, organisations need management systems with sophisticated feedback outputs that provide insights on which behaviours, which strategy, and which narrative yield the best results. This will help with advising delivery teams on where to focus their efforts, what actions to take, and how to deliver.

For example, an e-commerce brand can build a capability that scores the experience of every single customer based on data such as recency (how recent did they buy?), frequency (how frequently do they buy?), and monetary (how much did they spend?) experiences. By using machine learning to predict the customer score for each customer based on their individual experience, the brand can dramatically improve its narrative and messaging, and showing up with relevance, thereby delivering enhanced customer experience.

Bringing it all together

A comprehensive CX transformation is inevitable for brands to gain a sustainable advantage over their competitors in this climate of increasing customer expectations, fierce competitive dynamics, evolving market and industry trends, and the need to simplify internal complexity.

Here’s the summary (and the link to) of the 3 strategies that brands need to bring together:

1. Clearly defining targets and purpose, and the value wanted from the CX transformation.
2. Transforming the business through agile methodology by creating cross-functional team composed of CX experts, designers, marketeers and strategists across regions
3. Embracing new capabilities on technology, advanced analytics and mind-sets by transforming the underlying capabilities, and implementing accelerators and enablers to deliver great CX through rapid iterations, idea generation, prototyping, and through virtual training sessions around key skills such as agile, design thinking and problem solving.

To get started on the CX journey, brands can use the following methods:

• A series of 3–4 workshops to align around customer-centric aspirations and the associated targets and brand purpose
• Look into internal or external benchmarks to set a target and a timeline for tracking progress and achieving it
• Launch one or more ad-hoc projects that show results with minimal investments of 8–12 weeks and create the excitement and support
• Scale it up across multiple experiences until it becomes the standard model
• Deploy an analytics engine within 3–4 months enabling the team to identify customer and audience behaviours and actions leading to better strategies

This redesigned journey of setting a bold aspiration that reflects brand purpose, of creating the momentum by launching projects that show concrete results, and of building an integrated customer insights and action engine can help brands become more customer-centric and deliver great customer experience!