Creating a SEAMLESS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
What is it, why is it so important, and how can it be achieved?
You might remember our introduction article on Customer Centricity Transformation. It defines the term “user or customer experience” like this:
The term “user or customer experience” describes the entirety of all user experiences in the context of an analog or digital product, a marketplace, a smart ecosystem or an IoT platform. The user or customer experience therefore describes the impact of the things mentioned on a user or customer. It reflects customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, a positive word-of-mouth effect, or a high net promoter score, as well as the economic prosperity of a company.
A SEAMLESS customer experience therefore means, that users or customers are guided and accompanied by a service or company throughout their whole customer lifecycle — without any disruptions!
What makes a customer experience seamless?
- the same distinguishable, professional brand appearance across all platforms
- the same high level of quality in usability, accessibility and tonality across all platforms
- connected platforms & services (ecosystem)
- giving feedback / being transparent about all (invisible) processes
- keeping in touch / regularly reaching out to the customer
- remembering the customer (purchase history, etc)
- learning about the customer (favorites, behavior, etc) — smart data analysis
- knowing about the customer’s current phase of life
- data-based allocation of situational relevant information / advice
- melted online and offline services (phygital experience)
Stay connected
Your company might have a very fragmented landscape of different technical platforms. And sometimes this is even necessary. But it is important that for the users / customers, this fact is made invisible. You can achieve that by assuring that all your platforms and services are deeply connected and corresponding with each other.
The closer you can get to your customer, the better the services you can offer.
Connecting platforms does not only mean to link services with each other. More than that, it means having one aggregated data pool with smart algorithms analyzing, evaluating and interpreting all that data, regularly generating practical recommendations for actions and continuous optimization.
Be convenient and relevant
Besides the connected ecosystem — which is usually completely invisible for the users / customers — these two things are very obvious to them:
Usability + Situative Relevance = Customer Experience
Usability and Situative Relevance are the key elements in creating an Ultimate Customer Experience.
Let’s go one step back and look at some definitions.
What is Usability? Usability is the effort a person needs to reach his/her/their goal effectively, efficiently and satisfyingly. Good usability enables users / customers to reach their goals faster and more pleasingly.
What is Situative Relevance? Offer the right services in the right place, at the right time, with the right sensitivity. To do that, of course, you need the right user data as mentioned above.
Customer Journey Mapping
A great tool for creating a usability-optimized customer journey is our template “Customer Journey Mapping”:
Use this template to visualize every single step of any existing use case. Then, brainstorm on any solution, shortening the number of steps down to a minimum. Generally speaking, you have reached a good usability if your users / customers are able to reach their goal within 2–3 steps.
To shorten the number of steps of a use case down to a minimum, try this:
- don’t limit your ideation by thinking “that’s too expensive” or “that’s not possible to implement”
- think of the latest, most innovative technologies
Sounds easy? It’s actually not difficult to come up with some exceptional ideas. It can be quite difficult, sometimes, to develop those solutions in a really good way. But instead of implementing something that’s already outdated tomorrow, always go for the greater vision.
Want to learn more about how to generate customer satisfaction by shaping a phygital experience?
Just stay tuned to our upcoming articles on Situative Relevance Index (SRI), Behavioral Analytics, Phygital Experiences etc.
Or you may want to have a look at our previous articles on
Customer Centricity Transformation and Ultimate Customer Experience (UCX) etc… ;)
Get in contact:
Eve Cecon | Business Innovation Strategist @ Sensory-Minds
e.cecon@sensory-minds.com
