Make Customer Experience successful and profitable
A new and effective approach to customer experience
What does the customer experience really mean, in terms of effort and results? Why is it so difficult to implement?
The number of books, researches, conferences and articles on customer experience is proliferating. Not a day goes by without reading or hearing these two magic words.
This approach is repeated over and over again, perhaps because the thought process about it has not yet come to an end. In fact, it is often the case that the customer experience is limited to the consideration of customer satisfaction, sometimes with increased effort in the approach and unfinished intentions.
Several obstacles can explain this situation:
What the customer experience is is not really clear and delimited. Everyone has an idea that it is a question of introducing notions of enchantment, surprise or proposing a different contact situation, but there is no precise checklist of everything that the customer experience must include in concrete and operational terms.
It is not easy to build a customer experience. If improving customer satisfaction or removing irritants are widely shared objectives, taken into account by companies, the process often stops at this stage. However, the customer experience is based on 4 permanent and simultaneous dimensions that are currently not considered enough: the relational, the servicial, the experiential and the emotional.
The magnitude of the task, its beginning and its end are difficult to assess. To do so, it is necessary to determine precise targets of clients to which to propose experiences, to quantify precisely the number of experiences to be created and then to manage them in a project mode, in agile marketing for example.
The approach is incomplete and does not produce the expected results because it only deals with one dimension out of three. Indeed, efforts often focus exclusively on the customer journey itself but fail to take into account the importance of the company's customer culture and the expected profitability of these approaches.
RELATIONAL
From all interactions the customer has with a brand or a company, this is what the customer is going to remember of. Relationships must be consistent from the beginning to the end with true relational engagement at all points of contact.
SERVICIAL
The easiest dimension to optimize focusing on removing irritants and providing impeccable service quality
EXPERIENTIAL
Omnicanal experiments, looking for enchantment with a precise and limited "wow" effect.
EMOTIONAL
Emotional aspects play a role in the decision to buy and buy again. It is possible to anticipate them or even to provoke them. They are also present in the BtoB experiences.
The crucial importance of customer culture
The company can develop all kinds of plans to improve the customer experience, if employees are not aligned with them the chances of success are close to zero.
It is then a matter of working on two dimensions: the cultural and the operational.
Customer culture (or customer orientation) is a set of beliefs and values shared by all employees. It is essential to guarantee customer satisfaction at the very least and, at best, to offer them an experience. It relies on the customer culture of each employee, back office and front office, as much as on the one of the organization.
This customer culture must therefore be precisely measured, globally, by function and by moment of contact with the customer in order to know his starting level, determine a target to be reached and build the ad hoc action plan.
On the operational aspect, it is necessary to see or review, with regard to the company's customer culture, the existing processes that may be counter-productive (because they kill the customer culture) or the processes that are missing to foster this culture. More than processes, principles of action can be implemented to give employees sufficient autonomy and responsibility towards the customer.
Evaluate the expected profitability of customer experience approaches
Every initiative started and carried out in a company naturally seeks a result and a profit. In the end, this profit is necessarily economic and financial. Of course, the objectives of increasing the customer experience are multiple, for example, improving customer loyalty. But if loyalty is sought, it is because it is known that a loyal customer buys more often or even with a higher shopping basket. Therefore, this has a positive effect on profitability.
The customer experience can also be sought because it allows differentiation, thus gaining market share and ultimately a positive impact on the topline.
Thus, the evidence that creation and implementation of targeted customer experiences generate profitability is one of the effective drivers for rallying and mobilizing all functions and hierarchical levels in the implementation of such approaches.
Several obstacles may appear, explaining why the measurement of profitability is forgotten in the implementation of customer experiences:
The intervention framework is rarely outdated. The framework is rarely outdated, so it is necessary to target the categories of customers to whom an experience should be provided and then quantify the number of experiences required.
Regarding the economic and financial analysis, the finest granularity is often the most useful. It is then a matter of building this analysis at the level of the customer experience itself: how much does it cost me? How much does it bring me in terms of volumes, loyalty...? And in the end, is it profitable?
Marketers often have difficulty translating the results of a new offer or experience financially. Usually when it comes to the customer experience, even if it is cross-functional, marketers often do not have the necessary skills and reflexes to translate a project economically and financially.
The variables in evaluation models are numerous and their correlated effects are complex. Qualitative and quantitative, linked to customers, markets, competitors, prices... Predictive models deserve to be simplified to be better analyzed and exploited afterwards.
The other functions of the company are forgotten. The creation of customer experiences can meet customer expectations but can also have an important collateral impact on several functions of the company. For example, a 24-hour commitment for a delivery has a strong impact on the supply chain, ordering, invoicing, etc... But what efforts need to be made from an organizational point of view to guarantee this commitment? Is there a risk of making too many promises that might be broken? What is the final profitability of this new offer?
Specify and delimit the number of customer experiences to be lived to deepen them and make them more successful.
The risk in the implementation of customer experiences is also the sprinkling. This consist of scattered and uncoordinated initiatives, which individually may be very good ideas, but not very visible and not generating results at the cross-functional and cross-cutting level.
Customer satisfaction may be improved by such initiatives on a particular touchpoint, but it will certainly remain average on the long-term process as it is lower on other touchpoints. This scattered approach does not create an end-to-end experience.
Seven dimensions are therefore to be taken into account:
3: Customer of course, the company's customer culture and profitability
+4 for the customer dimension, naturally at the heart of the process: service, experience, relationship and emotion.
With a delimited and targeted number of experiences to be created, a precise roadmap based on the 7 dimensions, a project managed in agile marketing and then an economic and financial translation of the results, the success of customer experience approaches seems more easily achievable.