“Customer Experience” is the current battle
ground for the industry to win new customers as well as retain customers and drive
better revenue and profit. Simply defined, Customer Experience (CX) is the
product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the
duration of their relationship. This interaction includes a customer's attraction,
awareness, discovery, cultivation, advocacy and purchase and use of a service. Forbes say that customer experience is the "cumulative impact
of multiple touch points" over the course of a customer's interaction with
an organization. It involves hard aspects like physical experience during interactions
at stores to softer aspects like interaction over digital media, perception,
social, psychological impact, etc. With the developments in technology,
significant changes have been introduced in the way customer is engaged and experience
is measured and improved. Significant investments are being planned in this
area and many companies have appointed Customer Experience Officers (CXO) to
spearhead the activities around it. One very important characteristic of the CX
is; it has a start but no end point, it needs to be improved perpetually. If we
do not improve the level of customer experience it automatically diminishes in
terms of customer perception.
This characteristic is very similar to how we
define Excellence; i.e. “Excellence is
the commitment one makes with one self to continuously do better than what one
has done previously in the activities one performs in personal and professional
life. The benchmark is oneself and it is continuously moving upwards. There is a
starting point (where you are currently) but no end point / final level of
excellence. It is a journey which typically has view of only next milestone or
two and remaining milestones emerge as we move forward”.
“Customer Experience” and “Organizational
Excellence” are two aspects which have similar characteristics and can be designed
to feed each other in a positive spiral giving dramatic benefits to an
organization
Author James Allen mentions that although 80%
of businesses state that they offer a "great customer experience”, only 8%
of customers express satisfaction with their experience. This throws
light on the gap between what is perceived great by industry vis a vis by
customers. This pushes companies to work hard on understanding customers better
and provide them a better experience. One of the mechanism organizations can
adopt is to drive organizational excellence initiatives based on the customer
experience needs. This will improve the excellence levels of various activities
performed by the organization and drive the customer experience automatically. This
cycle of achieving higher and higher levels of Customer experience through
different innovative excellence initiatives will drive the ultimate objective
of better revenue and better profits. A quote by Steve Jobs, “You have got to
start with customer experience and work back towards technology-not the other
way round” vindicates the approach mentioned here.
There are two approaches to build Excellence
initiatives which will be fed by the needs of better customer experience and
move the needle in the right direction.
1
Reverse Planning for a Customer Experience
thread
2
Creating multiple pairs of supplier/customer
within ecosystem
1 Reverse Planning for a customer
Experience thread
As we know there are multiple aspects / avenues
where companies connect with their customers such as in retail stores, on web
site/ mobile/social media, through service desk, through advertising campaign,
special interest groups, etc. In this approach we pick up one thread and create
connecting activities backwards till the raw material sourcing / design stage.
Identify critical activities in the same which will have impact on the final
customer experience. Analyse each one of them and identify initiatives to
improve the excellence level of the organization unit performing these
activities. The activity should be analyzed holistically from multiple angles
covering People, Process, Technology. Each activity needs to be questioned as
to can it be performed with higher level of excellence and what changes /
amendments that need to be brought out to do the same. You get a comprehensive
set of initiatives which are linked to a specific improvement aspect of customer
experience.
Let us take a simple example: “Customer needs
help in locating certain merchandise and wants to know some more information
about it and she asks an employee on the floor of the store”. How do we enhance
the experience customer gets during this interaction?
At the basic level, the employee on the floor must have the
information about merchandize, where they are located?, how to reach there?, how
much stock do they have in store right now?, are there any similar products
which customer can consider?, are there any deals going on the product requested
by customer or a similar product?, are there any related products that could be
suggested to the customer?. We can assess each of the area and see what is the
level of excellence we are working with, identify changes that we want to bring
in with respect to people/ process/technology so that we can bring it to higher
level of excellence and this have an opportunity to create a better experience.
In this case, we can check
- Is the information available with employee?
- What is the mechanism of making this information available to the employee on the floor
- Is it available to a few employees (category wise information distribution) or any one would have this information?
- How intuitive is the mechanism to provide information?
- Is the information accurate?
- How current is the information?
- How fast is the access to the information?
- How easy / fast search capability available with person on the floor?
Look at each and every aspect of information
with focus of how are we doing today and is there any better / faster /
efficient way to do it. Identify such areas as excellence initiatives and start
implementing them
This experience could be further enhanced, if
the person on the floor is well trained in engaging customer in an effective
manner. Every up sell /cross sell happens through a better engagement.
The third level of enhancement to experience comes when you
reach to the location specified by employee on the floor and you find your merchandise, it is not out of stock and has the same deal as mentioned by the
employee on the floor. This leads to other aspects of business like store lay
outs, stocking as per lay out, matching physical layout and electronic
information, stock levels, logistics aspects of merchandise movement etc. We have started the thread for customer experience
for a simple transaction customer has with an employee on the floor and how it
traces backward to various activities which need to be performed at a higher
level of excellence in order to provide a better customer experience. Analyzing and creating excellence initiatives in each area will help improving the
customer experience systematically.
2 Creating
multiple pairs of Supplier / Customer within the eco system
This approach handles the customer experience
at a different level. Instead of picking up a thread and going back till the
design stage, it works on a chain of Supplier / customers within eco system and
improvement in the specific experience at each pair level will automatically
improve the overall customer experience that the company can achieve. Some of
the pairs could be
- Customer and Store team
- Customer and IT Team
- Customer and Customer Service team
- Store team and Warehousing team
- Store team and IT team
- Warehousing team and Planning team
- Warehousing team and Production team
- Production team and Procurement team
- Production team and Design Team
- Production team and Sales team
- Sales team and Design team
Each pair has one service provider and one
service receiver and set of activities through which they interact and customer experience of this interaction is noted. This
interaction when analyzed gives clues for excellence initiatives to be
undertaken.
So, in summary, road to higher revenues and profits passes
through the focused excellence initiatives around customer experience.
