Best practices for companies to enhance their CEM
Customer experience management is the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations, thereby increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. We believe that it is a collection of processes a company uses to track, oversee and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal of CEM is to optimize interactions from the customer’s perspective and foster customer loyalty. To manage the customer experience, a company needs to create a strategy that encompasses all customer interactions.
Below mentioned are some of the best practices for companies to enhance their CEM.
Do not try to delight the Customer
Try to define what you mean by “delight” and focus your efforts there. “Delight” for a person from an engineering background might mean more features and functionality. For a financially inclined user, “delight” equates to being cheaper. For the salesperson, it could mean more customer freebies. For the inexperienced user, it could mean a simpler interface — and on and on. Therefore, any customer experience innovations should be far from fuzzy truisms such as “delight the customer” and aim for something that is more specific and achievable.
Sweat the small stuff
We are aware that tiny changes can make or break the customer experience. Hence, one should try to find the small ideas that will have big impact. Not all ideas are equal, and seemingly small ones might make all the difference. CEM leaders should always start with small ideas, but aim big.
Don’t tell the truth – Show it
Every new idea should be pitched using something beyond PowerPoint and Excel. Make the pitch tangible and appeal to all the five senses. The value of technology innovation is hard to discern theoretically. Any technology must be touched and felt to understand what it offers.
Embrace constraints in Customer Experience Innovation
Blue-sky thinking is the best way to approach innovation. In fact, a small number of well-chosen constraints about the customer experience innovation solution or process will drive more creativity than a blank-slate approach.
Be led by the customer’s needs, not the technology’s possibilities
One of the biggest errors that technology innovators make is to be seduced by a technology’s potential rather than being led by a customer’s actual needs. The farther away one is from the customer, the harder it is to evaluate the impact a technology innovation will have on a real-world customer experience.
Another important point to remember is that customer experience is often used to mean brand experience and user experience. However, they have subtle different meanings. User experience has a narrower meaning related to the use of the product or core service, rather than the whole customer experience. The brand experience has a broader meaning than the customer experience, probably because the customer’s experience of the brand is only one (albeit the most important) viewpoint, and other stakeholders, such as shareholders, suppliers and employees, also have an experience of the brand. These three different terms are clearly related. User experience is a subset of the customer experience, which, in turn, is a subset of the brand experience.
So, the next big question is: How would your customers define Customer Experience?
The understanding of the term customer experience by the customers varies widely, particularly between industries. For example, in the automotive industry, the repairs experience is second only to the driving experience. In retail, the customer experience is heavily determined by the customer’s ability to check-out without queuing, locate products and gain assistance in how to make use of products.
To conclude, most organizations already have at least one plan, program or initiative to improve the customer experience. Most of the large organizations have multiple disconnected projects and initiatives to improve customer experience. We, feel that at every stage the challenge is that each team, department or group has its own interpretation of what it means by “the customer experience”.Creating a consistent definition is important in getting the teams to work together, focus efforts and define metrics.
Authored by Navin Parti, Vice President,Q3 Technologies
