CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

The Customer Experience: An ongoing learning process.

The Customer Experience is a strategic imperative and therefore requires Senior Management buy-in.

Deciding to listen to customers is the first step towards creating a customer-centric organization, and is the essential source for initiating ongoing innovation processes.

The diagnostic stage represents the starting point for thinking and doing things differently. Methodologically, it might be useful to answer some questions in order to work with interdisciplinary internal teams and customers.

How does your Organization define Customer Experience? What experience do you propose? What is your offer? How is this experience delivered? Is it aligned with your customers’ expectations? What is your Voice of Customer Program, how does your organization listen to its customers? What actions is your organization implementing to improve this experience? What Journey do you propose to your customers? What experience aligns with the interests, preferences, behaviors and expectations of your target market?

There are various Management and Research techniques and tools to answer each of these preliminary questions, with the goal of understanding and resolving each one.

The gap between the Experience desired by the customer, and the Experience provided by the organization will determine the range of innovation and creativity to achieve greater profitability and competitive differentiation.

From our perspective, the Customer Experience Management Model is composed of three key factors:

• Product or service. Products or services meet customers’ needs.
• Interaction. The ease of delivering what the customer needs when interacting with the company.
• Brand. The customer feels an emotional bond with the brand.

These three factors are the expression of the Individuals and Culture of the company, of the systems and the technology, of the measurement, of the impact on the economics and financial indicators and of the policies of the Organization.

How do we obtain data for each of these factors? Do we have this data internally? Or should we generate this through Research? There are different types of indices to measure the Customer Experience. The NPS (Net Promoter Score), the TCS (Total Customer Satisfaction) and the BCE (Benchmarking Customer Experience). The NPS became widely popular for its ease of obtaining data, although from our perspective, it doesn’t sufficiently consider all expressions of customer loyalty and satisfaction in favor of solely recommending products or services offered.

On the basis of the Voice of the Customer Program (VOC) and Voice of the Market (VOM), we will identify the vital processes (Vital Processes) i.e., those processes of low performance and high impact on the Customer Experience.

Once the processes to be improved have been prioritized, ongoing innovation teams will be formed, which will become change agents reporting to an Innovation Committee.

The Innovation Committee will represent the forum for the presentation of ideas for the ongoing improvement of the profitability and sustainability of the business.

To ensure the success of the processes, it is essential to provide all the necessary tools to the change agents to facilitate their efficient implementation. Training is one of the great assets for innovation!