How many times have you not left a store unserved and unhappy?
The customer experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. The quality and impact of your CX is a result of how you build your customer journey, analyze its impact, and make the necessary adjustments to correct weaknesses and make improvements.
Imagine you own a home electronic store. A customer is looking for a new camera. He can’t find an answer about the product in your store, and no representative has offered assistance. Rather than going to the effort of seeking out an expert in your store, he uses his mobile phone to find the information, make the purchase with someone else, and then share the experience on Facebook. Or a different scenario; the customer actually gets hold of an expert – but the wrong one. This expert knows everything about TVs but nothing about cameras.
That customer failed to receive the service they expected at a critical point in their journey, and had a poor customer experience.
In an alternate version of this scenario, the customer is looking for a camera. He checked into the store via a meet and greeter at the entry, making your staff aware of his need. The customer is connected to the appropriate associate available to answer his questions personally. The customer receives attentive service and an efficient process. He buys the camera and goes on his mobile phone to share a positive experience.
Certainly this is only one example in a limitless number of different scenarios, but it illustrates how each small piece in a customer journey can dramatically impact the total CX. A complete CX-focused environment engages four key efforts:
- Build
- Track
- Measure
- Innovate
Build
As we saw in the scenario, how you design your service environment makes a tremendous impact on the quality of the customer journey. The process of structuring the resources to accomplish a quality CX begins with customer journey discovery – a process of mapping each touch point from the first engagement through post-service follow-up. It’s likely that the customer journey will span online, mobile, and on premise. From the first touch point to the last, every channel offers a familiar brand experience and the right resources to accomplish objectives with ease.
Track and Measure
Continuously gathering and analyzing journey data points generated by each journey informs the design of the service environment, equips staff members to make informed service decisions in real-time, and drives dynamic updates to the customer journey that address actual customer needs.
Innovate
A host of fixed and variable factors impact the quality of your CX. By tapping into BI resources, you can look to actual data to find new and better ways to optimize each step in the customer journey. That might mean using volume patterns to put mobile queuing and digital signage resources in place to improve operational efficiencies even as a location is stressed by customer volume. Or it might mean knowing what locations would benefit from mobile workforce tools to ensure customers can always engage an expert from wherever they are in your environment.
Ultimately the structure of your environment provides a roadmap for the customer experience. The data generated across the customer journey provides a roadmap for how you design that experience to be ideal for your customers and employees. All are vital because a successful CX is one that works well for everyone in every channel at all times.
Is your CX environment engaging all four components? If not, start thinking hard how you can improve your approach to provide amazing experiences in your operations.
Image Courtesy: Qmatic/Dreamstime
