How to Improve Customer Experience: Take Action with these 7 Questions

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Sometimes popular business speakers make customer experience work look glamorous. What could be more fun than making customers happy? Personalize the experience, provide excellent customer service, and presto: happier customers! Why not just sprinkle in a little added delight? Why not just smile more? C’mon – have some fun! Your customers will remember you for it and keep coming back.

How to Improve Customer Experience

Psst… I’d like tell you a dirty little secret.

Customer Experience Investigation™ is not that sexy. Some days it’s not very glamorous or very much fun at all. We love it, but it’s really hard work.

And yet, companies repeatedly devalue the real work it takes to improve customer experience. They talk and talk, sleep on it, talk some more, discuss endlessly and yet never assign any real action to it.

The “Doing” of Customer Experience

There are real activities behind moving superior customer experience into action. Activities that require fortitude, dedication and most of all, honesty.

Next time you engage in a discussion about how to improve customer experience in your organization, I challenge you to think about action, not philosophy.

How to Improve Customer Experience

Ask one of the following actionable questions:

  1. What have customers been saying? Do we have any real feedback from customers to review?
  2. Are we keeping in touch with existing customers?
  3. Do we know why are our customers leaving for competitors?
  4. What have we learned recently by listening in on social channels?
  5. Have we been tracking customer-centric KPI’s? How does our customer retention rate compare with last month/quarter/year?
  6. What are we learning from experiences in other industries?
  7. How does the actual experience compare to what we would expect, based on our customer journey map? (Don’t have one? That’s a good place to start taking action.)

You have to MAKE it happen

Answering each one of these questions actually requires action- action you should be taking to stay on top of your customer experience strategy. It’s not a one-off thing or something to noodle on, it’s something to do consistently.

Taking consistent action on a customer experience strategy is as crucial to your business as tracking profits and growth, yet so many organizations have no real action plan. Are you on track to deliver?

What’s on your customer experience TO DO list? Don’t just talk the talk. Get to it!

Image credits: 42andpointless JonoTakesPhotos via Creative Commons license

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Jeannie Walters, CCXP
Jeannie Walters is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP,) a charter member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA,) a globally recognized speaker, a LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com instructor, and a Tedx speaker. She’s a very active writer and blogger, contributing to leading publications from Forbes to Pearson college textbooks. Her mission is “To Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers.”

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