The winds of change are blowing in the customer experience universe and some businesses have begun to realize that they need to pivot. We’re now in an era where the playing field has evolved into a complex, but necessary, mix of digital and human labour. The businesses that will be making the shift, should prepare themselves for the discomfort that comes with the journey of change and adaptation.
Achieving and sustaining customer happiness in this volatile and hyper-connected world, hinges on the need to pivot, (ah, here’s that overused word again), away from the traditional architecture associated with service delivery and towards what some call the new way of future-proofing customer experience. My take is that it’s simply about a business having the good sense to remain relevant in a time of rapid change.
Typically, one of the major complaints I hear when I meet with prospective clients, is that their previous efforts at achieving a permanent solution to customer experience excellence, have failed. They see an improvement over the short term, but there is no lasting effect, a situation that would have resulted in a major level of frustration for the business, since customers would not have experienced the highly desired, “wow” effect.
Excellence cannot exist in a degraded environment.
This state of limbo is a difficult place for businesses to reside. It’s a two-edged sword, where customers are not happy and the business knows that in spite of its best intentions, the service being delivered is missing the mark. An added complexity, is not knowing how to fix the situation, permanently.
The way out of this quagmire, is to say goodbye to some traditional approaches to service delivery, whilst saying hello to more efficacious ways of achieving the endgame of customer happiness.
The first goodbye would be to the reliance on “hope” as a strategy. Hoping that the business will do well by its customers, without the benefit of applying codes of practice, standards and customer-pleasing strategies, will only yield a customer value deficit.
A better strategy would be to approach customer happiness from an experience design perspective, where all aspects of what value means to the evolving customer, become the subject of the service delivery orchestration plan. Whenever we see a business getting rave reviews consistently, chances are that an experience design team created a blueprint for service excellence, that was being followed to the letter.
Customer experience management will need to have its own loud voice, a seat at the highest decision-making table and singular focus within the operations value chain.
I’ve mentioned many times, in previous articles, that It’s a good idea to say goodbye to using customer service training as the answer to all of the customer ailments and complaints that plague a business. If all staff attend training, but teamworking is toxic, the internal climate is saturated with irregular people management practices and disrespectful communication remains unmitigated, the customer experience will be a spectacular failure. Excellence cannot exist in a degraded environment.
Another goodbye would be to the practice of placing the responsibility for customer experience under the purview of the marketing department. When customer happiness is the driver of revenue, no business that is serious about its earnings will risk comingling its star function with another function of lesser importance. In other words, customer experience management will need to have its own loud voice, a seat at the highest decision-making table and singular focus within the operations value chain.
When the entire workforce of a business possesses a sense of urgency, so many unforced errors associated with untimeliness, lack of following up and failures in closing communication loops, can be avoided.
Yet another goodbye would be to the dangerous practice of recruiting bodies and not talent to customer experience roles. Hiring strategies should be so robust, that the majority of candidates are “high value” hires. When hiring for talent, the lens should not be limited to technical skill, but should target equally solid interaction skills, skills of influence and the skills that support both front-end and back-end efficiency. One such skill is that of urgency. When the entire workforce of a business possesses a sense of urgency, so many unforced errors associated with untimeliness, lack of following up and failures in closing communication loops, can be avoided.
One of the best gifts that a business can present to a customer, is keeping its promises. A deeply rooted sense of urgency, delivers incalculable value to the infrastructure that makes sure that promises are kept.
If traditionally, a business sets low expectations of itself and does not go beyond those expectations, pushing the rock up to the top of the customer experience mountain will be a formidable and laborious undertaking. Conversely, for those businesses that routinely set their expectations bar high, the going may be disruptive and uncomfortable, but not gruelling.
One of the best gifts that a business can present to a customer, is keeping its promises.
The lesson here is that if a business exceeds its high expectations of itself consistently, its going to find itself half way up the mountain.
All that this business will need to close the gap and get to the top, is science.