What Does Your Customer Experience and Service Delivery Future Look Like?

What Does Your Customer Experience and Service Delivery Future Look Like?

Let me help you with some adjectives. Gloomy? Hit and Miss? Satisfactory? Hopeful? Promising? Revolutionary?

If the road to service delivery and customer experience future is not paved with intentional strategies for boosting or sustaining the delivery of great customer outcomes for your business, then these articles sadly, have not been helpful. So, let’s give it one more shot. Here goes.

 

If your future experience delivery looks gloomy, with an indication of persistent customer unhappiness, the one action that your business should undertake immediately, is to arrest the service slippage.

 

If your future experience delivery looks gloomy, with an indication of persistent customer unhappiness, the one action that your business should undertake immediately, is to arrest the service slippage. This will mean, at a minimum, identifying an easy to fix complaint, getting to the source of the problem and taking corrective action. This simple act of remediation, whilst small, can cause customers to take notice. Whilst the action will not win your business an award for excellence in customer happiness, some empathetic customers may decide not to defect to the competition. This should buy enough time to tackle and remediate complaint number two.

If your future looks like a hit and miss scenario, then it’s time to attach some penalties to the people and departments that are hitting and missing. Collaboration is a crucial lever in having a well-oiled internal, experience-rendering mechanism. When individuals and departments that should be working together seamlessly, keep dropping the ball, someone has to be held accountable. Please be warned that holding people and departments accountable for their deliverables can get a bit messy, (especially if the expected outcomes have not been realized). Because, after all, who enjoys being “shown up for incompetence?”

 

If your future looks like a hit and miss scenario, then it’s time to attach some penalties to the people and departments that are hitting and missing.

 

Is your experience future looking satisfactory? Satisfactory is just one level up from hit and miss. This means that your business has a fifty-fifty chance of keeping its customers happy. Not the best odds, but there’s still a window of opportunity to tip the scales in the right direction. A satisfied customer, as I’ve mentioned before, is one of the biggest risks to a business. It means that the customer’s needs are being met, but just barely. In this situation, the focus should be on raising the overall standard of the customer’s experience, “at all points along the journey,” to achieve a heightened level of excellence.   A full attack should be launched on “all” issues that are preventing the delivery of great customer outcomes.

When the current state of customer experience delivery is impactful enough to forge a strong feeling of confidence in the state of future delivery, projecting the outlook to be hopeful and promising, the business is in a good place with its customers. The need here, would be for the business to sustain the deepening of “ease of doing business” by ensuring that all customer-centric services e.g. self-service and payment solutions, continue to support customer convenience and speedy need resolution. Ongoing modernity should be the driver in this case.

 

Is your experience future looking satisfactory? Satisfactory is just one level up from hit and miss. This means that your business has a fifty-fifty chance of keeping its customers happy.

 

Well, we’re in the revolutionary domain. This is where the air is rare. Only those businesses that are determined to be the best in class for customer experience, populate this domain. Being revolutionary is a choice made by a business that is obsessed with being extraordinary within its sector. Having made the choice, all resources are mobilized to attain the goal. The businesses in this domain are the standout awardees for great customer experience. Customers speak in glowing terms and sound like devotees when they speak about these standout businesses.

The need here is for the business to go beyond being a great provider of useful products and services and to become a community hub that nourishes the vested interests of its customers. So, if a business is selling home furnishings, it becomes a hub for interior design creations. A hardware store becomes a hub for do-it-yourself solutions and a clothing retailer becomes a hub for helping the career-mobile   professional to build a bespoke business wardrobe.

 

When the current state of customer experience delivery is impactful enough to forge a strong feeling of confidence in the state of future delivery, projecting the outlook to be hopeful and promising, the business is in a good place with its customers.

 

Let me invite business leaders to contemplate the future and to envisage a world where the customer is evolving at a rate so rapid, that only revolutionary customer experience strategies will achieve relevance with customers.

It is said that, “the best indicator of future behaviour, is current behaviour.” If we add a twist to this adage, for customer experience purposes, then, a most pressing question that needs to be answered would be, “given its current state, what is the future outlook for customer experience in your business?’