A comprehensive customer experience (CX) strategy implemented systematically produces powerful results. There is no ‘silver bullet’ for this, it relies on a company-wide commitment and a ruthless focus on ‘what matters most’ to your customers – implementing the people, process and product changes that will make the biggest difference.
Sounds like common sense. But it isn’t always common practice. Here’s our guide to the mistakes we see most often – the ones that hold the greatest potential to derail all other customer experience efforts. Better to avoid these than learn them the hard way.
Sin #1: Silo-thinking
In many organisations the customer experience is fragmented. Separate departments own separate but related operations. Marketing, for example, often communicates new propositions without first ensuring the front-line can deliver them.
To be successful, the customer experience must be owned by the senior management team. They must bring departments together to optimise resources, efforts, and budgets, creating an organisation-wide strategy for delivering the brand. Aligning Marketing, Operations, and HR behind the brand promise is critical to creating the internal commitment needed to deliver your desired experience. (We call this ‘Triad Power.’)
Sin #2: Lip service leadership
Leadership is vital for any significant organisational change, yet too often leaders fail to get involved.
When the CX isn’t performing, senior executives decide it’s a result of the customer-facing staff acting ‘off-brand’ and direct employees to ‘put customers first’ or something similar. Before returning to the ‘important business’ of the financials.
Our work has repeatedly shown that the most significant factor in creating strong companies (with strong financials) is leaders who take personal responsibility for demonstrating the brand values and who know what their customer values are.
Sin #3: Assuming all customers are equal
When working on customer experience with clients, we always begin by collecting customer data to inform the design of the new experience.
The most frequent client response to this suggestion is “We already have customer data, you don’t need to bother”. Yet whilst many organisations collect mountains of data, relatively few know who their most profitable customers are.
Which is a costly mistake.
Because typically, a few customers will represent a significant proportion of your profit. And crucial to the success of your customer experience is ensuring it’s differentiated in a way that these most profitable (target) customers value.
Sin #4: Assuming all touch-points are equal
Increasingly, brands are realising their entire customer journey must be seamless across different channels. But where many go wrong is to assume all touch-points are equally important. They aren’t.
Your key touch-points are the ones that either represent greater value to customers, or come at a memorable point in the customer journey (such as the final stage), or provide the opportunity to differentiate your brand promise.
So rather than driving your business into the ground by investing in every touch-point equally, map your customer journey, identify the touch-points with the most impact, and determine how to best deliver your desired experience at these ‘hallmarks’.
Sin #5: Going through the motions with training
Investing in customer service training does not guarantee organisations will deliver a great experience.
Companies pin their hopes on undifferentiated training to deliver a differentiated experience, often bringing in external consultants to conduct a generic workshop repeated once every year.
Such training isn’t effective as teaching internal champions and managers to cascade relevant learnings in the form of succinct, branded modules, designed to be easy to deliver over time. This allows managers to ensure the internal culture supports the desired customer experience change.
Sin #6: Putting technology in charge
Letting technology dictate your customer experience never ends well.
The mistake most organisations make is to install CRM systems before being clear about the customer experience they wish to enable, and without any thought about how the systems add value for the customer.
The role of technology should be to support the delivery of a pre-identified desired experience. Your unique customer experience definition and management methodology must come first. Without that to work towards, your technology will be working off its own meaningless script.
Sin #7: Measuring satisfaction rather than experience
Focusing exclusively on end-result measures won’t allow you to impact those end results.
Market share and profitability are vital measures of business performance, but are also lagging indicators. Whilst measuring customer satisfaction isn’t a winning approach either, with estimates that 80% of customers who switch suppliers actually express satisfaction with the supplier they leave.
The answer is to move up-stream. To measure and manage those activities you can take control of and that deliver the customer experience and drive customer advocacy. We call these the value-drivers and, if you get them right, you’ll create advocates who will recommend you to others and award you more of their business.
These seven deadly sins are not the only mistakes made in customer experience, but they are the most common ones. We’ve specialised in customer experience for long enough to know what works and what doesn’t, and we’d love to hear about your unique situation, goals, and how we can best help you achieve them.
To learn more about our research and how we work with clients to design new customer experiences that are distinctive, end to end, and that turn customers into advocates, download our white paper and get in touch for a chat.
