3 Ways to Innovate Customer Experience

The secret to a good experience isn’t the assortment features, it’s the value derived in the customer’s experience with your brand. In a highly competitive market, customer experience is what defines the winners vs. the losers. A customer’s experience begins well before the purchaser speaks to the sales rep. For example, every Apple product is designed with the overarching purpose of making the time one spends with Apple an enjoyable experience. Visiting Apple’s website, visiting their store, or using their products – the customer experience is consistent, so how can your business emulate, obviously on a different scale, their tactics that have helped Apple become a trillion-dollar company.

A successful brand shapes their customer’s experience by embedding the fundamental value proposition in every feature and touchpoint.

Your innovation journey begins with a well-established Buyer Journey Framework that needs to be personalized for your business, products, and opportunities to integrate customer experience into all you do.

Every touchpoint builds your brand and how customers interact with your teams (sales, marketing, engineering, product management, HR, and client success).

Businesses live and die by customer experience, so think about the last time you had a great experience as a business and remember that in many ways, the experience is how you FEEL.

Here three simple tips to innovate Customer Experience!

If you’re unsure, customer experience exists with every impression of your brand as a whole throughout all aspects of the buyer’s journey.

Second, the framework to innovate Customer Experience is by focusing on three primary touchpoints that create the customer experience: people, place, and product.

1. Map the buyer journey, build personas, ask for customer feedback

Mapping the customer journey means you need to develop a framework to indicate all the current steps and interactions customers experience with your people, place (online, phone, a customer portal, email, etc.), and which product. The journey you want customers to walk thru is the journey to a panacea – An advocate paying their renewal, using every product you offer, and willing to splatter product review websites with 5-star reviews.

To create great customer experience, you need to build a customer journey map, develop buyer personas, and identify positive connection actions with customers. It’s ok to ask for and act on feedback, create helpful content, and build a community.

Here’s an example:

2. Get everyone on board

Once the organization is persuaded of the importance of experience, every department plays a crucial role.

• The marketing department needs to capture customer feedback and circulate that knowledge within the company and personalize communications accordingly.
• The service department must ensure that processes, skills, and practices are attuned to every touchpoint.
• Product development should embrace customer-led input on designing product features and functionality for a User Experience (UX) perspective.
• Human Resources should integrate customer experience into employee hiring and training.
• Account teams must progress from monthly or quarterly surveys to detailed touchpoint analysis and recommendations.

3. Measure Success

Without measuring success, you’ll never be in a position to enhance your capability to provide a market-differentiating customer experience. A positive customer experience is crucial to your business’s success because a happy customer will become loyal and advocate for your business. In today’s digital landscape, the Voice of Your Customer needs to be amplified on your website. This is a no brainer, but how do you innovate what you already know.

An excellent way to measure customer experience is Net Promoter Score® or NPS. When measuring NPS, consider data in the aggregate across teams to measure the overall customer experience. You can also collect NPS for in-product usage, customer service, and communication channels (phone, email, chat, etc.).ending a marketing webinar?

Using customer satisfaction and spot surveys consistently at critical junctures in the customer journey provides insight into your customers’ experience with your brand and product or service. You can use a cheap solution like Survey Monkey then move the data into your CRM, so associate with customers.

• Additional helpful measurements:
• Analyze customer satisfaction survey results.
• Identify the rate and reasons for customer churn.
• Ask customers for product or feature requests.
• Analyze customer support ticket trends.
• Collect on-boarding feedback
• Collect online and in-app experience feedback

Finally, you need to measure customer experience to determine what you’re doing well and where there’s room for improvement.

Conclusion

Remarkable customer experience is about making customers feel valued at every touchpoint of interacting with your company and brands. It’s critical for sustained business growth, promotes loyalty, retention, and encourages brand advocacy.

Managing customer experience means you need to develop a process based on your business’ maturity scale, but it’s never too early to start surveying, analyzing, and enhancing customer interactions.

Customer experience management demonstrates a clear investment in customer needs and offers greater value to your customers. If you don’t add any additional value over time, these customers look to your competitors when they catch up.