sitting at the board? It’s an oxymoron that
the key provider of revenues is represented
by a little sub department called customer
care to listen to complaints from the
customer who employs everyone. This
must be fixed as customer experience is
the future differentiator for any business.
Strategy
Every organization however small must
have a customer experience strategy which
is not disjointed but creatively woven to
be seamless to address various aspects of
creating solutions for customers in their
product offering. One may compare two
companies offering the same product but
customers choose to go to one. Why? The
experience.
The Chief Executive Officer or business
owner must be the driver of this strategy
and must create time to break it down
to staff for effective communication and
understanding. The customer experience
strategy should and must be aligned to
the corporate strategy so that there is
a standardization of execution at every
customer touch point. Understand where
the customer sits in the business and how
you listen to the customer voice and use it.
The People (Employees)
This is greatest resource in any organization.
Value your teams so that they can apply
their best skills and attitude towards the
vision of satisfying the customer. If your
employees are unhappy, the customer will
be worse. It’s one thing to imagine you
have a good product and customers will
buy. The gist of good experience lies on
how the product is dispensed. A five star
meal served on a dust bin with a big smile
is no longer a valued meal. It belongs in
the trash. That’s the difference.
If the employees are happy they will go
the extra mile beyond the call scripts and
resolve cases using more logic than set
procedures. Train the team to excel as a
team with skills and information will
do a great job. Trust your team to do
the best they can and create an enabling
environment.
Standardized Operating
Processes
Brands that win in customer experience
have a unique way of doing things. They
58 MAL32/19 ISSUE
Value your teams so that they can apply
their best skills and attitude towards the vi-
sion of satisfying the customer. If your em-
ployees are unhappy, the customer will be
worse. It’s one thing to imagine you have a
good product and customers will buy. The
gist of good experience lies on how the prod-
uct is dispensed. A five star meal served on a
dust bin with a big smile is no longer a val-
ued meal. It belongs in the trash. That’s the
difference.
stick to a standardized process and
product delivery. Today if you walk into
KFC, the chicken tastes the same, the
look and feel is the same and even though
you move from one location to the other,
the feeling is simply KFC. The next step is to identify who your
customers are and segment them
accordingly. Who are these customers and
what criteria will you use to offer different
services? Is it demographics, geographic,
psychographic, behavioral or multiple?
How can we ensure that this is the norm
for businesses? One is to ensure that you
develop end-to-end business processes
which are tested and tried through and
through. If you are the CEO of a company,
use your products and walk the customer
journey. Don’t order products from the
comfort of your office. Sit in the contact
center and answer customer calls so that
you are not getting the wrong information
from the revenue streams only. Understand your customer inspirations
and goals of your brand. What do they
want to achieve? What are their goals?
How can you meet that 100% at the
channels that address them specifically e.g.
you cannot send a granny in rural village a
tweet though you may use the medium if a
query is trending on-line.
I often use HR recruitment processes
and for most companies this is extremely
disappointing for jobless people who can
barely enter their data without multiple
failure points, ambiguous requests and
lack of acknowledgement after hitting
the submit button. If they review the
responses e.g. number of attempts,
finished successfully applications, then
they’d see the need for documenting their
processes and ensuring they are customer
friendly for a great user experience.
Customer Journey Mapping
This is a key point where you visualize the
steps that your customers will follow from
the point of prospecting to churn and map
it out for reference and clarity. The first
step is to identify how your business from
a strategic point of view will interact with
the customer and what areas of the brand
they’ll touch. How will you deliver service
at these points? What channels should be
used?
Now that you know your customer e.g.
Male, 38 years, middle class choose the
right products and map them to this
criterion but be careful not to fall in the
trap of profiling as this could lead to
prejudice. The other thing that you would
want to do is to review your touchpoints to
map them to the customer personas borne
of your segmentation and start building
relationships. Give channels for feedback
and use the feedback to improve the
journey. Lastly the customer journey map
must be kept alive and always improving
to ensure you adopt to new and innovative
ways of doing things.
Authenticity
A leader who is synonymous with good
customer service draws customers to his
business as there is a feeling of authenticity.
People buy people and not just anyone.
People want to trust the seller and in
gaining this trust they gain confidence in
the product they are buying.
Think about mobile money at the
beginning. Who was the first decision
maker at a regulatory level to approve this