Customer Experience Management

How we deliver customer experiences more often than not defines just how successful we are, as long as when delivering for customers, we also focus on sales being profitable with positive cash flow. This process of strategically managing a customer’s experience ought to encompass every aspect of the organisation through human resources, marketing, finance and operations.

How we practice reacting to customers underpins all we do in our organisations. Asking ourselves how we meet and ideally exceed customer expectations and increase their satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy are core platforms for customer experience management. This is a customer-centric strategic approach focusing on delivering, delighting and exciting, not just satisfying.

As a complete end-to-end journey, customer experience management is a series of reciprocal and sequential touchpoints which cumulatively define a customer’s experience, be it in-person, in their office, in your office, in-store, online or over the phone.

Linked closely with reputation management, where how things are done in our enterprises influences identity and image, customer experience management targets how an individual customer forms conclusions about an organisation based on their interactions. If a customer’s experience has been typified with lack of response to calls or emails, delayed communication, inaccurate information, poor customer-service or dreadful handling of a complaint, it is likely this customer will form a low opinion of what you do, your employees, your services and products. In a very short time this can lead to expression of negative views damaging the reputation of the enterprise.

Customer experience management is not so much a component of management, or a function of management. It is a series of expressions of the values which the enterprise uses as the glue holding all stakeholders together. In this respect, customer experience management differs from customer relationship management, which is defined as practices, strategies and technologies to manage and analyse many customers’ interactions and broad customer data with the goal of improving customer service relationships and assisting in customer retention and driving sales growth. Customer experience management is much more holistic, impacting on all areas of the organisation’s operations, specifically treating customers as individuals.

If your values focus on getting back to customer basics, if you are committed to listening reflectively to your customers and are prepared to generate new activities based on what you hear then you are well on the way to creating a customer experience management system which will deliver results. If you are not just selling one-off transactions but are committed to repeat buying, then you will be looking for the best possible touchpoints.

Key to expressing these values effectively is the speed of your reaction; developing an agile and iterative approach, where you ensure speed and simplicity are processes underpinning your service. If developing exceptional customer experiences are important for the enterprise then it is also vital these processes and activities are operating within the enterprise. This ensures internal customers as well as external customers are experiencing and reacting positively to the enterprise.

Ensure employees in the human relations department and the finance department know they are serving other employees. This will mean your sales staff are very aware of the quality of service they need to deliver for external customers. Sharing explicitly crafted values and training employees to value their customers is key. The starting point for customer experience management is focusing on the individual customer, sweating the small stuff and searching for competitive differentiation in a world where competition is increasing, where products are much more commoditised, and where technology offers new ways of engaging with customers but also makes it easy for your competitors to copy you.