Many people believe that improving customer experience (CX) is complicated, confusing, expensive and requires a lot of effort. At Clarasys, we do not believe this is the case. A great CX is usually the result of consistently delivering against the customer’s expectations.

All customers, whether B2C or B2B, want a product or service with the following three characteristics:

• a cost that is within their budget
• quality that meets their expected standards
• delivery standards that meets their needs

In order to improve your CX, a good starting point is to make sure that you understand what your customer’s expectations are in terms of quality and delivery. This understanding will ensure you are tracking the right leading operational KPIs to generate the insight you need to consistently meet their expectations, improve your customer loyalty and to grow your top-line.

The question then becomes: how can you integrate your customer experience with your operational performance? Let’s look at a few simple steps that will help you get started.

1. Understand who your customers are

The first step is to build a comprehensive picture of who your customers are. If possible, take a data-driven approach to look at your customers, and then segment them into relevant groups (i.e. by demographics, behaviours or benefit groups). Customer personas are a useful tool during the analysis to help your organisation understand and empathize with different customer groups.

2. Map customer journeys

A customer journey map is the visual representation of the experience a customer has with an organisation. It allows the business to understand the key interactions with their customers and the moments of truth for areas in which they need to improve to deliver a great and consistent CX. A good journey map also captures different tools and systems that support the customer, as well as the different business teams that get involved throughout the process.

3. Gather customer feedback

For businesses to truly understand where to focus, they need to develop an approach for both customer listening and customer feedback. It is important for a business to gather both qualitative (customer verbatim gathered through interviews, surveys, etc.) and quantitative feedback using CX metrics like NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) or CES (Customer Effort Score). This feedback should be captured to understand the customer’s perception at three different levels: the overall relationship, individual journeys (i.e. the buying process) and individual touchpoints (i.e. a service call) in order to provide a further layer of understanding and measurement of customer sentiment.

4. Understand your customer’s needs

Now that you know who your customers are, you’ve mapped their journeys as customers, and have their feedback, it’s time to go one step further and reach out to some select customers to work out their minimum expectations. You can then define the relevant leading operational KPIs and set clear targets to track how well you are meeting the needs and expectations of your customers. Additionally, it’s important to focus on understanding the strengths of the relationship between your leading indicators and your CX metrics so you can better prioritise your efforts.

5. Create a CX dashboard and drive CX improvements 

Dashboarding is the best way to maintain a direct view of the leading metrics behind your operational KPI’s driving your CX. Sharing the metrics that matter most to your organisation’s leaders in real-time will enable your teams to more clearly understand progress involving CX. Using your existing data and systems to visualise your CX will clearly articulate where the organisation stands against customer expectations and organisational targets. When in harmony, the marriage of data and CX will improve employee engagement and top-line results.

Now more than ever, customer experience is a differentiating factor that can make or break a business. By considering these steps, we can help you see that embedding CX across your business is time well spent.