Part 1 of Customer Experience Success Series: Get In Tune!
An out-of-tune piano or violin may be one of your most vibrant memories of a poor user experience. Every one of the strings and keys must be in sync, no exceptions. And so it is with every one of the groups in your company that is managing part of the end-to-end customer experience.
CRM, VoC, UX, FCR, NPS, DX, and so on – it’s more than alphabet soup.* They’re all parts of a whole.
Business results are correlated with coordination of customer experience management methods. Companies that foster communication or central supervision among managers of different types of customer experience (CX) endeavors demonstrate better results than other companies.**
Don’t Listen with a Tin Ear
Step into your customer’s shoes and think about it: one part of the company you’re buying from asks you to participate in a survey where you voice certain frustrations, and shortly afterward another part of the company asks you to engage in the loyalty program and promote how wonderful the company is. Or maybe you’re buying multiple product lines — each one sends separate surveys, engagement calls to action, and so forth. And that’s supposed to make you love their company?
All you really wanted in the first place was to get certain products to move ahead in your life or business, right? So there are typically two things out of tune: coordination among managers of various CX efforts and coordination of CX efforts with times and modes that are logical and non-disruptive to the customer.
Here’s How to Get in Tune
- Take an inventory of who manages what across the entire customer lifecycle.
- Anyone asking customers for something
- Anyone communicating with customers
- Anyone making policies that have a direct or ripple effect on customers
- Acknowledge contributions and intentions of the formal and informal CX managers.
- Show them how they’re all parts of a whole.
- Help them see their collective effect on customers.
- Coordinate efforts across all of them,
- Create an intranet space for them to share timelines, artifacts, insights.
- Establish a monthly check-in for representatives to coordinate.
- Set up and foster communication channels for them to keep one another informed.
- Coordinate efforts to fit the customer.
- Find out what timing and modes of your CX efforts make the most sense to customers.
- Establish triggers that indicate a customer’s readiness.
- Tailor CX efforts to be logical and non-disruptive.
- Close the loop internally and externally to prevent recurrence of hassles.
- Sensitize non-customer-facing groups to CX realities to drive anticipation and proactive CX excellence throughout your company.
Get in tune and you’ll stand out above your competitors’ out-of-tune customer experience management. Customers will sense your stand-out harmony and reward you. Like a magnet, they’ll be attracted to the most in-tune option. Word-of-mouth will travel like wildfire. You’ll find synergies among your CX efforts that free up budget for higher value add to customers. Your CX managers will experience greater job satisfaction. No wonder getting in tune is the number one success factor for strong business results in customer experience management.
* Customer relationship management, voice of the customer, user experience, first contact resolution, Net Promoter Score™, digital experience, loyalty programs, customer success, customer service, content marketing, experiential marketing, customer care, and similar managerial efforts are components of customer experience management.
** ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management Best Practices Study, 2010-2013.
