Customer Experience Transformation

Customer Experience has evolving fast pushed by the pandemic Covid-19. Companies of all stripes have invested heavily in tools and technologies to help them understand their customers more deeply and to gain the advantages of superior customer experience (CX).
However, eventhough the CX technologies have risen fast, many companies are still doing the old way in measuring their customer happiness such as using NPS (Nett Promotor Score) survey. If this has gone old way, how the future of CX looks like?

1. Predictive Consumer Insights is The Future

Why you need a survey to ask customers about their experiences when data about customer interactions is available and can be used to predict satisfaction? Some CX leaders have taken the plunge and have begun making use of the data on offer, drawing valuable insights that can prompt alerts and guide swift action to improve customer experiences.

2. Increasing adoption of Unified Omnichannel CX Platform

Companies are getting frustated of managing multiple vendors and technologies stack. Having different vendors will create a big friction in CX transformation journey. A unified CX platform such as Zoho CRM Plus that have native integration between all the apps will help implementation of CX Transformation smoother.

3. Hyper personalization is needed to impress customer.

Sending email by greeting the first name or remembering their birthday definitely can deliver a good customer experience. However, nowadays they are no longer impressed with that. Leveraging real-time customer data such as their website behavior, search results, purchase history, most active times, and past interactions with your business can help you develop a deeper understanding of their needs and hyper-personalize their experience.

With the help of AI and ML, CX platform could deliver hyperpersonalization at scale.

4. Data Security and Privacy become more critical

As customers more personal data in exchange for highly personalized experiences, the emphasis on data security and privacy will increase in the upcoming year. As more data privacy regulations similar to EU-GDPR are introduced around the globe, businesses that adhere to these laws, uphold stringent data protection measures, and make the right use of customer data will earn customer trust and grow quickly.

Unfortunately, many businesses are not ready to meet the new demand. Customer experience transformation is the solution to cope the new ways of customers behaviors.

However, a customer-experience (CX) transformation can generate a lot of anxiety. Many leaders are hesitating even to start because they are overwhelmed by the many challenges of driving change.

But this hesitation creates real risks for the business. What the business should do? There are 3 building blocks the business needs to focus on and fulfill in their CX transformation journey

1. Build Aspiration and Purpose

Business must have a very strong and solid customer centric vision and aspiration. Companies then translate aspirations into expected business value by defining the specific changes in customer behavior they expect to see.

If a company looking to give a more convenient way to buy by serving omnichannel customer journey, for example, could make the business leaders talk more about the best flow for customers to purchase the product in each channel rather than talk only financial.

Once they have prioritized the channel to focus on, the CX leaders can start to create a road map of CX transformation.

2. Transform the Business

Quite often, this stage requires a new process to develop or organization re-structuring to support the initiatives. Here, CX leaders can create a task force to handle specific initiatives.

The most important point to consider when choosing project members is to have a good mix based on their expertise. Once the team have developed new process and services, make sure they are scaled across the business, integrated into the CX platform, and continuously tested and refined across segments.

3. Enable Transformation

Leaders who have successfully implemented new experiences for their customers sustain the changes by building new capabilities. This could be done by having customer-centric mindset, an integrated technology stack, an agile operation model and Performance-management system built on predictive analytics and machine learning.

Implementing a unified CX technology such as Zoho CRM Plus can be a game changer. It will reduce the time to integrate different technology stack as well as easier for employees to adopt the new tech since having similar UI and UX compare to having multiple platforms to enable CX transformation.

However, customer experience is beyond than customer touch points. Although customer touch points can help bring a good customer experience, but it's not the only one shape the experience. Companies can have good and well interactions on each customer touch points, however it still can end up with a low customer experiences.

Here's what CEO should consider when transforming their CX

1. Understand customer journey from customer eye's

Companies tend to define their customer journey according to their business process. In other word, customer must follow company process if they would like to make a purchase.

Or other mistake is too many companies focus on individual interaction touchpoints devoted to make inquiry, onboarding, customer service, and a like.

Companies need to see customer journey from their perspective and see it as holistic interaction instead of individual touch points.

2. Improve the journey from the biggest pain of customer interactions.

The executive should understand which journey is the most important and has the biggest pain for customer during their interactions with the companies whether it's asking for a support, finding information about products/services, or making a payment. Then companies can make improvement based on that make up the journey.

The new process is created, new touch points is established and usually it involves new technology implementation along the process to improve the journey.

3. Create a customer centric culture supported by robust change management.

Quite often companies transformation fail due to not putting the cultural transformation as part of their transformation journey. To ensure CX transformation result long lasting, the executive should put more attention to cultural change once the improvement is done.

Tie in performance management with a clear metric, executive walk in and being a role model, and provide the employees with the necessary training and workshop are some initiatives companies can do to support the cultural change.

After all the CX transformation effort must touch every aspect of the business from Employee, Process, System, and Technology. Missing one piece, will put the transformation effort at risk.

Like many change programs, customer-experience transformations often fail to meet expectations. That’s not surprising: they require employees to change their mind-sets and behaviors, and an organization to make cultural changes.

Here are some common mistakes that companies do in executing their customer experience transformation

1. No Strong Vision and Aspiration

Many managers enter a transformation with no real vision for the organization’s future state. Quite often the transformation target is vague or not so compelling to the whole organization to make a move. Great organizations instead spend significant time up front to define a clear, compelling, personal, and ambitious aspiration.

2. CX Transformation is not Company top 3 priority.

Many CX transformation fail because not become a top 3 business priority for the CEO or other executive level. Without their support, securing organizational alignment, transformation budget is difficult and the transformation loses its hype and momentum in the organization.

3. Unable to quantify the transformation value to the business

Many companies launch CX transformation program without knowing of what a better customer experience worth to the business. Leaders of such a transformation will find it hard to secure sufficient resources for needed investments if they don’t have evidence that their efforts will generate business value.

4. Making to much assumptions

When it comes to defining what matters the most by the customers, the transformation team tend to make an assumption. It will leads the transformation team to wrongly prioritize the journey and executing low impact initiatives.

5. Lack of quick win initiatives

CX transformation usually takes quite long time to implement from 2-5 years depend on the size of the project. Many leaders focus on long-term changes or holistic service redesigns and don’t expect any short term win. Employees may become frustrated during this period and disengage, while customers may decide to take their business elsewhere.

Designing CX transformation program must have balance of short term and long term intiatives.

6. Narrow focus on the touchpoints than the overall journey

A lot of managers think about the customer experience very narrowly, focusing only on individual issues and forgetting about the overall system for delivering value. It's CX leader role to guide the team, identify the missing piece in CX transformation and align the whole team to the success of the transformation journey.


Are you ready to start your customer experience transformation journey?

Author

Handito Aji Saroso

Growth Marketing and Commercial expert who has strong exposure in growth hacking, client acquisition, demand generation, lead conversion, negotiation, deal closing, and account management through digital and conventional approach for a wide range of company sizes from SMEs to Large Enterprises. He has a deep understanding in Inbound, Digital, Content & Account-Based Marketing, Inbound & Social Selling, Solution and Consultative Selling and Strategic Negotiation. He also has experience in the overseas working environment when works in Singapore and Belgium.