“Tell me, I will forget;
show me, I will remember;
involve me, I will understand.”
Confucius
Understanding the expectations of your customers is the starting point of offering the right customer experience and customer service. By meeting the customer expectations or even exceeding them companies are on their way to create a good customer satisfaction level. But what’s the value of understanding customer expectations?
Already in the 5th century BC it was apparent how important it is to involve people in based upon the quote of Confucius.
Involving customers means you can learn their expectations and directly create better customers experiences. Customer experiences that they will understand because they really align to their needs.
Awareness of customer experience for organisations
With the introduction of the experience economy in 1998 by Joe Pine, the concept of creating value for customers through the creation of experiences.
source: Twitter Ideafreak
After the introduction of the experience economy the awareness emerged in more and more industries besides the entertainment industry where the creation of experiences for customers has always been their core business and is really rooted in their DNA.
The concept of experiences has actually always existed and each company has a customer experience through the interaction with customers and the products and services they deliver. Often though these customer experiences are not well designed with the best experience for customers in mind.
Unfortunately many customers have to deal with fragmented customer experiences.
We all know the examples that customers have to deal with:
- Customers have to deal with information leaks within companies and start a conversation over when changing communication channels;
- Customers have different levels of quality of service depending on the touchpoint;
- Customers experience a red carpet treatment when they become a customer, but after that
expected promises aren’t delivered.
The starting point for an organisation to design a customer experience (CX), is to have an explicit understanding of each interaction and experience (digital, retail, customer service, use of products and services). A total overview of the customer lifecycle gives companies and organisations the opportunity to start optimizing and designing customer journeys and touchpoints. These customer journeys and touchpoints are the primary starting point for organisations to deliver the right brand experience to (potential) customers, this process is also know as customer experience management (CEM or CXM).
Is your customer experience excellence driven by moments (interaction with customers) or customer journeys?
A good customer experience fuels business growth
The business for service design professionals took off with the demand for customer experience improvement. McKinsey research on customer experience has shown that many customer experience transformations stall because the value is not shown.
Although these customer experience transformations stall, research has shown that higher customer satisfaction leads to a higher revenue growth. A very important condition though is that the whole customer journey must provide an excellent customer experience.
Companies that grow their business related to a good customer experience really bridge the gap between improving customer value and business value. By understanding what really matters to customers (voice of the customer) companies have started digital transformation programs. Connected customers using digital technologies are forcing organizations to serve their needs better by aligning departments like customer service / customer care, digital, sales, field service, retail but also billing and payments et cetera.
The potential result should lead to an increase in revenue of 15% and increase in customer satisfaction of 20% based upon a recent customer experience survey.
Narrow the customer experience gap and strive for more customer journey consistency, emotional consistency and communication consistency.
