This week our main focus was on how to carry out CX improvement strategies in a workplace. This is crucial to understand because it allows others in a company to feel confident in the CX program that is being implemented.
A big idea we discussed was how “The Path to Customer Experience”. Understanding that the customer experience leads to perceptions, which then leads to beliefs about the company, which drives customer behaviour. Behaviours can represent drivers of future growth in a company, for example likeliness to repurchase, likeliness to recommend, etc. When we say we are measuring a customer’s ‘experience’ we are really measuring their perception of the experience. This allows us to understand that our goal is to ensure we are managing the perceptions of our customers. How do we do that? By controlling their expectations! A customer’s expectations shape their perceptions. Thus, we are left with two options in any situation: improve the experience or adjust the expectations.
Adjusting expectations can be challenging for sales-oriented companies as they often try to oversell the expectation beyond the reality of the experience being delivered. Marketing departments should begin by selling attributes of the company that are common in promoter comments.
The customer experience can be improved by applying any of the methods that we recommend. First, we discussed the Closed Loop Process, which involves responding directly to customers after receiving feedback. Next, we looked into Journey Mapping, which allows us to understand exactly what it is like to use a product or service and how a customer would feel at each step in that process.
Both these methods move us towards the ultimate objective of creating a customer centric culture. We contrasted the idea of a workplace culture with that of a workplace climate. The main difference being that a culture is learned overtime, shapes employee behaviour and is the main foundation for change. Climate, on the other hand, is behaviour-oriented and is the key driver for sustainable cultural change.
A final point we discussed was the importance of creating a positive employee experience. This is because engaged employees impart a great customer experience, which leads to loyal customers, creating strong financial results.
To conclude, by understanding the perception we can discover gaps between customer expectations and experiences. Then we can investigate why the gap exists and determine how to fix it. Molding the perception to be aligned with your brand promise is the ultimate goal of your customer experience management initiatives.
Please contact us on natalia@accelerationstrategy.com for more information on our CX Leadership & Implementation Program