What does this mean to customer experience professionals?
We need to provide a simple path for our organizations to follow. This human behaviour truism will lead you to a fundamental understanding of your customer experience management programs. Our job is to ensure that we are managing the perceptions of our customers. Key to this is realizing that perception is dependent on the relationship or gap between expectation and experience. When we are measuring the “experience” we are really measuring the customer perception of the experience. A CX Management program has two choices in any situation - improve the experience, or adjust the expectation.
Adjusting the expectation will require a tight alignment of the communications and marketing teams with the company’s intentional design and delivery of the client experience. One can imagine how a sales-oriented company would have challenges with this alignment. Sales and marketing are overselling the expectation beyond the reality of the experience being delivered by the product or service. Encouraging the sales and marketing management teams to focus on selling the attributes of the company that are prevalent in the promoter comments will be a good first step in this alignment.
For most companies, your customer experience management approach leads you to improving the experience through the many methods that we recommend. From establishing continuous improvement through a well implemented closed loop system to creating a compelling customer centric culture, there are many paths to improving the customer experience. One of my favorite approaches is to establish a Customer Journey Mapping baseline. This process will support your closed loop programs, your human centered design shift and will also support your efforts to move the organization to a more customer centric culture.
Understand the perception, determine where there is a gap compared to your desired perception, and why, then decide how to fix it. Fix the perception and you fix the behavior.
Please contact us on natalia@accelerationstrategy.com for more information on our CX Leadership & Implementation Program