Week 7: CX Leadership & Implementation program ~ Summer 2021

Week 7 of our CX Leadership & Implementation Summer program is done and dusted!

Key takeaways from week 7: "Structured Design to enable Customer Driven Innovation: Delivery"

This week we dove deeply into the topic of delivery. We discussed delivery in the sense of understanding and improving how we deliver our intended customer experience. We have previously learned why CX is important, spent time understanding our customers, and established a business case for this. Now we have a brand new set of phenomenal experiences that we are ready to deliver to our customers.

A big thing we mention with delivery, as with so many other aspects of CX, is that the experience delivery should be completely aligned with the brand promise. We looked at a couple of examples to help us understand this. One was Patagonia, their brand promise is ‘in business to save our home planet.’ They deliver on this in many ways, from manufacturing sustainable, high quality clothing options to offering free repairs on any damaged product so customers don’t go buy new products. Patagonia is a successful brand because they are able to deliver on this promise that customers expect.

Speaking of Patagonia, they are a great model for strong CX delivery, there are 7 key things we can learn from them:

All these points are instrumental but I will highlight a few specifically. Point 3 seems rudimentary but there is actually a lot of evidence to support it. 84% of customers value ease over choice; therefore, creating an effortless and easy experience is ideal. This ties into Customer Effort Score (CES), discussed by Matt Dixon’s The Effortless Experience. CES defines how easy it was to do business with a particular company. CES is a good indicator of if a customer will return. While NPS is great, CES is often more impactful because promoters make up only ~10% of active customers in a business, whereas 80-90% of customers will be repeat customers. Improving the Customer Effort Score, CES, will drive the improvements for all of your customers, and the ROI of your organization. By reducing the effort, we are effectively reducing the anxiety the client has about executing this particular transaction. This removes any negative emotions thereby driving up the customer's journey toward advocacy.

An experience at the Ritz-Carlton in Amelia Island, Florida is a great example of point 6. A family was staying at the hotel on a trip and after returning home the father realized they had left their son’s stuffed giraffe Joshie at the hotel. The boy was wondering where his giraffe was so the father told him that Joshie had such a good time on vacation he decided to stay for a while. Later he received a call from the hotel, telling him that they found Joshie and were immediately shipping him back. The father requested that they keep him for a few days so as to support the explanation he gave to his son. They not only did this, but they also went above and beyond by sending the following photos back home to the family.

This was very easy for the hotel to do but this small attention to detail positively impacted the Hurn family’s loyalty to the Ritz-Carlton hotel. The average customer lifetime value of a Ritz-Carlton customer is approximately $250,000, it likely cost the Ritz-Carlton $20, if that, to do all this for the Hurn family. This is a fantastic CX delivery example and was reported on by numerous newspapers including the Huffington Post.

Point 7 is also very often overlooked and is crucial to CX delivery success. We know about the importance of first impressions in CX but last impressions are equally important. Ending on a high greatly increases your chances of turning a regular customer into a repeat customer or even a promoter. Remember the old adage “All’s well that ends well.”

In summary, CX delivery is a crucial step in the CX process. Delivery must be aligned with the brand promise. It should be effortless, detail-oriented and leave a strong lasting impression. Improving CX delivery will improve CES and subsequently increase the percentage of repeat customers, reduce customer anxiety, and improve ROI. How can you improve CX delivery in your organization?

Our next CX leadership & Implementation will start the 7th of September 202. Click here for the course details.

Please contact us on anne-marie@accelerationstrategy.com for more information on our CX Leadership & Implementation Program