Customer Experience: How to set your team up to deliver
Creating a compelling and successful customer experience requires more behind-the-scenes work than you may have thought! Looking to improve your customer experience? Read my 7 points to deliver the right CX.
The Compelling Customer Experience
the awareness building (advertising)
the unique selling point (branding)
the product (look and feel)
the services (customer aftercare)
and the repurchase process (customer retention)
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is the overall perception your customers have of your brand, services, and products. This also involves all stages of their experience with your brand, from before they make a purchase extending to after they use the product or service.
Forbes put it more simply when they wrote, "Customer experience can include a lot of elements, but it really boils down to the perception the customer has of your brand.
What Impact Can a Good Customer Experience Have?
A good customer experience is highly valuable for any brand or business. In fact, some would argue that a solid customer experience is just as important as the product or service the company is trying to sell!
Businesses or brands that create a well-rounded customer experience for their consumers get the benefits of invested and loyal customers in addition to repeat business. As you can imagine, this also means more profits for the company as a whole.
A positive view of your brand is priceless! For more valuable tips and tricks on how you can more effectively reach your target audience, check out my UX Design Tips for Successful Outcomes video!
How to Create a Compelling Customer Experience?
The Customer Experience starts with the team that creates the product and the related services the Customer will use.
To create the right customer experience, your team needs to know their Customer and how their work impacts what the client sees, wants, feels, and thinks about your solution. Since your team and their performance and results will impact the Customer Experience, you should consider:
7 Steps to a Build Powerful Customer Experience
Build Culture
Celebrate Innovation
Encourage Team Communication
Ask for Customer Feedback
Market Research
Updated Technology
Cross-Team Coordination
When thinking about customer experience, it is important to remember that their experience starts before they make a purchase and extends to even after they have used your product or service.
Build Culture
Having a business that is known for its welcoming workplace culture can, believe it or not, impact the way customers feel about your brand. Building a positive and close-knit workplace culture will inevitably spread. This positivity translates into how your employees view their role and treat your customers.
It all starts with leadership! You can begin by reading my article about Leadership Styles and Behaviors to Make You a Better Leader.
Your workplace culture and your employees' approach to teamwork and cross-team collaboration is key to success. Not only will starting your team off with a solid foundation help your employees thrive, but it will also have a positive impact on the public's perception of your brand.
Diverse and collaborative teams create better outcomes. And if your customer base is diverse (and you will want it to be), a diverse team viewpoint is vital to your long-term success. Learn more about Team Culture in this video.
Celebrate Innovation
The world around us is always changing, and so should your products and services! To contribute to an excellent customer experience, it is essential for your team to feel empowered to venture outside of the box and come up with innovative ideas.
How to create a creative vibe? Create space for curiosity and develop a sense of wonder. When in doubt, ask the Customer. And more inspiration on idea generation techniques, see my video here.
Encourage Team Communication
Your team members should feel encouraged to share their thoughts and ideas. A team in the flow will be able to solve problems and deal with change requests from Customers. Make sure:
Goals are clear
Forums for open-ended sharing are provided
Solutions not problems are the focus
Workshopping ideas
Letting each of your team members become a part of the solution, no matter what their role is how you get the best of your teamwork into the customer experience.
Ask for Customer Feedback
Checking in with your existing customers and prospective customers is important to your mission of providing the ultimate customer experience. Routinely following up with your target audience will give you the necessary data to make any essential adjustments to your services or products.
But asking your Customers for feedback will require action and followup on results. If you ask what you can do to make things better, your customers will expect you to act their input somehow. You need to:
Show you are listening
Communicate the changes that have been implemented
Ask for additional feedback to ensure the new outcomes are the right ones for your Customer.
Market Research
Any team or business that hopes to succeed should conduct in-depth research on its target market. However, many teams barely scratch the surface of the amount of market research they should be conducting on their target audience.
Creating a compelling customer experience starts with your team knowing everything there is to know about your target market. Review my article about Successful UX Outcomes Through Design Thinking for a list of questions to help you begin to empathize with your target market and get to know them better.
Getting the right tool for market research depends on what you need. Check out this link to the Top CX Market Research tools.
Updated Technology
From Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to the programs your team uses for graphic design, you must invest in updated technology. Providing your team with world-class technology to work with will ensure your customers receive a timely and visually pleasing experience.
Outdated systems and programs can contribute to slow responses, crashes, and a generally underwhelming experience. So keep your technology solution fit-for-purpose and robust.
When Customers can depend on a clean and simple solution that is easy to use, they will be more likely to engage with your product. Manage upgrades and downtime to lessen the impact of unavailable sites and apps. And if you are moving into a new space, make sure that your sites meet the needs of users based on network availability and bandwidth speeds in those locations.
Cross-Team Collaboration
It happens to the best of us; we get settled into our own individual teams and comfortable with the people who work around us. However, to create a great customer experience, it is important for the different teams within your business to openly and effectively communicate.
For example, the marketing team needs to communicate with the sales team and vice versa. Building effective cross-team collaboration starts with adequate soft skills.
Learn more about How to Build Your Team's Soft Skills for a more collaborative team experience.
Building a superior customer experience isn't a one-and-done event. It is something you do continuously and improve upon each day. Keeping your target audience in mind throughout the whole process is a sure way to guarantee your customers have the best beginning-to-experience!
I've given you 7 ideas to improve the Customer Experience. What did I miss? Do you have an idea you'd like to share?
If so, please leave a comment in the box below. Thanks for your input - I'm listening!
