Customer Experience Management has been the holy grail for organizations, but it has been quite a tough nut to crack despite the availability of several solutions and products. So what does it take to get CEM right? Here is a set of 8 steps that can guarantee excellence and help you achieve a 6 sigma standard in customer experience management:
Make CEM an organisation-wide initiative
Brands are realising that keeping customer experience as a KRA for the customer-facing staff alone isn’t enough. An increasing number of C level executives have CEM on their priority list and not just that, it has seeped through the different layers of the organization right from the back-end staff to those who face customers across various touch points of your brand.
This is the key thing to ensure that nothing takes more priority than customer experience, no matter how high the stakes are.
Motivation & Fit – Customer Facing staff
Hiring the right talent for customer-facing roles is a crucial element in shaping customer experience. It is important to identify the best fit for a given job. A variety of factors apart from talent and skills come into play here, such as, geographic parameters, customer demographics and even some psychological elements of prospective buyers. To keep them motivated to play their A-game in every transaction is another area brands need to focus on, in order to create compelling customer experiences.
Staff empowerment
Often, policies, which are supposed to act as enablers in achieving organizational goals act as hampering factors simply because they are either too rigid or impractical. Ensuring that you don’t join that long list of brands making this mistake is important. Your business exists because of your customer and to give him an experience he’d love, your staff need to be empowered enough. You don’t want your staff hiding behind the iron veil of policy or job entitlement and be the reason for losing an opportunity to turn a customer into a potential evangelist.
Incentive
To further boost the morale of your customer-facing staff and as a result spread delight among your customers, providing incentives to your staff can help a great deal. This gives a goal-based approach to your staff & charges the atmosphere with so much zeal and healthy competition. At the end of the day, your brand is the real winner as a result of the small, yet meaningful and motivating incentives.
Break down functional silos
It isn’t the IT team’s problem alone if a customer isn’t able to pay his bills online. A customer-facing rep cannot hide under the pretext of ‘job function’ to shrug away from getting the payment processed. As far as the customer is concerned, it is the brand that he’ll have a problem with and not the customer service team or the IT team. The customer views your brand as one entity and it is extremely critical to breakdown such functional silos to make your employees see customer problems as their problems.
Mapping the customer journey
Brands are investing heavily in understanding the journey of a customer, the different touchpoints that exist, the experiences they get out of each of these etc. This is an extremely welcome step as it helps the brand understand customer expectations and by exceeding those expectations, the customers tend to experience a sense of delight which Is very likely to work in favour of the brand.
Personalisation
Making the customer journey personal makes him/her feel special about the brand. It also is a great way to offer customers based on their individual preferences & purchase history. This imbibes in them, a great deal of trust and loyalty towards your brand.
Measure, measure and Measure
To control customer experience, you first need to measure it and metrics such as the Net Promoter Score, Loyalty score, Customer Delight Score, etc, can help you understand how your customers feel about your brand quantitatively. Drilling down further into these metrics can help you understand what caused them to give these ratings which is tangible, actionable insight that helps directly in improving customer experience.