A, E, I, O, U – The 5 Pillars Of Great CX

Customer experience is the most exciting opportunity for businesses in 2020 and the reason is simple; the companies that focus on customer experience reduce churn and increase revenues – leading to higher profits!

For many, customer service and customer experience are seemingly interchangeable. Yet, one is a single touchpoint with a brand, while the other impacts feelings and emotion, and encompasses the entire customer journey. Customer Experience impacts all areas of your business, but how do you get started?

Here, are 5 must-dos to help you create a great customer experience strategy:

A – Act

A best-in-class customer experience management (CEM) solution must allow companies to ‘close the loop’ with its customers. Closed-loop feedback gives companies the ability to continue a dialogue, whereas a typical customer feedback program ends the conversation or doesn’t start it at all.

Companies that engage in closed-loop feedback gain substantially more ROI from their CEM programs than their competitors, in the form of improved customer loyalty, greater employee engagement and stronger financial returns.

E – Empathize

Customer Empathy is understanding your customer’s point of view, feeling what they’re experiencing and considering this in your decisions. When we utilise Customer Empathy in our interactions, we engage with customers through empathetic listening; asking the right questions and keeping an open mind; setting aside our assumptions about their experiences to gain real insight into their needs to inform our problem solving and decision making.

It is Customer Empathy that delivers new possibilities. Perspective-taking gives us a new way of looking at the customer’s world and a new lens through which to see things differently—revealing new opportunities for future value and growth.

I – Improve

A customer-centric culture is not born in one day. Customer-centric culture should be developed and supported. In many organizations, the best way to ensure wide participation in customer experience improvement is to include a CX metric, such as NPS, incorporate scorecards and bonus systems. This is particularly important for employees, who face customers only indirectly, but still, have a significant influence on their experience.

Building an accurate customer journey map and continually measuring the customer experience is not enough — in a fast-paced world, it’s equally as important to act on opportunities and potential issues as soon as possible. The best way to do so is to proactively analyze the key drivers of the customer experience. A well-designed customer journey map and steady feedback stream will provide many data points on potential changes that may improve the customers’ experience, but identifying which changes can influence long-term success is what really matters in the end.

O – Originality

If your people aren’t having a great time then your customer will never have a great experience inside your environment. Which is why it is important to not rely on a set-stone formula of customer experience and give your front-line the liberty to tackle customers their way. You will be astonished to see the lengths your employees go to, just to ensure happy customers.

Nobody likes a ‘Me Too’ brand. Your customers know when you’re doing something just because your competitors are also doing it. Have an original approach to ensure happy customers. This starts right from the initial greeting to the ambience of the store to the hygiene to even product displays. Try something different, something unique and you’ll find your CX initiatives reaping fruits much faster than traditional methods.

U – Understand

Thanks to advanced analytics, behavioural recording tools, stronger customer touchpoints, and Customer Experience Management solutions, understanding customer behaviour has gotten easier than ever.

Having a comprehensive understanding of your customers is the key to achieving core business goals. Whether you’re trying to build or optimize the customer experience, knowing your customers better than they do is key. Creating a plan for future customer engagement is just as important as creating a plan for the present. This puts customer experience teams in the right frame of mind to respond to customers during stressful or challenging situations.

Want to build a great CX strategy? Get in touch with us and we’ll do the heavy lifting for you!

To help you assess the readiness of your CX initiatives, experts at LitmusWorld and The Positivity Company have carefully designed a CX Maturity Assessment. This will help you understand where you currently are and where you want to be through our CX Maturity Roadmap guide.

Take the CX Maturity Assessment