Do you want to create a world-class customer experience strategy by mastering your customer portal implementations? Naturally the answer is yes, but first you need to understand what is meant by customer experience and why customer experience is important.
Customer experience (CX) is the sum-total of sensory, behavioural, cognitive and affective consumer responses during all three phases of the consumption process – pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase. It is the cumulative impact of multiple touchpoints and why customers will keep coming back – or reject the brand altogether.
One way to ensure you provide outstanding customer experience is to equip your employees with the resources and tools needed to deliver on the promise of excellent service.
Read on to discover how to set up a customer experience framework underpinned by a six-phase approach. Follow this approach to develop a customer experience strategy that will help you create a world-class customer experience and take your business to the next level.
And if you want to delve deeper into the subject you can download our in-depth Guide to Implementing the Best Customer Experience Strategy.
CX Strategy Framework
Phase 1 – Master Your Customer Data
The first phase of a customer experience strategy is mastering your customer data to provide yourself with a single version of the truth about your customer. Proper Master Data management allows you to understand your critical business relationships and use that information in the best way possible, so that you can grow and protect your business.>
According to a study by Gartner, companies lose an average of $12.8 million annually in squandered resources and expenses for operational inefficiencies, missed sales and unrealised new opportunities due to poor quality data.
Phase 2 – End-to-end Integration of Systems
The second phase of a customer experience strategy is to ensure all systems involved in your customer journey are integrated end-to-end and to ensure the Master Data is kept up to date.
The goal is to get the company’s various systems to “speak to each other.” This speeds information flows and ensures everyone in the organisation who has a “touch point” with the customer has a complete understanding of the customer relationship.
Phase 3 – Digital Channels
According to a recent Ovum Research Report, 52% of companies are at the early stages or are yet to start their omnichannel customer engagement transformation programs, even though they understand their importance to the business. In addition, fewer than 10% believe they have made good progress on omnichannel, with the rest making moderate progress.
Customers will expect a seamless experience whichever channel they use.
Therefore, the third phase of your customer experience strategy is to make sure that your customers have the option of reaching you via many different types of channels. This includes text, social, email, instant messaging and chatbots – and all must provide a unified brand experience.
A word of caution, it also gives customers more platforms to talk about bad experiences, and the reality is that customers share more about bad experiences than good ones so make sure you have the resources in place to manage them.
Phase 4 – Automation
After implementing the first three phases, you may find integration gaps due to lack of support from legacy systems, or your customer journey business processes are not optimised.
It is common to default to manual interventions to address these gaps, however over and again we see that this can lead to human errors and process delays.
The answer and fourth phase of a customer experience strategy is business automation. There are several advantages of business automation that include augmenting customer experience with personalisation, streamlining CX with Chatbots, facilitating processes with electronic forms and lastly improving the purchasing experience.
The data generated from automating these processes will also support data-driven decision-making through real-time reporting, and much more.
A great advantage of automation is freeing up staff to focus on core business areas. This results in improving CX and increasing sales without a corresponding increase in recurrent expenses.
Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology will enable you to respond quickly to business needs.
Phase 5 – Dashboards and Reports
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. A consolidated view of customer data is critical to understanding customer insights and their behaviour. Stakeholders in the organisation have different needs based on their role in reporting on KPIs and monitoring customer satisfaction.
Dashboards and reports provide users with a single source of information from various sources. Management Information and Business Intelligence reporting helps stakeholders at multiple levels track and monitor their KPIs, allowing them to respond quickly to the changing trends.
Ideally, a CX dashboard should include three types of measurements – Perception metrics, Descriptive metrics, and Outcome metrics.
Phase 6 – 360-degree View of Your Customer
The final phase in our framework is to ensure you have a 360-degree view of your customer. Unfortunately when interacting with customers, coming up with relevant content, advice, and offers to respond in a timely and relevant manner is easier said than done.
The solution lies in a robust customer portal that offers that 360-degree customer view. A good customer portal will provide a customer experience map that shows all the touchpoints a customer could, or has had, with your company and the interactions at each touchpoint. These touchpoints include online and offline channels and the end result will be an increased customer retention rate for you and generally a better experience for the customer.
Implementing The Framework
All 6 phases in the cx strategy framework mentioned above can be implemented using project management methodologies that your organisation has already adopted, be it waterfall or agile. When applied appropriately, either methodology or even a hybrid of these will work.
Achieve Outstanding Customer Experience
If you are looking for a solution provider to create a customer experience roadmap and build your customer platform to improve your customer experience, Ashine Consultancy Services (ACS) is at your service. We are one of the few software companies in London and the UK that provides IT Consultancy and Services focusing on Customer Experience. We have written a downloadable, in-depth Free Guide to Implementing the Best Customer Experience Strategy to help you.
Our Secret Sauce and Unique Attributes
We are a software house with multi-industry expertise that delivers strategic Customer Experience (CX) solutions for businesses using best-in-class technologies and practices.
We do not have off-the-shelf software solutions. All our services are fully customised, and we offer bespoke solutions to our customers, including upskilling clients so they can get the most from their solution(s).
We work with our customers in true partnership, whether our clients completely outsource the work to us, or hire us as an extension to their IT team. Additionally, we strive to deliver within the SLAs agreed and share performance metrics to our customers regularly. We also provide flexible billing options to our clients to choose from, including fixed price, time and material, and subscription.
To start discussing your own bespoke Customer Experience Strategy get in touch with our team of expert consultants for a free consultation or download our Free Guide to Implementing the Best Customer Experience Strategy for more information.
