5 Steps Towards a Better Customer Experience

5 Steps Towards a Better Customer Experience
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By Andrea Lennon, SVP, General Manager, Critical Mass

Here are five steps to building a comprehensive, real-time view of your customer and quantifying the success of customer experience and a brand’s value proposition.

Of course there are underlying platform implications of successfully implementing and scaling a real-time customer view and value impact analysis on an ongoing basis. These steps can be conducted in small lab settings or addressed as part of a broader customer centric strategy.

1. START WITH WHO YOU KNOW

Existing customers are what’s driving your business today. Given the amount of data at our fingertips today, a holistic customer view is often just a matter of smart insights extracted from your existing data sources supplemented with external real-world behaviours.

2. CONSTRUCT A REAL-TIME VIEW

Look at the full potential of customer touchpoints across the organization and channels and quantify these as much as possible to determine where there’s scale and importantly, successes and gaps.

3. ASSIGN A VALUE FOR INTERACTIONS

As businesses struggle to meet the demands of omnichannel customer experience, it’s inevitable that customers will face friction in their interactions. Some will be significant enough to cost the business their relationship with the customer. Businesses need to identify those moments most critical to the customer, and therefore the bottom line, in order to prioritize the metrics that can define the health of their business. The employment of a proprietary algorithm can be an effective way to index the health of customer experience on an ongoing basis and build a more meaningful picture out of disparate data sources.

4. EXECUTE A VALUE IMPACT ANALYSIS

In an omnichannel environment, filling a gap often has a wide-reaching impact on the organization. A single solution might require updates to the website, changes to platforms, logistics, training and marketing. So for each gap, define the value that it has on the organization, leveraging metrics that are used to indicate the health of the business such as revenue, brand equity, and benchmarking against competitors.

5. PRIORITISE AND PLAN FOR A BETTER EXPERIENCE

The path forward will be contingent on balancing the health of the business today with longer-term business planning. Short-term wins are critical to show progress and build organizational momentum but never at the expense of the bigger picture. A vision and road map with time increments such as 6, 18, 24 months are ideal planning tools for facilitating customer centric evolution.

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