While your organization’s leadership may all be in agreement that investing in customer experience is important, they may not always understand the far-reaching implications of an optimization effort. After all, unlike other more siloed efforts such as marketing campaigns or IT infrastructure enhancements, customer experience touches nearly everyone in your organization.
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I’ve worked with commercial, association and government clients to assess, create strategies and put in place measurement platforms and plans for their customer experience programs. In order to ensure you get maximum buy-in, follow-through and mutual understanding of what a successful, holistic customer experience looks like, consider involving stakeholders from across the organization. There are several questions to ask as you plan your optimization efforts, which I’ll discuss below.
What are all of your customer touch points?
Let’s start with what might be the most obvious yet potentially the most time-consuming effort. While you may have an easy time identifying some of the most frequently used customer touch points, conducting an accurate audit of every one of them can often be an eye-opening exercise.
For instance, your digital channels will undoubtedly include your website, social media pages and email marketing, but what about others like your company’s listing on Glassdoor or Google Maps? Then you have all of your offline touch points. What are all the points where a customer could need or want to talk with someone on the phone? These could include everything from an initial sale, to billing inquiries, to customer service and complaints. If you have brick-and-mortar locations, who are all the different people that a customer might interact with? You’ll quickly see that this often isn’t a simple list of a few things, but rather a broad list of touch points across many mediums.
When you’re completing this full audit of customer touch points, be realistic about which ones you can optimize right away. Often, with the clients I work for, we do a full accounting of customer touch points, but we may start building and measuring in phases and only focusing on a fraction of them at a time, beginning with the ones that will allow us to get quick wins.
How do you share insights with internal stakeholders?
Sometimes the visibility that internal teams have of efforts such as customer experience optimization can make all the difference in their success. For instance, even if you have a primarily digital methodology to reach customers, do you have a way to report the success or challenges to other internal team members who may have even a tangential relationship to the outcomes? Your customer service team might not be responsible for the user experience of the website, but what is their response time when a support-related inquiry is sent through the site?
Giving your teams broader visibility of the success of your customer experience can not only allow them to see the role that their teams play, but it also often allows them to gain insights about ways to improve processes.
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Where should you focus your actions?
As I mentioned under the first point, prioritize quick wins, and create a prioritized list of future initiatives. Consider utilizing an agile approach, where tasks are grouped in logical sets and tackled one at a time.
For instance, if the dropoff in customer acquisition is at its steepest decline at a specific point in the buying process, you may want to start optimizing your customer experience there for a few reasons. First, it’s something you already know about, so there’s an immediate problem to solve. Second, since the buyer’s journey is critical for any business, there will likely be an immediate return (e.g., more paying customers). Finally, this could be considered a quick win for your customer experience optimization efforts, thus quickly and easily proving the value of them. After all, not every type of optimization is going to be so easy.
It likely goes without saying that you may want to focus your actions on items that are directly in line with business key performance indicators (KPIs), but often the way you prioritize needs to be more nuanced than that. By focusing either on an area where there’s a major bottleneck that could be fixed to drastically help a process, or focusing on something that will be easy enough to start measuring, we can let some quick wins prove the value of customer experience optimization to the rest of the organization.
What logistical challenges exist?
Even with the best intentions, there can be roadblocks to the most strategic efforts within an organization. Understanding what logistical challenges may exist in implementing a far-reaching customer experience optimization process can mean the difference between short-term success and indefinite delays. Even seemingly mundane details can often derail an operation.
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For instance, if your customer relationship management platform is difficult to integrate with other systems, or if your website is maintained by a third party, understanding from the start what the potential challenges are with integrating them can be crucial.
By confronting potential logistical or operational challenges head-on, your customer experience optimization efforts have a much better chance of long-term success.
In addition to the questions above, ask yourself some others as you plan your customer experience optimization: What is your budget? What KPIs will you use to benchmark success?
When you’re aiming to optimize your customers’ experience, it’s important to make sure that you have a realistic plan to support your efforts. Getting buy-in from key stakeholders and creating a realistic plan to measure and optimize your customer experience can enable it to stay successful in the long term.