Written by Anna Vilatarsana and José Buch
Based on North Highland White Paper “Optimizing your costumer experience-focus: An actionable guide”

It is not new, as the legendary management guru, Peter Drucker once said, “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer”, and even there are multiple strategic priorities, we need to remain focused on the most important one: our customer.

Customer Experience (CX) is a simple idea: to provide an experience which keep customers engaged to come back and to share it.

Research shows that CX leaders consistently outperform the market: do not waste any other minute. The time is now.

It is not a trend. It is part of a shift in the marketplace in which nothing else matters more than your ability to deliver a superior experience. Sustained success will come down to your ability to turn customer insights into improved experiences.

Even there is plenty of information in the market about CX, tools are limited.

We believe there are 3 main elements to develop on the way to outperform in CX. First, adapt the PRIORITIZE to treat CX in a proper way. Second, FOCUS on what really matters to our customer. And third, MEASURE the impacts to be able to perform corrective actions and be open to continuous improvement.

1st building block: PRIORITIZE

A common issue in organizations is the silo effect, where employees from different areas do not share information and thus, this creates blindness to a global customer approach. CX must be prioritized within the organization.

To be effective, leadership needs to be at the board level, and CX strategy must be tied to revenue expectations. CX must go beyond and have insight into and influence over every component of the organization.

Only 57% of organizations are assigning CX leadership at a C-suite level”

Source: North Highland CX Transformation Global Survey

It all starts with a definition of your vision, detailing the feelings your customer experience aims to create, making sure it evokes an action approach.

Followed by an Assessment of your operational readiness and culture, evaluating the current state and identifying opportunities and threats to achieving CX optimization. Build your strategy off this assessment

And finally, with an Alignment of your people & building bridges: at the end, the root causes of poor CX always stem from the inside. To be CX-optimized, organizations must undergo an organizational makeover, realigning themselves in a way that makes customer engagement and collaboration easy.

2nd building block: FOCUS

CX demands a complete understanding of customer interactions, journeys and relationships, being capable to identify which are the most relevant moments for our customers. Once identified, the bigger complication for companies is to be capable to improve internal processes and adapt to the new findings. This requires having

optimized and automated processes, focused on the customer.

First step is to get to know your current and future customers: Utilize all existing assets—surveys, social media, complaints, reviews, sales outcomes—and organize around patterns. From there, get out in the field and spend time connecting with customers and you’ll have immediately actionable ways to improve. Complete this analysis with quantitative results, to develop foresights on what is coming on CX to be ready.

Then map your existing customer journeys to define opportunities to deliver real, lasting enhancements to the customer experience, next to your internal people and processes.  What really matters is to convert customer research into real customer experiences.

Once it is clear, hire, train, reward and empower your employees. Harness the realness, passion and humanity of your workforce and put it to work for your brand.

And finally design enterprise solutions that prioritize the most critical processes and include control points.

3rd building block: MEASURE

Digital transformation is forcing companies to adapt in a high speed to new reality, mainly driven by customers. Organizations must be in a constant state of beta, letting customer feedback serve as an important input on their new improvements.

In this scenario is compulsory to measure being able to understand and modify what matters at the right moment. Today, we talk about weeks, not months, to deliver. Teams must work together and on an environment of excellence execution.

First step is to prioritize your best ideas and prototype: Identify the activities you believe will have the greatest impact against your most critical CX needs. Test with your real customers. The only real way to know if something works in CX is to put it in front of customers and ask them what they think.

When you succeed at the prototype level, scale up: Comprehensive CX measurement is the enabler of adaptation: Start by defining metrics and then, measure the moments that matter at the interaction, journey and relationship levels. At that point, align measurement of the processes that matter to determine efficiency and effectiveness.

Then, set up and agree on a measurement framework: A CX measurement framework must create cohesion within metrics and inform actionable results.

Finally, devotedly measure and tweak.

These main elements are the foundation of CX but not the finish line, it requires a regular reevaluation of strategy and priorities nourished by customer feedback that needs to trigger organizational transformation and process improvements.

This methodology helps to set the pace, but it just sets the foundations to an outperforming CX organization. Companies need to permanently revisit their strategies always placing the customer at the center of organizational thinking committing to perfection on this strategy.

True, sustained success will come down to the ability of companies in turning customer insights into improved experiences that are delivered seamlessly by empowered employees.

The time for redesigning and transforming your organization to achieve growth through experience is now.

You can read and download the full North Highland White Paper “Optimizing your costumer experience-focus: An actionable guide” by clicking here.

Contact

José Buch
Partner

[email protected]