Three Ways You Can Deliver A Better Customer Experience

A better customer experience doesn’t always mean reinventing the wheel. Sometimes all it requires is examining the experiences you already deliver and asking how you can make them more in tune with customers’ expectations and needs.

Every journey begins with a single step. When it comes to improving customer experience, the first step in your journey can be a simple one. Just ask yourself: “How can we make this experience better?”

There’s little doubt that the broader discipline of customer experience management is complex; it encompasses no less than every segment, function, journey, and customer-facing process or technology your company employs. But at its core, the process is relatively simple; anyone can do it.

Here’s how. By looking at those places where you interact with your customers today and by capturing the experience from your customer’s perspective, you’ll begin to understand how specific journey stages and touch points impact the end user—and you will start to see where barriers exist.

For your customers, the objective is about accomplishing a goal or getting what they need from your firm. For you, it’s about making that process easier and more enjoyable for your customers, while also making it more efficient for yourselves.

Whether from the customer or the business perspective, you can only really do three things to make the customer journey work better:

1. Add new steps, processes, or interactions where they are missing: Do your customers ever find themselves unable to do things like cross channels or save transactions to complete later? Perhaps your systems gather data from customers up front that you can’t use further down the line. Things like this indicate both that your customers are encountering barriers, while also indicating that you’re missing interactions, processes, or steps in the journey that will make their lives—and yours—more effective.

2. Improve existing journeys and the touchpoints that deliver them: In many cases, you may find that the right steps are in place, but that they aren’t optimized to meet customer needs. Like a mobile banking app, for example, that doesn’t allow remote deposit via a photo of the check. Or a customer loyalty program that doesn’t notify customers when their favorite items are on sale or when a new style is available. Identifying opportunities like these is a great way to drive maximum value with (relatively) minimal effort.

3. Remove woefully underperforming or redundant processes, steps, or interactions: Many times, something is in place because “it always has been …” We worked with a client last week that had multiple manual processes in place to transcribe customer data from one form to another, since their systems didn’t connect. A quick analysis showed that the cost to eliminate these extra steps and link technologies was far less than the cost of continuing as before. While it can be difficult, eliminating redundancies is almost always a sure path to ROI.

You can start finding answers—“where should I add, improve, or remove?”—by increasing your understanding of who your customers are, what they want, and what’s important to them. This requires adopting an outside-in perspective and approach, which is much easier said than done.

But learning how your customers feel—and how well they believe their needs are met—is in and of itself the critical first step in improving their experience. Because once this question is answered, there are only a handful things left to do: add, improve, or remove. Or, of course, if it isn’t broken, do nothing. Knowing that things are working as they should—and being able to show it—can be the most valuable action of all.

Because a better customer experience doesn’t always mean reinventing the wheel. Sometimes all it requires is examining the experiences you already deliver and asking how you can make them more in tune with customers’ expectations and needs.

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