Customers and, more importantly, repeat customers are what sustain a business. So, it stands to reason that the main preoccupation for a company should be the consistent delivery of great customer experiences.
The problem though is the sheer diversity of touchpoints through which a customer can interact with a brand and form their customer journey. Anything from branding, advertising, and newsletters to events, social media posts, and blogs can be classed as a form of customer interaction.
We can already notice how easy it can be to stumble and without knowing impact the experience a customer has with your brand. A risk you simply can’t afford to take. Why? Well, because 32% of existing customers are quite happy to part ways with a company after just one bad experience, and 67% of users have said that their standards have never been higher.
The prospect of such a challenge can add extra pressure on your ability to deliver a great experience and ensure a positive customer engagement. So, what can be done if you are one of these companies in need of a customer experience strategy redesign? One proven option would be to make use of customer experience consulting firms with years of experience in helping companies with their service design.
Going down this road may put some companies on the fence and unwilling to change. If you have the same hesitation, then we hope our latest article can help ease some of your concerns.
We will explore the concept of customer experience while also discussing the benefits of customer experience management consulting and show how we can make your customer experience redesign a fun process.
Customer Experience at a Glance and Examples of Good Practice
Customer experience as a whole is a complex concept. Let’s break it down, so we can understand it better. In its basic form, customer experience (CX for short) includes all the forms of interaction a customer has with your brand. Talking with your CX team is part of the overall experience, but it isn’t the end of it.
A customer can browse your website or app, sign up for your newsletter, consume your social media content or directly use your product or service.
All of these elements combined make up the customer experience. Based on these interactions customers will gauge whether you are able to solve their pain points and convince them to come back. This last part has a lot to do with customer loyalty.
CX — What Should You Focus On?
There are a few things to keep in mind when you start to fiddle around with your customer experience strategy. It is important to look at:
Cultural Leadership
- A company’s culture is important as it is made up of group norms, shared values and beliefs, and consensus on the overall objectives and goals.
- The leadership team at any company will need to embrace the need to adopt a cultural leadership style in order to implement change.
Change Management
- An overhaul this significant (redesigning customer experience) doesn’t come easy. We believe it is essential to have in your redesign team people tasked with managing this company-wide change in the status quo.
Listening Programs
- You need to develop the ability to listen to what your customers have to say.
Let’s take a look at a practical example of the theory we covered so far.
Our Work With Indiana’s Largest Healthcare Provider
We mentioned this before. Organizations can easily fall behind in rapidly changing environments with customer expectations altering ever so often. This was the case with Indiana’s largest healthcare provider — Indiana University Health (IU Health).
They found it increasingly difficult to understand their customer behavior and have come to Collabo for help. The challenge at hand was no easy feat. With new leadership, a shift in how an organization operates follows suit. For IU Health, this meant an overhaul of how it listens to its customers and design a customer experience matching expectations.
The mission to achieve consistent service delivery that takes into account patient experience has fallen to IU Health’s Experience Design team to complete. They quickly identified they needed help with one major initial task. So, they called us in to lend a helping hand.
The Task
The goal was to develop a system-wide journey map accurately describing customer experiences at all of IU Health's service lines and locations. Burning the midnight oil, we managed to:
Engage and connect with more than 500 patients and 90 internal team members in order to capture their points of view.
Develop four separate overarching patient journeys.
Organize and coordinate seven stakeholder sessions to identify strategic pain points.
The Result
We were able to create a high-level map that accurately described the whole universe of IU Health. This meant that the internal design team was able to use it as a means of connecting with other departments and cooperating to fix hot spots.
With hands-on experience with designing customer journey maps, IU Health’s Experience Design team was now able to develop them on a consistent basis. This resulted in numerous system and regional patient improvement initiatives.
Looking at how our client transformed their customer experience, we can notice what we touched upon in the previous section. The organization was ready to embrace and manage change, actively listen to what its customers had to say and transform the overarching company culture.
Key Facts for Designing an Outstanding Customer Experience
If you were to attempt a customer experience redesign on your own, there are certain key facts you should consider. You can view these as helpful tips. After all, creating personalized interactions and memorable experiences that can stand the test of time doesn’t come easy.
Some of the aspects you should consider fall under four principles. These are:
Make the customer the sole focus of your customer experience strategy
If you look at it from a customer’s point of view you’d find that, for most people, a great CX goes beyond the simple buying, delivery, and using of the product cycle. Many also find value in the emotions that come with the whole process. Therefore, it is worthwhile to take the time and look at your whole operation from the point of view of potential or even loyal customers.
Include the parties involved in delivering customer experience in your design process
It goes without saying that an exceptional CX doesn’t exist without your employees, suppliers, and contractors. When you go through the design process, it is important to also look at potential barriers that can prohibit stakeholders to do their job properly. Removing them when needed will improve motivation and the overall customer experience delivery.
Adjust your economics to account for the change in strategy
It is important to bear in mind the costs of a whole CX redesign. The financial aspect should be calculated minutely to avoid a collapse of the whole process after implementation.
Encourage the business to support the new design
As we all know, change doesn’t come easy for some people. Particularly when it’s to do with their role. Routines and ingrained habits can infringe upon the capability of some employees to embrace change. Making sure that the staff influenced by it understand the reasoning behind can go a long way toward them buying into your vision.
The Importance of Customer Experience Consulting in the Redesigning Process
It can be quite daunting to let an outsider into your business. Even more so if this outsider is there to place your whole operation under the microscope and identify issues that need to be sorted.
However, these outsiders, in this case, consultants, are there to help you see what is not working. They are there for the betterment of your business; there to help you design a winning CX strategy. One that has your business objectives aligned with the needs of your employees and customer expectations.
More importantly, using consultants to redesign the customer experience allows a fresh pair of eyes to identify potential problems on a customer’s journey and come up with solutions. Considering the variety of customer touchpoints your business can have, having an extra pair of eyes to look at how your business is handling them most definitely cannot hurt.
Lastly, these outsiders can help you conduct customer experience training so that your CX team knows exactly what to do.
Customer experience consultants are, of course, as diverse as the needs of your customers. There is no sure-fire way to make sure you are working with the right team for your business needs.
Speaking of business needs, it’s high time we show you how Collabo XD can help you redesign your customer experience so that it fits with the customer of today.
Collabo XD’s Approach to Customer Experience Design
Our proposition to help you redesign your customer experience relies on techniques that allow us and you to understand both your customers and all parties involved in delivering the customer experience.
Essentially, we will be employing the principles of:
Experience mapping
Design sprints
Journey mapping training
Experience Mapping
We go through the process of experience mapping so that we can better understand what your customers are going through when they come up against all your business touchpoints.
Once we have a complete overview of the entire customer journey, it would be easier for us in collaboration with you to identify pain points and devise solutions accordingly.
Design Sprints
The use of design sprints is somewhat of a novelty in the service design field. What we do here is organize participatory sessions with all stakeholders that have a vested interest in delivering great customer service.
The duration of these sessions differs depending on the number of participants and issues that need to be addressed.
Journey Mapping Training
We believe that simply completing projects for our clients doesn’t quite cut it as a mission statement for us. Our motivation is to make sure that we leave you fully equipped to adapt and design your CX operation on your own.
This is why we came up with our customer journey mapping training workshops specifically designed to teach you, no matter your level, to design a journey map on your own.
Being able to draw a customer journey map on your own significantly increases the chances of devising a CX strategy capable of delivering exactly what your customers want.
Concluding Remarks
We know we mentioned this quite often throughout the article, but customer experience really is at the center of it all. Taking care of perfecting this part of your business can set you apart from your competition and be the kind of brand customers are happy to interact with.
Although complicated, adapting your customer experience to suit the ever-changing needs of customers can be fun at the same time.
At least, this is what we think our approach is based on.
If you are thinking about redesigning your CX, get in touch with us today, and let’s see how we can set things in motion.