how to build a great customer experience · 2. omnipresent – people want you to be everywhere and...

HOW TO BUILDA GREAT

CUSTOMEREXPERIENCE

PRACTICAL TIPS AND TACTICS FROMLEADING CX EXPERTS

HOW TO BUILD A GREAT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Practical tips and tactics fromLEADING CX EXPERTS

Why do we want to build great customer experiences?

We do it because we want customers to stay with us for longer, to spend more and to recruit new customers. End of.

We understand why it’s important to create great customer experiences – but thatdoesn’t make it easy. How do you get started? What can you do to build a greatcustomer experience? What are the tips, tricks and tactics that willmake a real difference?

In this guide, we’re bringing together top tips from the CX experts to help you build great experiences for your customers.

This guide is inspired by our CX Day celebrations at LEGOLAND® Windsor. The thought leadership event brought together over 200 CX leaders to share fresh ideas, best practice and the latest innovations around customer experience.

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PRACTICAL TIPS & TACTICS FROM LEADING CX EXPERTS

BUILD A GREAT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

HOW TECHNOLOGY IS SHAPING CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

To understand how technology is changing consumer behaviour, you’ve got to get good insight into your customers. Think about them from a generational point of view.Look at what different customer groups want.

WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES THEN? HERE ARE THE THINGS CUSTOMERS REALLY EXPECT FROM COMPANIES:

1. Immediacy - We want it now! This is Amazon Prime territory. Nobody wants towait – if you phone a call centre and there’s a wait, you’ll probably move to livechart or another channel instead.

Professor Moira Clark Director of Henley Centre forCustomer Management

We won’t have lots of Moments of Truth because we’ll want it NOW. This is what

technology is going to facilitate.

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2. Omnipresent – People want you to be everywhere and connected at all times. It’s about providing a channel to customers, whether they’re out walking the dog, in the car or even on a plane.

3. Automated Services – We’re already seeing a lot of things like IVR. But they’re going to get a lot better. In a very short time, we’ll be able to have service conversations with basically robots on the phone.

4. Rich interactions – Customers want to be able to have videos. They want to feel that the interaction is really addressing how they want to communicate.

5. Transparency – Increasingly, customers want to know what are the service levels, what’s the customer satisfaction, what are your response rates. It’s one of the reasons we love TripAdvisor – we can instantly see what people think.

6. Proactive Service – Understanding what the customer wants even before they know they want it and being proactive in providing that service.

7. Customer Co-Creation – GiffGaff is a great example of this; they encourage customers to give customer service to other customers (basically C2C interactions). Then they reward customers who do this with lower phone bills.

8. Customer Learning – The more you can educate your customers, the better the experience will be.

9. Customisation – Tailoring interactions and experiences specifically for that customer.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING AGAINST THIS LIST? BE HONEST NOW. At the end of the day, it’s about keeping things simple, it’s about keeping it easy and it’s about keeping it real-time for the groups of customers that you serve.

Top Tip: Don’t get so obsessed with the technology that you forget about the person. Customer service still has to be right. Service is still the killer app.

“Moira is a consummate professional and customer experience thought-leader. I’ve watched Moira present several times and her

content is always excellent and insightful.”

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GAMIFYING THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

THE CUSTOMER DNA PRINCIPLES:

Jason Sharpe Managing Director, SharpeBusiness

“For me, customer experience is absolutely, intrinsically linked to colleague

engagement.”

If you get your employee engagement right and you get them highly engaged, you will benefit with:• Better customer satisfaction• Less employees leaving• Less absenteeism• Better productivity• Better efficiency

The secret to empowering employees is to give them the keys to the kingdom and let them know you trust them to use the keys wisely.

At work, every single person will have things they have to do and a framework they need to work within. It might be regulatory, it might be compliance or it might be risk. Of course, that’s okay – you’re going to do these things. But once you’ve got that framework, trust your employees to do the right thing on behalf of the customer.

• Obsess about your customer needs and not about product features – How manypeople have sat in a room when people have said ‘We can do this whizzy thing’ or‘We can do that whizzy thing’? Yes, it’s great to innovate. But what does the customerthink about all of this? What are their needs? Let’s understand that, as well asdesigning new products and features.

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• Reinforce the brand with every interaction – This isn’t just about frontline staff. It’s not just the marketing teams. It’s everybody’s universal responsibility, when they interact with a customer, to build on the brand and make sure they know what it stands for.

• Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function – What does this mean? Many organisations have CX gurus, complaints teams, Voice of the Customer meetings. You’ll have lots of ‘customer’ functions. There’s nothing wrong with that. But, it’s important to treat customer experience as a competence as it means it’s everyone’s job to worry about customer experience.

Top Tip: Obsess about customer needs at every interaction, treating customer experience as a competence.

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“At the heart of everything that Jason does is an unrelenting focus on what is right for the customer and employees. Those that work

with him or follow him are left in no doubt thatnothing matters more.”

THE ART AND INFLUENCE OF STORYTELLING IN CX

Ian GoldingCustomer Experience Practitioner

We wouldn’t be celebrating CX Day without the passionate, driven people who are doing their

very best to drag their organisations(sometimes kicking and screaming) to recognise

and acknowledge how important it is to be customer focused and customer centric.

Storytelling is a critical competency of any good customer experience professional. We all like a good story. When we’re kids, when we have kids, we love telling stories.

Never underestimate how good storytelling can be in influencing your organisation, your employees and your teams to focus even more on driving continuous improvement to the experiences you give both your customers and your employees.

If you’ve not considered how important storytelling can be, think about what stories you can share about your experiences. Think about the impact that these stories have;whether good, bad or ugly. Think about the way these stories make you feel.

The way we make customers feel is what we remember. And customers – which is all of us – will feel one of three emotions and they’ll remember one of three emotions:

• They’ll remember the very good things• They’ll remember the very bad things• They’ll remember absolutely nothing at all.

Storytelling is a way to make people remember.

Top tip: Feelings and emotions aren’t soft and fluffy – they’re core to the business.

“Ian is a very engaging speaker whom I can fully recommend to other organisations. Ian’s vast experience and determination

within CX comes out in his presentations and reallymotivates you.”

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LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®

Patrizia Bertini European Director of Research & Insights,Wipro Digital

“Customers are the experts in theirown experience.”

Innovation fails because we’re not able to get into people’s heads and understand what they want and why they want it. Ask yourself, when was the last time, as a professional, you spoke with (not to) your customers? You can’t innovate if you don’t understand what’s going on in your customer’s mind.

The other problem is that innovation comes from interaction.

We’re saying that customers are the experts. We’re saying that to innovate and bring something memorable, we need to interact. But where is this interaction happening? It’s happening in society, out in the world. It isn’t happening by itself.

Top Tip: Play is absorbing – it’s where everyone and everything sinks to thebackground because you become absorbed into what you’re doing.

“Patrizia and her LegoViews bring energy and inspiration tobusiness consultancy, resulting in real ideas being generated

and real decisions being taken.”

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MAN & MACHINE

Andrew Fawcett CTO, FinancialForce

“Lots of devices are becoming more connected in lots of different ways.”

We’re used to things like smartphones and laptops being connected to the Internet, but now other products, like fridges, cars and washing machines are also being connected.It’s all happening through the Internet of Things.

In this space, one of the buzzwords you’ll hear a lot is API (Application ProgrammingInterface). If you’re ever thinking about bringing products or devices together, the keyis to think: “Can you connect these parts together?” with APIs. Essentially, they’re likethe oil in the engine, keeping all the different parts moving and connected.Nothing happens without an API in place.

Top Tip: APIs are essential to integrate all parts of customer data within the organisation.

“Andrew has an extraordinary vision as to the potentials oftechnology. A new technology could be emerging and he would be

one of those rare individuals who just ‘gets it’ and immediately sees the potential relevancy or impact it could have.”

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THE INTERNET OF THINGS

Mark Brill Senior Lecturer in Future Media, BCU

“Some people probably hear Internet of Things and think ‘that’s all very well, but I don’t really

know and I don’t really care.”

Instead of thinking about the technology, think about the problems you can solve with it.For example, washing machines that text when a load has finished doesn’t solve theproblem of having to wash clothes. Just because the technology exists, doesn’t meanit’s helpful. Innovate to solve problems.

MAKEY MAKEY Makey Makey is a project that was initiated by two students at an MIT Media Lab that enables anyone to be creative, inventive and imaginative.

Top tip: Strip back the idea and focus on the problem. Don’t think about the technology.

“Mark’s presentation was fantastic and the audience reacted with passion and enthusiasm to his unique approach. As an expert in

cutting edge technologies, Mark was insightful and sociable across the event.”

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CX DAY REAL-TIME INFOGRAPHICS

Chris Shipton creates visual maps of meetings and events live as they happen. Here are a few from the day based on each speakers’ presentation:

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To see the Infographics visitwww.cx-day.com/cx-day-real-time-infographics

MOVING FROM STRATEGY TO ACTION

Dennis Fois CEO, Rant & Rave

“Customer experience is not a strategic challenge; it’s an execution challenge. It’s about doing, every day. It’s not about a

board-level strategy.”

The problem is we have a lot of competing priorities. A particularly interesting one is cost vs. service. When Rant & Rave works with new organisations, we ask whether they’re cost-led or service-led. Most will say service. But when you really test it in an organisation, it often doesn’t stand up.

Score and understanding is another competing priority. We want to measure things. But if customer experience is about ‘How do you make me feel?’ then it’s about emotion, not a number. How good do you think we are as people at expressing emotion in numbers? Just collecting a score means we’re missing out on the ‘Why?’ - we’re missing out on the insight.

If you look at most Voice of the Customer (VoC) programmes, there are some clearchallenges that organisations are facing, which stats from Forrester help to back up:

• Over a third of VoC programmes have no executive support.

• 60% of organisations don’t use the programme for customer experience design (such as asking better questions, following-up with customers and knowing when is best to follow up).

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• Two thirds of all programmes don’t have an engaged frontline, meaning theseprogrammes stay at the top level. They stay as board reports and statistics, ratherthan being embedded within the organisation.

• The most startling of all, 45% of all participants undergoing VoC programmes don’tclose the loop with the customer. So, in other words, they ask for feedback, they askfor improvements, but then don’t do anything visibly with this information.

We think this has something to do with the way we’ve been primed to work on projects.Typically, it starts with a strategy, and then goes into insight, execution and finally engagement.

The approach we’re suggesting is rather simple: start with engagement first. Reverse the approach, so we’re doing rather than thinking.

Top tip: Most customer experience projects fail because they’re projects and customer experience is not a project. It’s a set of principles that need to be enduring.

“Dennis is a smart, creative and strategic thinking Senior Executive. He combines very strong leadership skills with his

committed and always motivating character”

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Copyright © Rant & Rave 2016

@RantandRaveUK

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+RantandRaveUK

www.rantandrave.com

[email protected]

+44 (0)2476 011 911

ConclusionBuilding a great customer experience has the power to transform your organisation. Using compelling storytelling, embracing the role of new technology and empowering your employees – all while starting with engagement instead of strategy – can help you achieve the ‘whys’ of customer experience; customers that stay with us longer, customers that spend more and recruit new customers.

This guide contains a bunch of useful tips and tactics, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

To find out more, check out the full speaker videos from CX Day. www.cx-day.com/watch-on-demand-presentations

how to build a great customer experience · 2. omnipresent – people want you to be everywhere and...

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