Many of our clients are achieving great success using a customer experience focus and related frameworks to drive innovation, strengthen their brands and even recast their strategy. Placing customer experience at the center creates a new perspective that generates results.
1. Yields insights with big impact
Research on the customer experience can uncover issues and opportunities not identified through traditional customer satisfaction research. Using the highly effective tool of journey mapping, an organization can better identify how best to connect with its various customers at different stages of interaction. By looking at the entire customer journey, marketers get a more comprehensive view of their value delivery and can gain new insights about the individual moments of truth that define customer perceptions. Mapping the journey can also reveal inconsistencies across touchpoints that may limit customer delight. With this perspective, marketers can prioritize with confidence, devoting resources where they’re likely to have the biggest impact, either by addressing shortcomings or seizing new opportunities to foster customer loyalty.
2. Challenges the status quo
The customer experience framework revolves around customers and their experiences with the brand. It’s an outside-in approach that leverages external inputs to generate solutions based on customer needs and preferences, rather than on the company’s organizational structure or other internal factors. The mindset shift is liberating, especially for businesses in markets with high barriers to entry in which companies typically think in terms of their internal capabilities. This exploratory approach can help incumbents preempt market disruption through a more informed, customer-centric approach to product and service design.
3. Fosters cross-functional collaboration
Many companies are challenged by siloed thinking. Getting operations people to think like marketers (and vice-versa) may be an uphill battle. However, all departments impact the customer experience directly or indirectly, and have a role to play in enabling a best-in-class customer experience. The customer-focused approach is inherently collaborative, bringing cross-functional talent and perspectives together to drive systems thinking and build esprit de corps that transcends any one department’s turf. Shared goals and ownership can yield transformative innovation and results.
4. Enables the CMO to drive enterprise-wide change
With so many different factors and departments impacting the customer experience, cross-functional cooperation and execution is required for implementation. This dynamic gives CMOs broader license to manage enterprise-wide change initiatives and get leadership support to drive change through to completion.
5. Builds a sustainably customer-focused culture
The customer experience framework is inclusive and intuitive. That makes it easy for employees throughout the organization to “hear” and accept the voice of the customer, and allows the development of service principles that provide clear guidance for employee behaviors. The organization can then incorporate these service principles into its brand activation and employee engagement programs, empowering employees to provide experiences that pay off the brand promise.
