While most people agree that a great customer experience is one of the most valuable things for a company to have, there’s often confusion on the specifics of customer experience. In his recent article, Jeffrey Mack points out that companies often have uncertainty with customer experience details like which department/group owns it, what technology is necessary to support it, and what/how to measure it. Mack offers an interesting concept that customer experience is similar to a layer cake. Like a cake, a great customer experience program has ingredients and separate layers that all contribute to the same final goal. Mack goes into detail on the following six key layers to a successful customer experience layer cake.
1) Company Vision: It all starts with the company instating a vision to put the customer at the core of their focus. Mack recommends making it both vague and specific at the same time to allow for flexibility for the company to evolve while keeping customer happiness as the core goal.
2) Company Leadership: The vision and strategy the company creates for the customer experience program is useless without proper leadership on strategic execution. Companies should make sure they have leaders who fully buy-in to the vision and are able to make the right decisions on all levels.
3) Company Departments: Customer experience should be the main objective for every department from marketing, to sales, to call center agents. In order for customers to receive great experience, the company must deliver a great employee experience first.
4) Customer Promotion: This includes benchmark data metrics like “net promoter score”. Basically, this layer of the cake includes requesting your customers to rate their experience with your product and/or service, which helps companies determine the strength of their customers’ loyalty.
5) Customer Effort: This includes tracking data to ensure that customers have to put in as little effort with your company as possible while still being satisfied. Mack says that having lower customer effort scores can be accomplished by doing simple things well such as reducing multiple contacts for resolutions and offering answers that don’t sound like they’re scripted. If customers feel like they have to put too much work into being satisfied with a company, they’ll be less likely to hold any loyalty to it.
6) Customer Touchpoints: The final layer involves keeping track of actual customer interactions via phone calls, live web chat, emails, and social media. This is the final icing on the cake that is built up by the layers before it. The success of your customer experience program can be monitored in real-time through real-life application.
Jeffrey Mack’s main point is simple: an amazing customer experience can be accomplished, but it requires multiple layers and ingredients working together to be successful. When companies have all the ingredients working together, the results can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
This blog post is based on an article from CustomerThink. To read the original article, please click the link below:
What Does Cake Have to Do with Customer Experience? – Jeffrey Mack
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