For many organizations, the initial improvements in Customer Experience have long since passed. The early gains in Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) have faded into legend and the NPS® now languishes in a plateau, quarter after quarter. Many organizations are scratching their heads wondering, “What now? However, they would be better off asking, “What’s next?”
How Customer Experience Improvement Is Like Getting Fit
Like many people, I have decided in the past that I needed to improve my health and get more fit than I am. When I embark on one of these health-kicks, I make some obvious and not very painful changes at the start (reduce my intake of sweets, walking more, etc.). To my great delight, they often yield impressive results straightaway. My bloodwork sings of improving health and my scale shouts, Atta-boy at me when I weigh in.
However, once I enjoy these initial gains in fitness, I notice that those impressive drops at the scale and in the doctor’s office are not what they once were. While I am not getting worse, I’m not improving either. If I continue doing only what I did at the outset, I won’t improve, either. Those initial changes have done their work, yielded their results, as it were. To continue to improve my fitness levels, I will have to make bigger, more fundamental changes to my lifestyle than at the beginning. For any of you that have undertaken a similar journey, you know that this is where the real sacrifices are made, where the food choices hurt a wee bit more than initially and the couch seems to sing a siren’s song of lethargy. In other words, it gets more difficult to improve; the easy changes have been made and now the real work begins.
A Metaphor for Customer Experience Improvement
In many ways, the cycle of a fitness improvement plan is a metaphor for Customer Experience improvement. Years ago, when the term Customer Experience was just a whisper in the hearts of organizations wanting to remain competitive in a changing market, you could make tiny, simple changes to how you interacted with customers and saw impressive gains in your Net Promoter Score® (NPS®). Senior management didn’t mind your agenda because it didn’t yet require many resources or change at the organization. Likewise, the team didn’t mind your agenda because it didn’t disrupt their business as usual that much—once they got used to the tiny, simple changes, of course.
In The Intuitive Customer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), my latest book with co-author Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University, we explore seven imperatives to make a case for why people behave the way they do as customers. As the tenets of our new world philosophy, these imperatives help take your Customer Experience improvement program to the next level.
An example of the granular analysis we recommend is understanding how an interaction between a customer and your organization looks like. We call this moment in the experience the Anatomy of a Customer Interaction.
When you understand the thought-processes behind an interaction, you can see how the little details of what you do and say (or stand, or wear, or even the order you require the customer to provide information) affects how the interaction transpires. Not only that, you can see how what the customer does and says (or stands, or sighs, etc.) tells you how your interaction is playing out in customer satisfaction. Moreover, when you satisfy your customers with a proper and deliberate interaction, they remember being satisfied (or not), which the customer recalls in the future when they need your product or service again (or decide they don’t).
Employee training on recognizing these initial verbal or nonverbal clues and the ability to interpret what they mean is vital. Converting these moments into satisfaction and a positive emotional outcome is vital as well. We train customer-facing employees in this skill with our Memory Maker Training. We teach them the elements of an Anatomy of a Customer Interaction and how to use these moments to create good memories of the experience so your customers come back for more.
What’s next in improving Customer Experience requires a commitment to understanding customer behavior at a granular level. It demands more than the easy, initial changes many organizations have made. These changes are a wee bit more sweeping than the first ones. They require an analysis of how your company operates, and what that means to the day-to-day work of your team.
If you want to improve your Customer Experience, it is this point where the work gets more fundamental and far-reaching than in the beginning. In other words, it gets more difficult to improve; the easy changes have been made, and now the real work begins.
To learn more about the Anatomy of a Customer Interaction and the concepts behind it, watch the recording of our FREE and informative 30-minute webinar and read the associated whitepaper. We examine the importance of the interaction between customers and customer-facing teams as well as how to optimize the experience to drive the most value for your bottom line. Please click here to learn more.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy these:
Revolutionary Thinking on Customer Loyalty
Astonishing BIG Gains from Little Changes!
Act Now to Turn Customer Pain Points into Pleasurable Profits
Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.
Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX