It only works for a while. The missing component is the emotional part of the strategy. For example, you can request your sales advisor to smile at every customer who enters the store, which is indeed very important. If you throw money at the problem, you will get more people to comply for a while but you will not reach their heart and soul, you will most likely get a fake smile… and the client will feel it.
Why does it matter so much? After all, we have lived most of our lives with a rather average customer experience everywhere, and many brands did well for themselves despite this.
Well, things have changed. Customers are now well informed, connected, aware and most importantly, they have a choice. Because of that, customer experience is the new battlefield. It is where brands will keep, win or lose their customers. In this context, the traditional transactional model appears to be broken.
A store is a place where a transaction must take place, nearly at all cost. The sales advisor either ignores you or pushes you to buy, he thinks short term. I say it is broken because this is no longer what the client wants. The new model is based on emotions and relationships. In this model, a store is no longer a place where the transaction needs to happen no matter what. The role of the sales advisor is no longer to close the deal at all costs but to build a relationship with the customer.
We should see if we have the customer contact information and can continue a conversation after he or she left the store. This is what matters. In this model, the store is a touch point, an important one, but not the final one.
The transaction might be taking place later in that same store, online or at the duty-free store at the airport. It raises questions about recruitment criteria, KPI, commissions schemes. Their main challenge many companies are facing is how to find the time and resources to grasp all the opportunities.
Reactive companies expecting some sort of disruption are finding their preparedness is paying off as they didn't need much help in implementing the necessary changes. Finally, the reactive laggards plunge into a crisis. They lack the skills and resources to adapt; even more crucially, they probably lack the vision and strategy of coping with change. At the time of a crisis, cash is king, and customers are the ones that control your inbound cash flow.
It's no secret that CX leaders enjoy higher sales, lower costs, and higher employee satisfaction than other companies. Most businesses claim to serve their customers first. If you genuinely embrace delighting the customer, you need to have teams working together. This calls for shared business objectives and shared insights.
Insights and data are always useful but even more so at the time of disruption. Whatever you knew half a year ago, is most likely outdated. Does the customer benefit from multiple, separated insight processes that are run as projects and have gaps between them? Of course not. If you want to become customer-centric, start moving towards a continuous, integrated insight process.
Improving Customer Experience has a proven, demonstrable positive payback. The challenge is that the costs and resource requirements happen today. The results, on the other hand, may only become visible days, weeks, or months later. There are a few ways you can address this.
The first one is the expectation management. When you start CX improvement actions keep the stakeholders informed and agree in advance what you measure, when and what outcomes you expect.
Second, split the work into smaller sub-projects. Showing early wins, however small, creates confidence and wins nods of approval. Third, plan your CX steps so that you can measure them near real-time. This gives you the flexibility to adapt while you execute. Avalon CX provides a free model for assessing CX core activities and methodology.
There are many other models around with varying levels of comprehensiveness and complexity, and we advise choosing the one you feel comfortable with. CX Insights involves target setting, strategy, and research.
Insights and analytics are shared across the other two areas. Marketing and communications define and build brands and always shape a customer's expectation of their experience with the brand, aka CX Expectations. The third element is the CX Fulfillment that comes in the form of products, services, solutions, and customer support. Bringing all three core elements together to an integrated, continuous CX should be your goal. While the concept is intuitive and straightforward, implementing it is in no way trivial.
It usually requires several rounds of iteration and interim wins that encourage participation across the organization. CX Expectation and Fulfillment can be a timely activity, splitting design and development activities.
These activities can loop, run in parallel, or be one-off projects depending on the nature of your business. COVID has resulted in an unprecedented shock to our society and the landscape of Customer Expectations is changing rapidly. Many companies struggle to adapt to the changes. Some are struggling to adapt to survive; some are at risk of missing out on opportunities. This study found three common key takeaways and suggests a method for addressing them, reactively or proactively.
CX encompasses all the interactions a person has with your brand. It all culminates in what customers DO as a consequence of the experience. Customer Experience can be studied from 3 perspectives: CX Insights covering business objectives, strategy, analysis, and data; CX Expectation setting by marketing and communications; and CX Fulfillment delivered by the products and services.
These three core elements form CX, and to optimally serve the customer; they should create one integrated and continuous process. CX leaders outperform their laggard competitors in profitability, employee satisfaction, and valuation. COVID has thrown virtually every organization into a state of disruption. Whether you were earlier proactively disrupting the market or taking a more cautious approach, now is a time to act.
Cash is king, and customers control your cash inflow. Every organization can benefit from implementing a data-driven, continuous CX plan. We're hiring! See our open positions. Canada Vancouver B. Dallas Frisco TX Email: [email protected].
Customers have different priorities, behaviors, and even their comfort zone has changed. What behaviors will bounce back? What changes are here to stay? What changes will follow the current changes? The third level is not knowing how to address the situation. Customer Experience has become data-driven, analytical, and even automated.
Data is a beautiful foundation to build on, but a lack of data can be paralyzing. Knowing when not to trust your data, generating rapid insights, and future-proofing your plans for different scenarios have become crucial.
Methodology The hypothesis behind this white paper is that COVID has been a once-in-a-generation experience that fundamentally disrupts the CX expectations.
Key findings Brand loyalty is being attacked on many fronts Customers are scrutinizing brands. The shelf life of data is short and just got shorter Data helps you make better decisions, and for most, once you've learned to rely on data, you soon introduce automation. Proactive organizations seek to disrupt industries, customer expectations, and even norms.
The actions of the proactive ones put a majority of organizations into a reactive mode. Conclusions COVID has resulted in an unprecedented shock to our society and the landscape of Customer Expectations is changing rapidly. Practical Solutions CX leaders outperform their laggard competitors in profitability, employee satisfaction, and valuation.
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