Chapter 1

Basic Training: Customer Experience Basics

In This Chapter

Looking at eight essential steps to creating a great customer experience program

Understanding why little things mean a lot

Considering why the "low-hanging fruit" approach doesn't work

Appreciating the importance of "owning" customer experience

Thinking of customer experience as the ultimate competitive advantage

Before you can work to improve customer experience, you need one key piece of information: what customer experience is. The best definition we've seen comes from customer experience thought leader Colin Shaw:

Customer experience is the sum of all interactions between a customer and your organization. It's the blend of your organization's physical performance [and] the emotions that you create all measured against customer expectations across all of your points of interaction.

Or to put it another way: Customer service is an attitude, not a department.

Simple, right? Well, maybe not. If you begin to dissect Shaw's observations, you quickly discover the daunting nature of the challenge in front of you.

Start with the first part of Shaw's statement. If customer experience really is "the sum of all interactions between a customer and your organization," that means it's a big problem if a customer's interaction with you is off the charts but merely okay with the next person in your organization that he deals with.

For customer experience to be great, every interaction at every customer touchpoint must be exceptional. In other words, the whole organization must work together to deliver a great customer experience. This is surprisingly rare, however. In our experience, organizations are pretty fragmented. Marketing is its own domain, separate from sales, which is separate from operations, which is separate from customer service, and so on. If your goal is to significantly improve your customer experience, you have to ensure these functional areas start communicating and working together.

Now move on to the second part of Shaw's definition: "It's the blend of your organization's physical performance [and] the emotions that you create all measured against customer expectations across all of your points of interaction." By "physical performance," Shaw refers to your organization's ability to produce and deliver a good quality product or service. The takeaway here is that if you want to deliver good customer experience, then offering a product or service that works, is reliable, and isn't a pain in the neck to use is a given. It's the bare minimum.

What about "the emotions you create"? Yes, great customer experience means creating and effectively managing your customers' emotions. The fact is, there's not a single interaction that occurs between an organization and its customers that doesn't foster an emotion of some kind. Whether that emotion is deep frustration or sheer delight is largely up to you and how thoughtfully you design, plan, and execute your customer experience.

And of course, there's the "measured against customer expectations across all of your points of interaction" bit. In other words, in delivering a great customer experience, you must consider your customers' expectations. Realize that each of your customer touchpoints affirms or negates the expectations that each customer brings to an interaction.

Moreover, be aware that consumers are quick to transfer their expectations of great customer experience from one industry to another. That means when it comes to delivering a great customer experience, you're not just competing with the store down the street . you're up against everyone, everywhere. (And to make matters worse, your customers are likely discussing your shortcomings on every social media channel possible!)

Over the next 300+ pages, this book delves more into what customer experience is and how best to deliver it. In this chapter, we discuss the eight essential steps to creating a great customer experience program, why "the little things" are a big deal, and a few other important topics that you need to understand before you begin the work of creating and consistently delivering a great customer experience.

Eight Steps to Creating a Great Customer Experience Program

There are eight essential components to building a great customer experience program:

1. Developing and deploying your customer experience intent statement
2. Building touchpoint maps
3. Redesigning touchpoints
4. Creating a dialogue with your customers
5. Building customer experience knowledge in the workforce
6. Recognizing and rewarding a job well done
7. Executing an integrated internal communications plan
8. Building a customer experience dashboard

We talk about each of these in detail throughout the book. For now, we give you a quick overview of each step.

Step 1: Developing and deploying your customer experience intent statement

The process of building your customer experience program starts here, with a formal declaration of your desired customer experience through an intent statement. The intent statement directs all subsequent work. Although the intent statement is related to and supportive of brand positioning, it's not a marketing slogan. The intent statement is more akin to a set of engineering schematics. It's a formal, defined set of criteria against which the organization can manage and monitor the delivery of customer experience. For more information on developing your customer experience intent statement, flip to Chapter 6.

Step 2: Building touchpoint maps

If you want to provide excellent customer experience, you need a deep understanding of how your customers interact with your business at each of your individual touchpoints as well as across your entire organization. To gain this understanding, you must map your customer's journey and the touchpoints they interact with along the way. This analysis provides you with a clearer understanding of your customers' experience with your organization. You can find out more about building touchpoint maps in Chapter 7.

Step 3: Redesigning touchpoints

You'll likely need to redesign one, some, or even all of your customer touchpoints to improve the experience your customers are receiving. Fortunately, the redesign process for each touchpoint requires just four weeks, or 20 workdays. No more, no less. (Due to an alarmingly prevalent bureaucratic condition - CADD, or corporate attention deficit disorder - redesign efforts must be very tightly scoped and time-limited.) During this period, the touchpoint redesign team brainstorms, proposes change, and executes on its proposal. In addition to creating change fast, this process also results in a widely dispersed set of enthusiastic customer experience change leaders. For details on this redesign process, turn to Chapter 10.

Step 4: Creating a dialogue with your customers

When it comes to getting feedback from customers, annual surveys are out, and constant listening and providing real-time dialogue is in. That means you need to inventory where you are listening effectively today, prioritizing your highest-value listening and dialogue touchpoints, and creating a governance model for managing and responding to customer feedback. The end game here is to be able to converse with your customers in near real-time and to respond to customer concerns, problems, and suggestions as they happen. For more on getting feedback from customers, see Chapter 11.

Step 5: Building customer experience knowledge in the workforce

Employees who regularly interact with customers need to understand not only what customer experience your organization intends to deliver (your intent statement), but also how to deliver that experience. Most employees are trained only on the specific functions needed to execute their individual part of their siloed business process. Very few are given real-world, hands-on, practical experience in exactly how to deliver great customer experience. That has to change! Chapter 12 discusses the ins and outs of building customer experience knowledge in your workforce.

Step 6: Recognizing and rewarding customer experience done well

Your organization's compensation system telegraphs to all employees what's really important and what isn't. If rewards (compensation and so forth) and recognition programs don't reflect your focus on customer experience, then even your very best efforts to turn your company's culture customer-centric will ultimately fail. The program will also fail if you reward individuals who "make their numbers" but act in a way that ignores or injures the customer experience. Chapter 13 covers the rewards of rewarding correctly.

Step 7: Executing an integrated internal communications plan

If your organization's leaders rarely mention customer concerns, issues, or opportunities, then all the best internal marketing will fall short of fostering significant cultural change. The fact is, making your organization customer-centric is an uphill battle. It is winnable, but significant...