More and much more companies are trying to differentiate themselves by having an effective customer experience strategy. To advance those efforts, some firms hire highly skilled “chief customer officers” or engage expert consultants for help.
But gleam great amount of firms that choose to go it alone, proudly proclaiming that “we know what we're doing.”
Those five words, though, could undermine the effectiveness of those firms' customer experience (CX) improvement strategies. Why? Because there's more to customer experience strategy than you would think.
It's simple for most one to think they are a customer experience expert. After all, each of us is really a consumer ourselves. We all know what it takes to create a customer happy – keep promises, follow the golden rule, serve having a smile, etc. It's not rocket science, right?
Well, maybe not rocket science, but definitely science.
The fact is, there is a whole science to shaping great customer experiences and, contrary to what many business people think, it isn't all common sense. To assist illustrate that – to underscore how “we understand what we're doing” could be a dangerously overconfident viewpoint – below are a few types of customer experience strategy considerations that could surprise you:
- What's most significant isn't shaping customer experiences, it's shaping customer memories. For a business to derive strategic advantage from the customer experience, individuals need to remember it positively. Whenever a friend or colleague asks you – “what do you consider of [Company/Product X]?” – your response is grounded in your recollection of the experience, that is actually diverse from the knowledge itself. It's for this reason that the best CX strategies take advantage of cognitive science to shape customers' memories more positively, thereby elevating people's impression from the overall experience.
- Fixing customer pain points won't enable you to get where you want to be. Business leaders are, by and large, fixers. They're trained early on, and subsequently coached and encouraged, to find problems and fix them. Fixing problems is a good skill to possess, and many a job has been built on such aptitude. It's also a valuable skill when handling the customer experience – in the end, a person experience with fewer pain points is a better customer experience, right? Yes, but there is a catch. Merely fixing pain points might help achieve competitive parity, but it doesn't necessarily deliver competitive differentiation. It doesn't make your customer experience memorable. Achieving that usually requires not only fixing existing customer touchpoints; it takes introducing entirely brand new ones that enhance the experience in a meaningful way.
- What customers don't see is really as essential as the things they're doing see. A lot of companies focus their customer experience strategy on the live, digital and print touchpoints that individuals encounter when patronizing the business (call them “onstage” components). That's entirely appropriate, but it is also only a partial solution. Essential are the “backstage” components – the behind-the-scenes workplace practices which help shape the mindset, behavior and engagement of company employees. From hiring profiles to training programs to compensation practices to cultural norms, these are all backstage elements that customers never see, yet they materially influence the caliber of the knowledge delivered. Probably the most successful customer experience strategies take this into account, balancing their attention across both onstage and backstage parts of the equation.
If you found some or many of these operating principles eye-opening, most. While engineering an excellent customer experience definitely requires a heavy dose of common sense, it also involves science and subject material expertise that's not whatsoever common.
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously declared that you will find “known knowns” (things we all know we all know) there are “known unknowns” (things we all know we don't know). But, he cautioned, there are also “unknown unknowns” (things we do not know we don't know).
So, if you're a business leader launching a customer experience transformation, be skeptical should you hear your team confidently report that “We know what we're doing.” Take into account that moment a coaching opportunity, and engage in a little pushback.
Challenge your team to honestly evaluate their expertise.
Challenge them to augment their CX knowledge, through books, training along with other resources.
Challenge them to entertain the real possibility that “unknown unknowns” – things they don't realize they don't know about CX – could sabotage their best efforts to produce a winning customer experience strategy.
