Customer experience as always been a key driver of business success. However, our current situation has turned upside down everything we thought we knew about our customers and their journeys.
There are three main observations and considerations that are playing out to be important in ensuring that our customer experience work is contributing positively to our business, and not becoming a liability in these times of change.
In this video, Cynthia Short dives into the three areas to pay attention to as you re-evaluate and redefine your customer experience.
If you’re seeking to revisit and redefine your customer experience, contact Lexico.
Transcript
Customer experience has long been a topic tied to make it or break it business success. I think it’s important that we recognize that today we’re all in the middle of customer experience transformations, whether we planned for it or not.
There are three main observations and considerations that we’ve been paying attention to here at Lexico that are playing out to be important in ensuring that our customers experience work is contributing positively to our business, and not becoming a liability in these times of change.
The first area is about our understanding of our customers.
It’s an important thing to think about that while we may not need to start over in our understanding it is really important that we start fresh. We cannot approach empathy with assumptions. Yes, we’re going back to our personas and our journey maps and taking our understanding about how to best serve our customers today, but we need to recognize that the insights there were built at a different time.
We also need to be open to the fact that our customers may not even be clear on what they need and want themselves currently. So I think it’s important that as we think about this, we don’t focus on building a new customer experience plan, but really build our planning capabilities so that we can stay flexible as these things evolve.
The second area is really paying attention and not forgetting all the pieces.
While we are thinking about our customers and trying to best understand them we have to recognize that employees have been the lynchpins in delivering meaningful experience to our customers forever. We have to recognize that how they work today, the roles that they’re playing, the value propositions that they have, are all changing as well, so we can’t assume that we know how to best support them. We need to be open that we need to relearn how to best empower them so that they can be positive agents for our customers.
Another piece is our internal customers. Every function has internal customers and how we support them has a huge impact not only a customer experience but to our businesses as a whole. As we’re navigating this change, this is a perfect time to infuse some of this thinking and understanding our internal customer needs and how they might have changed as we’re putting together change plans for our functions as a whole.
Finally which might actually be the hardest, is know thyself shall we say.
We need to recognize as leaders, as decision makers, that we are people going through these major changes as well
and may be bringing biases to the table that we may not be aware of. Uncertainty can lead to avoidance or short-term focus that we may not want to be leaning into. We have to be clear on how we’re characterizing these changes and how we’re approaching decision making as well.
So to wrap up, like I mentioned before it’s interesting times. We’re all finding ourselves in the middle of customer experience transformations whether we were intentionally pursuing them or not. We need to maintain that things are going to continuously change, and we need to recognize that. This is a new landscape and we are going to have to adapt.
So I hope this has been helpful in giving you some new thoughts on how you’re approaching your own customer experience work, and I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on what you’ve been paying attention to as well.
Thanks.