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Customer Experience Strategy is a term widely used to mean very different things for a lot of companies. Most brands get lost in the conundrum regarding the differences between customer experience strategy and customer service, which are different. And as this CX Innovation space evolves, what we know as ‘customer experience’ continues to evolve as well. In this post, we wanted to define Customer Experience Strategy in terms of how we utilize it with our clients, and cover how any company can look to create a GREAT customer experience strategy.

But first, a definition:

Simply put, customer experience is the sum total of all the interactions between a customer and an organization – including discovery, initiation, purchase, service, and advocacy.

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all” – Michael LeBoeuf

Every single brand interaction impacts your customer experience (online and offline), and therefore, your customer loyalty. (Louder for our friends in the back!)

So now that we’ve defined this ever-evolving term, let’s go over how you can create a great customer experience strategy:

1. Deeply understand your audience 

Today’s consumer expects more from the brands they choose to buy from and engage with. Long gone are the days where superficial information about them (location, age, gender, etc) is all you needed to reach them. You need to understand your customer’s needs more than ever, and be able to take them through a journey that allows them to build trust with you – which eventually turns them into buyers. One of the best ways to dive deeper into your customer is to create customer archetypes (also known as personas/profiles). 

Customer personas challenge you to think about all areas of you customer’s journey and helps you identify where you can unique serve in that journey. From there, you can easily tailor your messaging and create a more thoughtful customer experience for that particular customer.

2. Work backwards from the customer experience you want to deliver

Steve Jobs famously advocated for “beginning with the customer experience and working backward to the technology”. This is for good reason – it’s much easier to reverse-engineer your strategy based on the end result than building the latter from the ground up. However, in order to do that, you need to know how your customer experiences your brand at all stages. Where are your opportunities to make impressions and create connection? For example, Amazon (now a behemoth), started with a very simple customer experience opportunity – early delivery. From there, you can imagine how they might have reverse-engineered the steps to make that strategy a reality.

3. Hire A-Players and get them invested into the process

A-Players are a unique AboutFace methodology that drives all of our hiring practices. A-players, by definition, are harder to manage because they’re bursting at the seams with creativity and innovation. But if nurtured well, they become fierce executioners who will own and help define your broader customer experience strategy. Simply put, employees are key to creating an excellent customer experience. In our experience, it’s the little things at the end of the day that make tiny differences in how your brand is perceived. It’s the same reason why we love it when we go out to dinner with our friends for our birthday and the manager comes over to wish us a happy birthday – or the bartender sends over a special cocktail. 

How your employees engage with customers speaks volumes – so make sure you get A-Players who deeply care about your company’s vision and values. 

4. ASK, & LISTEN

Did you know..

Research from Bain & Company showcased this – and leaders everywhere should be shaking in their boots.

How can you know customers’ needs without asking? And how can you assess brand value without asking?

This is why it’s essential to create feedback loops – which require the company to ask, and listen. There are a lot of creative ways to do this, some of which include a post-interaction or real-time feedback survey, which allows you to followup with customers with more detail. Another, and we would argue (of critical importance), is to see what is being said on social – the good, the bad, the ugly. Customers are incredibly honest on their platforms, and there’s a goldmine of data in there if you’re willing to listen.

5. Build systems for quick and effective solutions

After you’ve digested your customer feedback, it’s time to swiftly and effectively respond. Every single stage in the customer lifecycle should have a support system in place. Here are some ways you can provide thoughtful and effective customer support:

• Live chat: chat bots are super effective ways to provide quick response times to improve your customer’s experience with your brand. Also, live chats are easily integrated into pretty much all CRM and Marketing technologies so that you can reach out to then later and get them re-engaged with the brand.
• Social media messaging tools: since a lot of feedback happens on social channels, heavily monitoring those and quickly responding with direct messages, comments and other engagements, allows you to step up your customer experience game. (Bonus – it also allows others to see that you take your customer experience seriously. Like the saying goes, you attract more bees with honey!)
• Traditional surveys and feedback forms still serve a monumental purpose: Using tools like Typeform, you can integrate automations, photos, and humor in your survey experience.

Ready to dive into how you can create a GREAT customer experience strategy that drives brand awareness and gets results? If you have more than 14 locations, book a call with Paige Hartsfield, our top CX Strategist today. If you have less than 14 locations, please visit our Secret Shopping On-Demand site to order today.

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“Even when we’re about three years old working with Lego blocks, we want to do something different, we want to build something unique with our own hands.”

It’s clear that from a young age Cisco Customer Experience’s Chief Architect, Dave Malik, had a knack for innovation, the process of deconstructing problems and reimagining new solutions. In his early career, Dave was drawn to the world of finance due to its position at the forefront of enterprise innovation. It was here that he discovered the value of technology to drive companies to find a ‘wedge’ in the market – vital for survival in the highly competitive world of stock trading.

He may have moved on from Lego blocks, but today Dave is still focused on finding and implementing the innovations that set businesses apart from their competitors. “Every customer has a vision of their own masterpiece and we want to help them build it.”

In our discussion with Dave, we uncovered 11 guiding principles he uses to drive innovation and digital transformation for some of the world’s largest companies.

Rule #1: Find the 10%

“When you look at the journey of a customer, it’s typical that 80-90% is fairly commoditized, meaning everyone’s doing the same thing. It’s the last 10% that really differentiates people. It’s about, how do you become the first in your industry, or the second, to really gain a competitive edge in the market. And those are usually extremely challenging maneuvers. Otherwise, everyone would be doing it.”

To unearth this, he works alongside companies in a process of ‘co-innovation’, helping them discover what their customers need, and guiding them to implement the technologies to bring their outcomes to life.

Rule #2: Innovate from the outside-in

One of the most common mistakes Dave encounters in these early stages is innovation from the inside-out. Instead, companies should place themselves in the shoes of their end-customers, innovating from the outside-in. “That’s how most companies fail. They build something they hope customers will embrace. Instead you should look at, ‘what are the toughest problems in the industry that can make an impact if resolved?’ and then you go tackle them.”

Rule #3: Focus on interactions, not transactions

“When you go to a store in a checkout line and get your groceries, that’s a transaction. That’s not what we’re here for.”

Just as important as winning new customers is achieving what Dave calls, ‘customer stickiness’.

But how do you make your customers stick?

The key is to focus on ‘interactions’ – building relationships by leveraging insight-driven experiences that engage customers as individuals, rather than delivering on one-time ‘transactions’.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI) are enabling us to unearth these insights by predicting how and when customers require expertise for a solution. When people feel valued, as the result of an outstanding or highly personalized experience, they’re far more likely to come back for more.

Rule #4: Innovate at speed, with safety

In recent years, many industries have been flooded with nimble new players, each vying to innovate faster than the rest and achieve ‘customer stickiness’. This has prompted many established companies to change the way they operate to stay above the high-water mark.

“As an example, we have executed programs with financial institutions with over 200,000 employees, but they know they can no longer operate like a battleship. So we’re seeing a lot of larger customers that are building smaller agile teams. They’re working in sprints and now we’re getting code out to drive cloud applications much faster with micro-releases.” At the same time, these companies should ensure they’re working with trusted, credible vendors to minimize risk.

Rule #5: Secure your network with Automation and ML/AI

Properly managing security is essential to ensuring safety when innovating. Hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear of a cybersecurity breach, often due to the complexity of maintaining compliance across environments and the sheer scale of the networks that human operators have to protect.

The answer? Automation and ML/AI.

“Humans cannot correlate millions of data points and drive insights from them to take action with low latency. It’s impossible. So, we want to get to the point where you can make an educated decision in a very short amount of time. We take threat and network intelligence very seriously, and we marry them through automation frameworks to protect not only their applications but also their employees and devices.”

Rule 6#: Unlock creativity by removing repetition

Beyond the pivotal issue of security, automation can also accelerate deployments and increase efficiency by batch processing repetitive tasks. Companies improve their bottom line, customers get access to reliable new services more quickly, and employees have more time to focus on innovation.

“A common misnomer in many markets is, ‘automation is going to dramatically reduce my workforce.’  The truth is, it will make your workforce more intelligent if you use it in a strategic manner.”

Rule #7: 24/7 availability is a must in today’s digital landscape

Automation is also key to reducing latency and remediating issues faster, both of which are central to availability. Today, if your experience can’t be accessed 24/7 by your clients, it can pose a serious threat to your brand.

As a concrete example, Cisco’s Customer Experience team is supporting the requirement for high availability for some of the largest mobile operators in the world. Site Reliability Engineering practices are being used to ensure system availability to meet end-user demand.

Rule #8: Drive simplification and choice in multicloud

Whether building a Lego castle or a digital masterpiece, openness and interoperability are key. With Legos we rely on the ability of every piece to fit together to create a masterpiece. This is true for our networks too, particularly when it comes to cloud. Dave believes every business should be able to develop a cloud-agnostic policy, the ability to choose the cloud they want, to innovate in the way they need, without negative consequences.

Multicloud is now a reality and those who exercise it will gain a competitive advantage. The challenge is ensuring these different environments are abstracted with common languages. Businesses must ensure they work with a vendor that can maintain security policies with no vendor lock-in, deliver the right experience and provide full visibility into their applications across any cloud.

Rule #9: Let your technology partner focus on the details while you focus on business outcomes

Automation, machine learning, and the ability to operate securely and efficiently across whatever environment you choose all provide the groundwork for innovation that drive a company’s competitive edge. Despite this, Dave’s point of focus when working with customers is around providing value by achieving their specific business outcomes. At the end of the day, solving these problems is what builds a strong, trusting relationship.

Rule #10: Adopt a holistic end-to-end architecture

One of the ways Cisco sets itself apart is by moving beyond product development, realizing that for companies to get the most out of their solutions they need to be able to look at systems end-to-end. “We’re looking at things very holistically. We’re passionate about how networking, security, applications, IoT, multicloud and emerging technologies can integrate more easily.”

With a cross-architectural approach, aided by Advisory, Architecture and Support teams, and ecosystem partners, Dave is able to help customers take a step back from their individual technologies. With architecture blueprints, key decision makers can view the entire canvas of their masterpiece and understand how it all fits together, and when and where investments need to be made. At the end of the day, IT is run as a business.

Rule #11: Innovation is a continuous process

To stay competitive today, no company can rest on their laurels. Rather, they need to continually ask themselves what new problems they can solve and how they can make their end-customers’ experiences even better across the lifecycle of their solutions. Here Dave draws the comparison to the Cisco’s Customer Experience racetrack.

“The graphic shows that it’s a continuous journey for our customers… We can always do better and improve and learn from what we’ve done.”

It’s this same philosophy that’s driven Dave Malik since day one, from bringing to life creative new ideas with Lego blocks, to stitching together digital solutions and driving innovation at a global scale.

“That’s kind of the mantra. I think, you’re never done. There’s no end. When people think they’ve arrived, they’re mistaken.”

The original article to this post was posted here.

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