Seven Vital Questions to Customer Experience Development

There is no doubt that most business leaders are aware of the value a high quality customer experience could add to their business, in fact in a recent survey 80 percent of executives said they understood the benefits, however those same executives agreed that New Zealand businesses have an “average” to “poor” approach to customer satisfaction

The question therefore is why aren’t more organisations focusing on a strategic approach to the development and management of their customer experience? And the answer to that question once again backed by research is “they don’t have the knowledge and expertise to do it.

So let me start to help with that by firstly highlighting seven questions a business must answer before embarking on any journey to put in a place a long-term customer experience strategy.

The 7 Questions you need to answer

1) Am I 100 percent committed to a long-term journey that will see the consistency and quality of our customer experience as a clear and sustainable competitive advantage? Understanding that without my total commitment I am unlikely to get total commitment from my team.

2) Do we have a clear will communicated company vision that has total commitment from within and is clearly aligned with our customer experience strategy?

3) Do we have a clearly defined customer experience statement that describes exactly what we will all strive to deliver to every customer, every time?

4) Do we have a clear understanding of every “touch point” and its priority from your customer’s perspective?
(A touch point being any point where a customer touches your business and from that touch forms an opinion of your organisation and the quality of its customer experience)

5) Do we have a service standard for each of those touch points to ensure the quality and consistency of the experience and its alignment with the overall customer experience? AND is everyone with the responsibility for delivering that standard capable of performing to that standard or better.

6) Do you have effective measurements in place to ensure everyone knows how they are performing against their defined customer experience?

7) Do you have a system in place to capture and development ideas from our customers and team as to how you can continually improve our customer experience to ensure it stays fresh and valuable to our customers?

How you answer these seven questions will determine where and how you embark on any customer experience improvement journey.

But please do me a huge favour, don’t start the journey until you clearly understand how those seven key customer experience development steps work and where your organisation is based on your answers.

I can ensure you that you will waste a lot of time and resource and do significant damage to your business culture as a result. And if you then call me, you would have just made my job much more difficult.

Chris Bell is the Managing Director of Customer Experiences a business committed to building successful businesses through the development of high quality customer experiences.

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