6 Proven CX (Customer Experience) Principles That You Must Follow
Many companies, not so long ago, never heard of the phrase “customer experience.” It is now as commonly discussed as, for example, “competitive strategy.” Like strategy, there isn’t any one right way; however, there are a few proven methods to attain goals, and Forrester Research tried to capture them in a report.
Improved CX (customer experience) has extremely tangible advantages in this digital era, which includes improved customer loyalty and more efficient journey to acquiring new clients. However, the Forrester report, released along with the Customer Experience Forum that took place in New York, contends that the majority of companies will not arrive there because their efforts are weak and ambitions are “too big”.
For instance, grand ambitions, involve trying from the beginning to develop an experience that differs from any other brand’s, and weak efforts involve not regularly measuring customer experience or even simply to track all of an organization’s CX efforts around customer touch points.
6 Customer Experience Disciplines
Like many additional long-term business solutions, the solution includes setting up best practices, as well as making them a regular part of daily activities and long-range planning. Forrester identified forty essential practices, and it all came down to 6 disciplines for its customer experience maturity framework. Following those disciplines, according to the report, companies may improve customer experience over time, show cost savings and, with the resulting bigger group of loyal and happy customers, witness improvements in revenue.
The 6 disciplines include culture, governance, measurement, design, customer understanding, and strategy.
Strategy aligns a certain customer experience plan that has the organization’s overall brand and strategy attributes and is shared around a company as a guide for decision-making. Customer understanding includes practices based upon a shared sense of the organization’s customers, and design molds a broad array of customer engagement at every touch point — customer service, retail locations, or website.
4 Phases
Governance and measurement mean establishing systems that track progress completely and consistently, as well as systems that manage the evolution of customer experience through the assignment of processes and responsibilities. Culture requires organizations to develop shared behaviors and values supporting its CX efforts through rewards, socialization, and hiring.
Forrester adds that companies which successfully adopted those six disciplines usually follow the same phased journey toward their objectives. In Phase One, the businesses fix what is broken in their CX through continuous listening, a prioritization of fixes then a coordinated repair effort which measures results.
Phase Two is Elevate, where the freshly determined good practices become the all-new normal, like Rosetta Stone’s month-to-month “top customer rants & raves,” reports or Courtyard by Marriott’s training plan which provides new hires the organization’s sense of what visitors want. Also, Forester noted that customer experience-successful businesses reward customer-centric behavior by workers around the enterprise.
Differentiate, Optimize
Phase Three is Optimize, as businesses create a “sophisticated customer experience toolkit” involving modeling ideal customer experience approaches, using an outside experience design practice or internally building one then tying training plans to CX.
In Phase Four, Differentiate, successful businesses stretch beyond an excellent CX to offer a differentiating one which may become a substantial competitive advantage, like determining unmet client needs or reframing opportunities or problems that involve the underlying need. Companies also might refocus their whole CX ecosystem, which may include orienting it around steps in a customer’s path instead of around the organization’s concentration on its product.
Within an age when the majority of services and products may be commoditized, brands must continuously improve their CX to survive — and this report from Forrester offer a strong guide for getting on the road to long-range survival.
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