All businesses work hard to gain new customers. If they have positive experiences, there’s a good chance they’ll buy again, increasing the returns on your marketing investment. If they’re delighted, they may even start “marketing” your business to colleagues, friends, and family members. It’s the holy grail of customer service, and the returns can be exponential.
As with all things worth doing, customer experience is worth doing well, and that isn’t going to happen by accident. Instead, you’ll engage in a process in which you map customer journeys, carefully consider each step, and strategise accordingly.
As part of your customer experience strategy, a customer experience framework refers to all the tools you’ll use and the methods you’ll employ as your business engages with customers. It covers each stage of customer journeys across every channel you use to communicate, and it aims to align your business’s goals with customers’ wants, needs, and expectations.
The Process: Customer Experience Framework Examples
The nuts and bolts of your customer experience framework will be unique to your company and your customers. There are a variety of approaches to developing a customer experience framework. This is what they have in common.
Use Customer Journey Mapping
Begin by determining your ideal target market and its segments. Now, consider how these people would discover your business, how they’d evaluate your products, what might lead to a purchasing decision, and everything that happens during and after a purchase. Use customer journey maps to develop an initial customer experience framework that strives to satisfy each type of customer.
Read more about customer journey mapping.
Measure
You’ve developed a framework of activities, tools, and processes that you hope will deliver positive experiences. It’s time to evaluate it and refine it. You’ll apply various measurements to determine how customers experience each step of the customer journey. These range from examining online behaviour to sending out surveys and interacting with customers.
You’ll get a lot of crucial information directly from your customers. Your Net Promoter Score (NPS), for instance, says a lot about how customers experience your business. A typical NPS questionnaire asks customers how likely they’d be to recommend your business and offers them an opportunity to motivate the reasons behind the scores they allocate. Follow up low scores and analyse the reasons why these customers were not happy with their experiences.
Take Action
Once you’ve identified the reasons why some of your customers aren’t entirely happy with their experiences, address the shortcomings that frustrate them and harm your business’s reputation. The faster you can act, the better. Actions can range from optimising interfaces and adjusting workflows and team structures to important details like perfecting customer onboarding processes.
Monitor
To see how you’re doing, determine how your efforts are impacting customer satisfaction metrics. As they improve, you should start seeing direct financial benefits like enhanced profitability and increased revenue.
The Pillars of a Customer Experience Framework
Strategy
Your strategy is the first pillar of a customer experience framework, but you won’t achieve a high level of customer satisfaction through strategy alone. After all, strategies are only as effective as the commitment you get from everyone that contributes to their fulfilment.
Culture
This brings us to the second pillar: company culture. While customer service is often seen as a stand-alone support function, every functional department in your business should be prioritising customer service and satisfaction. Consider the practical implications of this and set KPIs. As the saying goes: “You get what you measure!”
Processes
The processes that lead to great customer experiences are designed to serve customer needs efficiently and effectively. Help your staff to make their contribution by developing processes that will do just that. As a knock-on benefit, efficiency and cost savings often go hand-in-hand.
Tools
Technology offers many ways to avoid dropped balls and automate routine processes for greater efficiency. While your initial investment in tech tools may be costly, they will help you to set up and monitor workflows while automatically performing some of the tasks that go into them. You can also use tech tools to analyse processes and gather and interpret data.
Feedback
All this effort isn’t worthwhile if you’re not achieving your aim, and your customers are the best people to tell you whether you are. Since your staff are at the coalface, they may have valuable input too. Gather feedback and put it to good use.
Best Practices For Implementing Your CX Framework
Remember, It’s a Dynamic Process
Implementing a CX framework is a good place to start, but it’s only the beginning. If you did your homework, you need only tweak the occasional process or make minor adjustments. But, small as these changes may be, they’re important. You may also find that customer needs change over time and being responsive, or even pre-empting trends could give you a competitive advantage.
Prioritise Your Target Market
Most businesses earn 80 percent of their revenue from 20 percent of their customers. While it may not be possible to please all people all the time, this 20 percent deserves special attention. Know who they are, what they want, and how you can make your mark through experiences they’ll be happy to repeat and recommend.
But what about the other 80 percent? The good news is that crafting a great experience for your ideal customers means you’re likely to satisfy most of your other customers, even though the experience wasn’t specifically tailored for them.
Keep Listening, Measuring, and Acting on Data
Many businesses gather valuable information they never use. It represents a wealth of missed opportunities. Just having data is not an advantage. Paying attention to it, analysing it, and using it to guide your strategies can have untold benefits. If you’re committed to CX, you never just “set and forget.”
Empower Your Employees
Addressing customer pain points doesn’t always require a committee. Knowledgeable employees who can act fast to deliver positive customer experiences will be a valuable asset. Make it clear that you value their input too. Your people may know about inefficiencies that hinder customer service and they may have effective solutions in mind.
Plan for Exceptions
No matter how carefully you plan and implement your customer experience framework to suit most of your customers, there will be times when generic solutions don’t work. That’s fine, as long as you have contingency plans that allow for creative problem-solving when exceptions occur.
Handling Exceptions: Human Contact is a Must
Automation allows business to guide customer experience in the right direction, but human contact is all-too-often the missing ingredient that leads to poor customer experiences. If you planned your customer experience framework well, most of your customers won’t need to talk to your representatives. But when exceptions occur, your customers will expect instant access to real people.
According to the Customer Rage Survey, there’s one very simple reason why customers become infuriated – it’s hard to get in touch and air a complaint. Consumers complain about difficulty in contacting the businesses they support. When they do get in touch, they often experience long wait times that compound their frustration.
Needless to say, this gap in the customer experience framework leads to negative reviews. Each one of these not only represents a lost customer, but serves to deter new customers who might otherwise have supported your business. As for negative word-of-mouth, it’s a given.
This presents a problem for many companies. We all know that customers seeking responses want immediate answers. And the volume of calls and emails isn’t constant. For example, a SaaS company may experience a barrage of calls during a service outage, and very few when everything is running as normal.
At RSVP, we offer an elegant solution. Outsourced customer service really can help bridge the gap between remote customers and businesses – provided you choose a high calibre, scalable solution.
Hoping to offer customer experiences that build relationships and loyalty? Let’s talk. Eager to gather strategically important information directly from your customers? We’ll listen on your behalf and provide the data-driven insights you need. Let’s get the ball rolling. Reach out today.