Mapping your Customer Experience Strategy

Who Owns the Customer Experience in your Organization?

Answer: Everyone Should.

Who drives the Customer Experience strategy?

Answer: The Leader who is responsible for providing customer service.

The executive team should be 100% supportive and enabling of the necessary collaboration to establish an effective Customer Experience strategy that is the best in Delivering Service Value.

The foundation for delivering outstanding service requires your touch teams to:

  1. Know your Customer.
  2. Understand how they use your products or services.
  3. Ensure this information is shared with all of your customer touch teams.

Don’t have a CRM tool? No worries, the Sales team or customer service teams gather this information during the sales process from customer experience management. Good ol’ fashioned text documents or customer profile forms will work just fine. Don’t let the lack of fancy tools prevent you from this most critical step of understanding your customer feedback to get your customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Create a Customer Experience Map.

Build your strategy by understanding what is happening today. Start by mapping out all customer journey touch-points, customer feedback data, and by whom. Be sure to delineate the type of outreach: email, phone, and face-to-face. Depending on the size of your organization, this is likely to be a collaborative effort with your sales, marketing, service, and fulfillment customer support team to customer journeys. Don’t think you can effect real change without the participation of these other customer success team.

After you have your map of touch points by whom and by type, fill in the expected timeline. For example, if you send a Welcome letter then be sure you have designated the timeline of when this letter is sent. Is it with the first order? Is it as soon as the opportunity has been converted to a successful customer experience strategy with a signed contract?

Example: Welcome Letter -Email – Marketing- Upon Signing of Contract

If implementation and/or training are a part of your customer expectations rollout to get a customer satisfaction score, then be sure to include general touchpoints and timelines.

This map is the start of your Customer Experience strategy. Once you map what you have, then add what should be included. From there, drill down into each touch-point to specify what, whom, how, and when. Final Step: communicate, communicate, and communicate.

Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages. …Henry Ford

The ultimate goal for your business is to figure out how to create an exceptional experience and establish it as the standard.

Coming next…Customer Onboarding. What is your current process? What makes it exceptional?