Whitepaper
Is your customer strategy aligned with customer experience?
The term 'customer strategy' defines how an organization aligns
itself to all its customer segments. Each segment should have a
unique strategy specifically designed for it, based on the type of
customers. Build a practical plan for optimizing relationships with
customers, this is achievable if your customer strategies are well
crafted, clearly articulated and have the support of various
stakeholders.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience can be summed as - perception formed owing
to all the interactions a customer has with a company or brand.
Remember, every time a direct or an indirect interaction takes
place, there is an experience formed and it holds true at all
touch-points.
After understanding the brand bands you target viz. high-end,
value-end or mass product and setting your commensurate
expectations from each of them, it becomes equally important to
ensure that they align with your customer experience. Your strategy
can be to give a uniform global experience or purely value-based
experience, but unless translated consciously into day-to-day
operations, there will be a mismatch.
Customer strategy should be embedded into each and every
customer facing process, person and technology. Only adoption at
all levels from top to bottom, leadership to operations, internal
departments to partners, will ensure a universal customer
experience.
Why is customer experience so important?
Of the many customer interactions, a single negative experience
is enough to leave your customer bitter, making them vulnerable to
switch.
The goal of Customer Experience Management (CEM) is to move a
customer from being satisfied to becoming loyal. The next step is
to move them from being loyal to professing advocacy and then
refereeing. But, the problem arises when your brand promise that
sets customer expectations, does not match with their
experience.
It is difficult to ensure a unified experience to your entire
customer base. Segmenting them on value, then customer experience
can be tuned according to their importance.
How will you ensure your customer strategy is aligned?
Unfortunately, there is no litmus test that measures the
compliance of your brand strategy, but the following points may act
as guidelines-
First-hand experience: Live the experience by
wearing the customer's shoes or make an independent party assess
the same for you.
Proactive Reviews and Surveys: The most common
way of checking your alignment is by conducting surveys and
learning the opinion of your customers.
Feedback management: Take early feedback and
action them using workflows before they become grievances.
Customers often resort to their social networks to criticise,
appreciate, discuss, promote or give suggestions and these need to
be considered.
Monitoring mechanism: Measure CSAT and QoE
(Quality of Experience) to understand the overall level of customer
satisfaction.
Challenges faced while implementing a customer-centric
solution
- Solutions are spread across multiple applications, processes,
stakeholders and departments.
- Not all customers are the same. So, to identify and segment
customers into various bands based on their needs and value remains
the biggest challenge.
- Internal aspirations and commitments of every stakeholder are
different and hence to have consensus over a single focused
strategy remains the biggest hindrance.
- Time required to implement such a solution is often high, along
with the gargantuan costs involved to deploy such a solution.
How can CRM help you align your strategy with the customer
experience?
- Translate customer strategy into processes that are automated
through technology.
- Incorporate strategy into every customer facing function -
pre-sales, sales and post-sales service.
- Maintain a consistent customer experience using multi-channel
integration on a single platform.
- Ensure that every customer touching experience is driven by an
SLA enforced process employing escalation and exception
reporting.
- Empower your employees, partners and all stakeholders with
customer information sharing and actionable insights.
To download as PDF, .