Customers today expect intuitive and seamless experiences that meet or exceed expectations. In order to compete and thrive, many private sector businesses have embraced Customer Experience (CX) to transform their products and services.
“90 percent of businesses, regardless of the vertical they are operating in, have stated that they have made CX their primary focus.”
The impact of CX is widely recognized and is now beginning to gain traction in the public sector, federal in particular. For example, a recent 2023 budget request was made by the White House to support CX offices and initiatives, a 2021 executive order was issued to rebuild government trust through transforming federal CX, and the 2019 Taxpayer First Act was created to “reimagine the taxpayer experience.”
Businesses, agencies, and organizations are rapidly implementing CX to better understand customers and leverage those insights to inform innovative and lasting solutions. Join the evolution with these 5 guiding principles to transform with Customer Experience (CX), recommended by IXP, as published in the Business Journals Leadership Trust on September 12, 2023.
5 guiding principles to transform with Customer Experience (CX)
By Tina Williams, Founder of Informed XP, an 8(a) WOSB, providing CX, UX, service design, digital transformation + human-centered solutions.
Customer Experience (CX) is no longer just a buzzword; it’s an expectation. In March 2023, the White House requested a $500 million allocation for CX in fiscal year 2024, supporting a recent executive order to rebuild trust in government by transforming customer experience. The companies and organizations that really “get” their customers deliver seamless end-to-end customer experiences that exceed expectations.
How? They don’t skip to the end of the “end-to-end”; they start at the beginning, and integrate CX into everyday operations and culture. You’ll be surprised by what you learn when you follow these five guiding principles to build or enhance your organization’s CX practices.
1. To serve your customers, know your customers.
Do you really know who your customers are and what they need?
If you want your services to make sense to the customer, you will have to make sense of your customer — understand who they are and why they need the products and services you offer.
Go beyond viewing your service through the lens of your organization. Walk in your customers’ shoes to better understand their wants and needs. There are many techniques you can use to learn more about them. Two particularly useful ones are user typologies and personas, which categorize customers into groups or types based on common scenarios, needs, expectations, motivations and related behaviors to surface pain points and opportunities.
Take the time to observe real customer interactions in the wild or via more structured activities such as mystery shopping or service safaris.
2. To meet customer needs, understand their expectations.
Are you meeting your customers’ basic needs well?
Now that you know more about customer needs, behaviors and perspectives, thanks to principle no. 1, it’s time to put this knowledge to work. Aligning customer expectations to your service offerings is the next step.
There are several ways to identify where your services fall on the expectations spectrum from must-haves and should-haves to nice-to-haves and even don’t-needs. For example, try the Kano model, a popular framework created by professor Noriaki Kano in the 1980s that establishes the relationship between customer satisfaction and product or service features to help you prioritize features on a product roadmap. Additionally, leverage a competitive analysis to benchmark market trends along with customer expectations and preferences to aid in validating your results.
The core service essentials that a customer expects should be well executed. Only after effectively meeting these should additional features to elevate customer experience be considered.
3. To deliver customer value, optimize internal operations.
Do processes, tools and other behind-the-scenes elements enable employees to effectively serve customers?
With all your great work to improve customer experience, don’t forget about the people providing the service. To ensure that your employees can deliver a great customer experience, you need to know if they are set up for success.
Talk to employees and spend time observing and learning how their work is done to understand their perspective. From technology and roles/responsibilities to policies and processes, use this feedback to identify what works and what doesn’t.
Then, leverage techniques such as contextual inquiry and process mapping to capture the current state and identify pain points and opportunities. This will allow you to prioritize improvements and develop a plan that better aligns operations to the customer expectations you discovered in principle no. 2.
4. To earn and keep customers, consider the whole experience.
What does the whole customer experience look like, end to end?
Once you have identified the customer and their service expectations, as well as the needs of your employees, ensure that these pieces continuously work together. Every individual interaction a customer has with your organization leaves an impression, and these add up to create the overall customer experience with your brand.
Considering the holistic customer experience requires weaving together a collection of customer-provider touchpoints and interactions spanning stages, devices and channels. To maintain alignment, consider both the front stage (what the customer sees and experiences) and the backstage (behind the scenes operations the customer doesn’t see). Use the data gathered from principles no. 1 through 3 to connect the dots between customer goals and expectations and provider touchpoints and processes.
For example, create a journey map to visualize the comprehensive experience and/or a service blueprint to layer in the related backstage view. The combination of these two methods is ideal for experiences that are omnichannel, involve multiple touchpoints or require a cross-functional effort.
5. To stay relevant to customers, continuously learn and improve.
How are you continuing to learn about your customers and your industry?
Customers, preferences and needs will evolve over time. Therefore, services and products must adapt to keep up and meet them where they are. To detect change and stay current requires continuous learning from customer feedback to industry and competitor developments.
Ongoing investment in customer and industry research is critical. Create and maintain ways to capture data and feedback regarding both.
For example, invite customers to provide feedback when they interact with your organization. A quick “How did we do?” questionnaire provides useful ratings on metrics that can guide improvements. Questions about wait time and responsiveness can be analyzed to identify choke points, improve customer care and optimize the journey mapped in principle no. 4. You can also give customers the opportunity to follow up more extensively, particularly if they reported a less-than-stellar experience.
Conclusion
“We’ve always done it this way” is no longer good enough. To thrive, your organization must transform.
Of course, operational excellence is expected and prioritized. But to be a leading competitor, you must routinely tap into your customers’ needs and adapt to their changing expectations.
Your first impulse may be to add new technology and features, but what good is that if customers’ basic needs are not well met? Enable operations in the backstage to effectively deliver on exceptional customer experiences in the front stage.
Now that you’re familiar with these CX principles, it’s time to grow beyond the information age and step into the age of the customer!
