How do you design the best possible customer experience across all physical and digital touchpoints?

Start with executive level sponsorship to lead customer centricity.

Improving the customer experience (CX) cuts across many business silos and someone at the top needs to have an intense interest in CX improvement and the power to make change happen.

Measure the relationship, customer journey, and touchpoints.

The customer relationship determines long-term profitability and should be the apex of your CX monitoring. Customer journeys contribute to the relationship and are the place to look for process improvements. Individual customer touchpoints provide operational focus but need to be seen in a broader context.

Ensure KPIs are relevant to your business.

There is no single customer metric that is right for every business. Try several and weed out those that do not help predict your desired business outcomes (e.g. profits, loyalty, new business).

Respect your customers’ time.

Don’t let surveying of customers become a negative customer experience. Implement a judicious combination of short surveys, low survey frequency and fair incentives for participation. Stop asking questions your business already should have the answer to.

Watch out for unintended employee behaviours.

Ever been asked to rate a customer service rep a 10? Incentivising frontline staff based on CX metrics can be counter-productive and cascading metrics only down to team manager level may be a better option.

Use an integrated software platform to streamline the process.

Even a moderate sized business will have many information flows to integrate into a voice of customer programme. Specialist software platforms have evolved to capture customer information across all business units, summarise results in dashboards and route feedback for follow up - all in real time.