Innercustomerexperiencecompetency

In essence, the digital era is the age of the customer; customer-centricity becomes the goal to fit the business’s purpose –to create more customers.

Due to the fast pace of changes and fierce competitions, it is without a doubt that many organizations have come to the realization that in order to be successful within their industry, they have to focus their efforts on improving customer satisfaction and building people-centric business.

 Customer experience is the conjunction point of ideas, purpose and human understanding. As a matter of fact, customer experience is both an output/outcome as well as acting as input to future improvements and innovations.

Customer experience is the key differentiator and an important strategy for long-term advantages: From strategic making to execution, customer-centricity means customer is the focal point. The customer-centric strategy takes the outside-in view and puts the customer at the center of business strategy and catalyzes people-centric innovation in a structural way. It’s important to convince senior management the value of customer experience with both “hard data” and soft touch, increasing customer delight from customer service to customer experience to customer success.

Although being customer-centric is at the top agenda of every forward-thinking organization, very few companies can walk the talk from top-down to digitize every touch point of customer experience and quantify its value. Often organizations don't know how to develop a strategic plan based on how to create value for customers. You might find people mistaking methodology for strategy, and applying techniques inefficiently to identify and define customer experience. So innovation and customer centricity have to be built into the business strategy; the culture of customer-centricity should be nurtured, the best and next practices to delight customers need to be developed, focus on creating value for people in every step to achieve well-defined strategic goals with C-level attention and sponsorship.

Customer experience, when done with rigor, discipline and focused approach in the right way, can be developed into a strategic capability: Customer-centricity is the description of the nature of the priorities in the organizations today. Each customer will have different needs and expectations throughout the journey, so the company needs to provide tailored solutions to fit their needs empathetically. Companies can provide input into a qualitative assessment and consider customer-centric services, processes, information, assets, people, etc, dimensions of the adequacy of the business capability to fulfill their business strategy.

Perhaps there is too much bias on terms like ``journey of customer experience or even “sequence of customer experiences.” Information Technology is the integrator and superglue to recombinant dynamic business capabilities for digitizing touch points of customer experience and accelerating the business capability development cycle. If the sequence of events is based on "outside in" data and the end result is to transform the company to increase its customer centric maturity and build a set of differentiated business capabilities to implement customer-centric strategy.

Policy sets the tune for people-centricity; processes optimize customer-experience: A move towards customer-centricity can be delivered through policies that are taken. Customer resolution is as much driven by the policy that informs or governs the process as much as by the physical act of the task at hand. New customer process changes, technology impacts, economic, and political policy trigger changes in the customers’ environment, thus, changing the need.

The process is part of the customer experience, and customer experience is the sum of the process. Not all processes and improvements are equal because each touch-point in any process does not always have the same effect. However, every part of the process is interlinked and the smallest touchpoint will have an effect (bottleneck) on a major touchpoint further up or down the line, and vice versa. To improve customer experience, the management can further verify: How many processes or customer touchpoints are included. How many staff people are involved? How much time/ finance requires at each step or touchpoints, etc. An ultimately honed and efficient business process should offer many valuable experiences and benefits on both sides!

In essence, the digital era is the age of the customer; customer-centricity becomes the goal to fit the business’s purpose –to create more customers. Customer experience strategy management is not just that empathetic understanding of people, but the ability to frame it as a compelling story, and step-wise solution. People-centric businesses are fluid, flexible, and intelligent in knitting all necessary elements together into great customer experience and drive a seamless paradigm shift.

Posted in: Customer Service,Strategy