Customer Experience

Exploring the Concept of Customer Experience (CX)

Graphics courtesy of feedierOpens in new window A well-designed customer experience accounts for the customer’s needs and all possible events the customer may experience. It allows for the possibility that things can go wrong and delivers an acceptable experience accounting for those cases. And it leverages all the knowledge that the company has about an individual, even if it’s held in different information systems.

There are various definitions of CX by different authors:

In other words, Customer Experience (CX) is the sum total of all of the experiences related to your brand. It starts with the first marketing impression; expands with the customer’s increasingly detailed understanding of the features, benefits, price points, style, and other selection considerations; and continues through the actual purchase, acquisition, usage, maintenance, and post-purchase relationship.

During the lifecycle, in which prospects become first-time customers, then repeat customers, and then loyal brand advocates, they will have a series of interactions online and off-line. They may talk to friends or colleagues, conduct research, look for recommendations and online reviews, talk to customer service reps and salespeople, visit stores, test products, and investigate competitive products.

In this process they also experience a range of emotions:

• They may become confused on a website or by instructions, read conflicting reviews, become excited by the prospect of purchase, become disappointed, get frustrated, feel happy about getting a good deal, or become angry about not getting a better deal.

• They may experience regret at missing an opportunity, or buyer’s remorse after making a purchase.
• They may be delighted by an unexpected level of customer service or attention to their needs, or they might be freaked out by overly personal service that feels intrusive.

All of these emotions, interactions, perceptions, and events are part of the customer experience.

For CX design to work right, the brand must avert countless opportunities to fumble the sale by using comprehensive planning and immaculately consistent messaging that eliminates all potential friction. AIOpens in new window can help, but if the supporting processes and systems are not solidly aligned and integrated, no AI can enable a friction-free experience.

There are now many more dimensions to a successful engagement strategy than there were before people went online, including social media, content marketing, cross-channel customer experience, big data, and analytics. It’s worth mentioning digital marketing as well, because much of the data used to power these experiences comes from new marketing technologies.

In this literature, we’ll explore how problems can get in the way of a systematic approach to customer experience and describe the eventual solution: the high-fidelity journey map and the plan for applying it to your technology. The result is a technique for applying the ontology to customer experience in your marketing technology stack and making more thoughtful decisions about technology. We will show you how to use the customer journey to make marketing technology plans, blueprints, and investments.

Let’s get started by looking at the fundamental challenge: how can you move quickly and personalize experience at the vast scale that’s necessary in the enterprise?

Ontology Enables Agility and Scalability to Coexist

Enterprises interacting with customers pursue two conflicting goals: agility and scalability. The newly integrated worlds of customer experience and marketing demand the ability to react and respond quickly and efficiently across departments, tools, platforms, and business functions. They also require organizations to globally manage a significantly larger volume of personalized and localized content than ever before.

1.     Agility

The first goal is agility— or more specifically, agile execution.

Agility is crucial as the pace of business and markets accelerate. Organizations must keep up with changing priorities, strategies, and execution challenges. What is working and what isn’t? Where are resources focused? What do market research and customer data tell us, and how should organizations respond, adapt, and evolve? What tools are most appropriate to solve engagement problems?

2.     Scalability

The second goal is scalability. Enterprises must be able to scale sophisticated and nuanced marketing, product, and service initiatives across platforms and channels, and operate them efficiently to support customers at every stage. This goal conflicts with agility in that it typically entails coordination of many tasks and processes that cannot be completed quickly.

How can you harmonize these two goals? The correct governance structure combined with consistent organizing structures provided by the ontology is the key.

A fully integrated, holistic, cross-department execution perspective is most effective with technologies based on a consistent architecture—and managed with reference to the ontology.

• Agility is based on reacting and adapting.
• Scaling requires consistency and standardization.

It is only through the use of an ontology that the two goals are no longer at odds with each other.

Complexity and the Customer Experience

As more customers transact most or all of their business online, organizations are forced to stitch together a seamless customer experience from what in many cases is a series of disparate systems.

For example, a customer experience project was once conducted for a financial firm using more than 50 platforms for managing customer investments. Customers could conduct some transactions predominantly online. For more complex investment redemptions, changes in beneficiary, or transactions with tax implications, the customer needed to call and speak with a customer service representative.

Of these tasks, some required transfers to specialists for callbacks, and others required the call center agent to interact with a back-office transfer agent. In extreme cases, the transfer agent required support from a special “hotline” of top-tier specialists who had even greater levels of training, expertise, and system access.

Imagine the customer experience this generated:

• beginning a process online,
• running into a roadblock,
• searching for help,
• sending an email request,
• calling in,
• being transferred,
• getting placed on hold,
• leaving messages,
• calling back,
• having to provide basic identifying information repeatedly, and so on.

Rather than a smooth paved highway, that journey was filled with bumps, detours, and side ramps that slowed the process, increased support and transaction costs, and damaged the customer relationship.

Each step and task could require a different department, system, process, technology, cost center, or procedure. So much for a smooth, seamless journey. Disconnected internal systems and processes destroyed it.

This type of poor experience will likely result in customer ill will, higher support costs, missed opportunities, and lost business.

Reducing the Customer’s Cognitive Load

We have all been transferred from department to department and have had to repeat account information and security questions.

We have all dealt with confusing and maddeningly unhelpful call trees (press 1 to be annoyed, press 2 to be really annoyed, press 3 to be really, really, annoyed …) while yelling “Operator!” and frantically pressing “0”. Some of us have even tried to return granite cleaner and wasted fruitless hours on the task.

In theory, the customer experience can be drastically improved in almost any organization. However, the groups that are typically tasked with improving customer experience (for example, call center operations) do not always have the resources to get to the root of the problem fand fix issues upstream. Call centers are incented to maximize productivity, not to actually solve the problems that are causing customers to call in the first place.

To solve the problem, eventually the root cause needs to be addressed. But all too often, the organization lacks the discipline to make the investment in finding the root causes of experience problems.

Or the organization has tried solutions before but has been burned due to the complexity of the problems, the number of systems involved, interdepartmental dependencies, a lack of overaching governance, incorrect metrics, outdated or poorly selected technology, or an insufficient application of resources to the problem.

Many customer experience improvements are rooted in reducing the cognitive load on the customer—by simplifying menus, understanding customers’ intent, and finding a way to cut directly to the chases. The “paradox of choice” states that providing too many options increases anxiety and leads to second-guessing decisions and unrealistic expectations.

This is why simple interfaces presenting just the information needed in a particular situation reduce the mental work and allow for faster, easier decisions with higher levels of satisfaction. But it’s not at all easy to figure out how to best simplify the experience.

The key lies with exercises that map the customer’s journey with the company and attempt to understand the customer, including their decision criteria, values, and considerations, along with the features, functions, and characteristics that are important to them. These components become a subset of the data attributes that represent the customer; those attributes must be included in the ontology so that systems can align the correct content with the signals gathered during their journey.

Just as a great salesperson reads verbal and nonverbal language to gauge what a customer needs, our digital customer engagement technologies read the customer’s digital body language and present what they need—no more, no less. We understand those needs and digital signals through journey mapping.