Every company wants to improve on their customer experience, however the biggest challenge is how to define it in unambiguous terms. If you interview different executives of the same company, it is highly improbable that they would align to the same definition of customer experience at a detailed level.
Here I’m sharing a very simple framework on how you can bring structure to this very ambiguous topic and use this to align the executive leadership team and then get down to the business of actually implementing the experience. A separate team such as Business Excellence is rightly structured to lead this initiative in an organisation.
Why is a Framework required
A framework usually helps bring alignment across various teams and I highly recommend you use it. Once the framework is aligned with the teams and leaders, the actual content of it becomes much easier to define and align. Here we will see a typical framework useful in building customer experience.
Parts of this Framework
A lot of times I see the customer experience strategy being defined only for the digital assets Ex a website or an app and in most scenarios the experience is much larger than only the digital assets. Usually a customer would experience much more than just your digital assets even though you might be high tech company.
Ex for E-commerce, it could start with customer using website or app to order the product, but subsequent experience would include emailers, WhatsApp messages, actual door delivery, time to delivery, customer service, return management and many more such touch points.
Similarly for Ed Tech it could include discussions with sales, onboarding, content of class, books, customer service and more such touch points.
For a B2B company a client experience model could include forecast collaboration, purchase orders, dispatch and delivery, account management etc. You get the point…
Listen to this podcast from Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb on defining customer experience.
You should use this customer experience management framework to define an end to end experience. I’ve divided this framework into following parts
- Unit level experience statements – What experience you want to give
- Input KPI’s – How would you know you are actually delivering the experience
- Interventions needed – To get to the unit level experience, what all would need to change. This could include your digital assets i.e Product and Technology, Marketing, CRM, Communications, Trainings, Audits, Branding, Data & Analytics and more.
- Owner and Timeline – To deliver these interventions, who are the owners and when will they deliver.
More often than not, if you have done a fair job of writing the unit level experience, you would end up with a long list of interventions. In this case, it is best to use a prioritisation framework and deliver these over a period of time.
How to use this
While there are many ways to bring this framework to life, I would recommend a closed room brown paper exercise with leaders from across the teams coming together to define the experience, metrics, interventions, owners and timelines.
Once done you could use the program management methodology in your organisation to deliver on these.
Metrics for Customer Experience
Typically most CEO’s would use NPS as the north star metric to measure customer experience and that is absolutely right. However this is an output metric and could also lag few weeks to months.
When you want to deliver to a designed customer experience, I would also recommend using a number of input metrics which are easier to control and a good lead to improve your overall NPS.
Conclusion
This framework is one of the most easiest methods to define your end to end customer experience and can come in handy to bring alignment on this ambiguous topic across your organisation.
For any questions, please write to me on mohit@moonshotscaling.com.
Leave a Reply