Fixing Customer Experience: 3 lenses to identify your next action steps

Suppose through feedback or journey mapping you’ve identified pain points in your customer experience. Now what?

Sometimes the key to solving a problem may be obvious, but more often it is not. So how do you figure out the best ‘next actions’ to more quickly make a positive impact?

In many years working with clients, we’ve often seen that fixing customer experience (CX) issues can seem overwhelming, and many things can stall out improvements. But with today’s fickle consumers, you need to move faster or people will look elsewhere to find the experiences they want.

How can you speed up the path to success?

3 lenses to help identify the next action to take

To uncover the most effective path to solve a customer experience pain point, it helps to look at the problem through various lenses. You may see indicators that shed light on why a problem exists, and spark thinking on immediate actions you can take.

1 — Communications

Potential problems:

• Are customers frustrated because they don’t know what to do or what to expect? Maybe they’re missing important information, or what’s available is hard to understand.
• Do customers feel it’s too hard to get help or find information that’s relevant to their situation? Maybe key details aren’t available on digital channels or are inconsistent across touch points.
• Are customers just not responding to you? Maybe your language and tone are too formal or generic instead of warm and conversational. Or maybe it’s too much about you instead of them.

Potential next actions:

Very often, you can achieve quick wins by improving how, what, when and where you communicate with customers.

• Your next action may be to create a journey map of the different types of communications that relate to a certain CX problem. It might be a chain of emails, or involve content on multiple channels such as email, website, collateral, and your mobile app.
• The journey map enables you to compare related information customers may see, so you can identify inconsistencies or lack of clarity that may be causing problems.
• From there, you can target which content to revamp, prioritizing improvements by channels that have the most impact or highest interaction.

2 — Processes

Potential problems:

• Is it taking multiple calls for customers to resolve a problem? Maybe your call center agents don’t have access to the right information to handle complex issues.
• Do customers think it takes too long or is too hard to complete a task? Maybe your processes require too many steps or multiple channels.
• Do customers complain they’re unable to do things they want to do? Maybe the interaction experience is confusing, making it hard to discover features and relevant info.

Potential next actions:

Yes, these may be bigger problems to solve, but don’t let that stop you.

• Look for ‘low-hanging fruit’ such as revising menus or navigation flow on your site or app to improve discoverability.
• Connect with frontline teams to see if they feel they need more training, support or tools to do their job better. Also revisit procedural content (for both employees and customers) to look for opportunities to simplify language and streamline steps.

Beyond the Arc CEO Steven Ramirez recommends:

“Don’t be afraid to start small. It’s important that you clearly define the problem and have internal stakeholders committed to finding a solution. You can then focus on incremental actions or a phased approach to improve your customer experience.”

3 — Company Culture

Potential problems:

• Are customers meeting basic needs, but not growing their relationship with your business?
• Do people complain about your company in social media? Is there negative sentiment about your brand?
• Are you challenged with finding brand advocates and growing word-of-mouth referrals?

Potential next actions:

• There may be many root causes triggering these issues, but one next action is to take an outsider’s look at your own company culture.   Are your employees focused on products and processes, rather than creating feel-good experiences? Are senior leaders more about budgets and management issues, instead of being CX champions?
• If the answers are Yes, then it’s time to hit pause, and consider how you might improve your company culture.For creating a customer-centric culture, we’ve supported clients in both individual lines of business and enterprise-wide initiatives. Big or small, it starts with a collaborative team to assess the problems, and gather data that makes the case for change.

From there, consider next actions such as:

• Recruit executive champions to evangelize the importance of your CX vision and key ways everyone can help bring it to life.
• Help employees become more customer-focused with best practice communication tools and training
• Define metrics for success, such as mapping customer satisfaction KPIs (key performance indicators) to employee reviews and incentives.

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Moral of the story? Looking at a problem through multiple lenses is a powerful way to spot opportunities. When solving a customer experience issue, it can mean finding an access point for quick wins, and gaining insight for how to deliver long-term excellence.

How Beyond the Arc can help

As a recognized leader in customer experience, our agency helps companies build stronger customer relationships and empower internal teams with strategic communications and data-driven problem solving. Learn more at beyondthearc.com or ping us for a quick chat.

Sources:

1  Assessing Organizational Culture Made Simple, Forbes, Oct 12, 2019

2  The ROI of company culture: Why companies should look at culture’s impact on profit, BDC Network, July 2016

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