Creating a leading customer experience (CX) is a goal for any customer-focused business. This is not just for its numerous consumer and competitive advantages; a leading customer experience is also a proven driver of bottom-line results.
To achieve a leading customer experience, a business must consistently deliver experiences that are high-quality, valuable, distinct, and delightful.
Unfortunately, many businesses struggle with delivering a consistent customer experience. This inconsistency, primarily due to varying quality across the experience ecosystem, is a significant challenge for many organizations.
Consistency is crucial because no experience exists in a vacuum.
Customers form opinions, are motivated to act, and grow to love brands based on the sum of experiences they have with a business. So when one experience doesn’t deliver against their expectations, frustrates them, or is flat out broken, that negative experience can adversely affect the perception of your entire CX, and by extension, your business.
Inconsistent experiences often stem from two main issues: strategic prioritization and measurement deficiencies.
Strategic Prioritization
Every business operates within certain constraints – time, resources, capabilities, budget – making prioritization essential.
Identifying which experiences to enhance, optimize, or design to meet or exceed customer quality standards is often complex. Many businesses, unfortunately, neglect to prioritize quality consistency, even when existing experiences are underperforming.
Categorizing experiences based on their role within your experience ecosystem can be beneficial for prioritizing when to optimize existing experiences for quality and efficacy, and when to design new experiences.
Your primary focus should be on ensuring core experiences are of the highest quality and efficacy before investing in the design and development of new experiences. Since these are interactions every customer encounters, they represent your greatest opportunity for positive impact.
Further prioritization should weigh the anticipated impact of optimizations or designing new experiences against the estimated investment in time, resources, or budget.
Prioritize updates to existing experiences or the design of new ones that promise high-impact with low resource demands. Following these should be high-impact, higher-resource ventures.
Measurement Deficiencies
Understanding your business’s CX – its strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities – is vital for consistently providing high-quality experiences and driving business impact.
Many organizations rely on metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) to assess CX quality. However, NPS is often too blunt an analytic to understand the efficacy of individual experiences. A more detailed and effective approach to measurement is critical, yet it remains a blind spot for many organizations.
Aligning provided experiences with their intended role in customer’s journeys is a foundational underpinning for an effective measurement framework. This alignment allows for setting specific objectives and key results (OKRs) for each experience, as well as aggregate OKRs for a broader view of how your experience ecosystem is performing by journey phase.
When experiences serve multiple journey phases, allocate an equivalent number of OKRs to those experiences. For example, a mortgage calculator might assist early-stage customers in assessing affordability, while also aiding in-market customers to compare providers during deliberation and conversion phases. In this case, success might be measured by usage, and also attributed conversions.
Effective measurement is a crucial component of every CX strategy, as it is a key input for prioritization and for ensuring consistent quality across experiences.
High consumer expectations, influenced not just by direct competitors but also by our-of-category leaders, underline the need for consistency in CX. Providing consistently high-quality experiences requires prioritizing the update and optimization of experiences in your CX roadmap and employing effective measurement methods to monitor quality and performance.