The Fundamental Strategy for your Customer Experience

As mentioned in a previous article of mine, creating a world-class customer experience starts by understanding your product’s support climate. You have to quantify by measuring, deciding and working towards numbers that are strategic to you and your businesses growth. You have to qualify by building, innovating and committing to a mission that offers the experience your customers are looking for and beyond.

If you offer a product or service, your customers will need help with said product or service. To know where to begin, or to double-check you’ve checked all your boxes, there are two categories to break down: Qualify and Quantify.

Qualify

1. Observe: Take time to understand the climate. It takes about 2 months to get a pulse, after that, you can continue to observe but plan to make moves simultaneously. What questions are you fielding? What concerns are coming through the door? What requests or feedback are people offering up? Don’t be afraid to interview and understand your most valuable customers and really get to know their wants and needs.
2. Find Inspiration: They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, don’t be afraid to find companies that inspire you. Figure out the nitty gritty of their operation and emulate them. What about their support experience made you fall in love? How can you transfer that to your business and your customer climate? Then copy it. Literally. Do the same thing they do (as long as it’s legal) but make it your own.
3. Staff up: Hire people who give a damn. If you believe, wholeheartedly, in your mission and the success of your company, they will too. Hold your staff accountable to important values and help them see their growth day to day, week to week, month to month. Reward them for it, holy moly, please don’t forget to give your people what they deserve. If they can believe with certainty that their work is appreciated and rewarded, they will never leave and they will bring the best of their networks to your doorstep.

Quantify

1. Benchmark: Once you understand what’s coming through the door, set benchmarks on where you are now at the baseline of the experience you offer. Then, set goals on what you want to achieve should you reach your peak at that stage of your business. Try to make sure the processes you are experimenting with are scalable but if they’re not and you’re still excited about the idea, do it anyway. If it doesn’t scale but works at that time, try it out, you may surprise yourself with a version that works for 100+ employees, or 1mm customers.
2. Become available: Create space/channels/pathways for your customers to effectively communicate, and implement a system to track it all. You need to watch for trends, observe changes and understand what works an what doesn’t.
3. Keep a journal: Note the date whenever you implement a change of any kind. Measure what has changed in regards to metrics or results from that day and if it was successful. Define KPIs like First Response Time, Customer Satisfaction Rating, number of tickets completed in a day and change them around often. See what quotas, metrics and standards drive your team to adopt and hustle. Experimentation is big, agility is bigger!
4. Tooling: Get the right tools in place to help make what you’re doing efficient as early as possible. Yes, you alone can handle over 100+ emails a day (because you’re badass) but why should you? Eventually your volume will grow and you’ll need automations, tools, processes in place to make it easier for you and a team, so get that stuff going from the jump. You have other things to do. If you can do it right the first time, why wouldn’t you. Think of things that will help you measure, survey and monitor those benchmarks and KPIs once they’ve been decided upon. How can you ensure consistency at the minimum?

Always keep the Customer Experience at the forefront of your business. If you ever find your CX metrics slipping, refocus. Recenter and work to understand what may be off-track. Iterate on a process that used to work but may not have scaled for where you are today. Don’t settle for what’s comfortable because if you’re doing it right, it won’t be comfortable for long.

Make sure to understand what’s going very well, and if you see gaps, take time to understand why they exist and what’s already been done to fill them. Assume that people know what they’re doing and they’ve given something, anything, a try. Talk to the people on the ground and understand the history, maybe they have a journal of changes and experiments and timelines. Study it, absorb it, then go.

Good luck!