A 6-Step Process to Creating a Superior Customer Experience From the Inside Out

 Our recent research shows that the majority of B2B business leaders feel that understanding their customers is a focus area for improvement throughout 2021 and beyond.

At B2B International, we look to inspire our audience to create superior customer experiences through putting the customer front and centre. We know how important it is to focus on both customer loyalty and employee engagement, particularly during challenging times.

As part of our B2B Insights Podcast, we have had the privilege of interviewing some real CX experts from around the world. Today we look at some of the key highlights from our podcast episode on “Customer Experience: More Important Than Ever in Times of Uncertainty” with Shep Hyken.

Shep is Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and a renowned speaker who has been inducted into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame.

Find out how you can create a superior customer experience from the inside out, powerful ideas to help your customers in a crisis as well as some key quotes from Shep and Nick Hague’s discussion:

https://bit.ly/3BDAZnr

The Value Proposition Canvas by Peter J Thomson

 

A value proposition canvas includes elements from behavioural psychology and design thinking.

A value proposition is the place where your company’s product intersects with your customer’s desires. It’s the magic fit between what you make and why people buy it. Your value proposition is the crunch point between business strategy and brand strategy.

When you’re starting a new project, or a new company, you need practical tools to help you focus on executing things faster and better. Good strategy tools exist only to help you focus on getting the right things done. The value proposition canvas is a fairly simple tool that quickly gets you to the ‘minimum viable clarity’ required to start building and testing a product or service.

A value proposition sits at the pivot point of an entire business model. Mapping the business model of a new product or service is one of the most important parts of building an overall business strategy. Strategy frameworks have traditionally been the domain of MBAs and consultants but they are so important that these days the tools have been democratised for use by entrepreneurs, designers and technical teams.

Business model canvas

The Business Model Canvas is a toolkit from 2009 that drew on Michael Porter’s value chain maps and Peter Drucker’s theories of the firm (among other sources). The Business Model Canvas is a chart that maps the key things that a business needs to get right to be successful.

The Business Model Canvas condenses the main elements of a business strategy into a single page.

The Business Model Canvas has become the preferred tool for modern startups to use when rapidly testing a new business idea. It’s an attractive tool because it condenses years of business school and management consulting practise into a single page (with some straight-forward questions for each section). – This is either a good or a bad thing depending on how much you love management jargon.

Any strategy tool is only really as good as the facilitator or team who are using it. Each tool carries hidden biases and assumptions. So choosing a good tool is important. Strategy tools are great ways of providing structure to a conversation and allowing people outside of the pure strategy professions to think about whether they are doing the right things at the right time, in the right order.

Having used it in several client workshops, my issue with the traditional  Business Model Canvas used to be that it didn’t do enough to encourage empathy with customers and to force the business to be accountable for how they communicated with their audience. In short, it didn’t place enough emphasis on the company’s value proposition.

A “value proposition canvas” is a chart that maps the key things that make up your product and why people buy it. There are many different value proposition canvases. Some are proprietary, some are open source and some are creative commons. Any canvas that helps you understand your customer, your offer and how the two fit together will help you clarify your value proposition.

Alex Osterwalder’s value proposition canvas

In 2012, Alex Osterwalder and his team released their Value Proposition Designer. Their version of the value proposition canvas is copyright and can only be used with credit to www.businessmodelgeneration.com. The Value Proposition Designer includes several bits of thinking from the Lean Startup movement such as “jobs to be done” and “customer pains”. It’s a good tool, but it’s not perfect.

The Value Proposition Designer is copyright by Alex Osterwalder and team. For details see www.businessmodelgeneration.com

The Business Model Generation team renamed their 2012 Value Proposition Designer as a value proposition canvas and published an excellent book in 2014 on the topic called Value Proposition Design. My critique of the Osterwalder (et al.) version of the value proposition canvas is that:

• The product proposition side isn’t grounded enough in marketing, branding and persuasion techniques. It doesn’t guide the user towards creative thinking and honest self-evaluation.
• The customer side isn’t grounded enough in behavioural psychology or customer behaviour research. It doesn’t guide the user into deep empathy for their customers or draw out enough new insights.

The psychology of why people buy things

I (like many brand strategists and advertising planners) often find myself standing in a supermarket transfixed, watching other people shop. I could literally stand for hours observing the range of human experience and emotions that go into making even the most seemingly banal shopping decisions. So many different parts of a person’s brain are engaged when they make even the smallest buying decision.

If you’ve ever eaten a doughnut while on a diet then you know that not all human decision making is fully rational. – But even if purchasing behaviour is irrational, it’s still predictable. That’s why I’ve drawn from behavioural economics and choice psychology to rebuild my own take on a value proposition canvas. Modelling human behaviour and decision making is a rich and diverse field of study.  You can read more about how people make decisions and why they do what they do in books such as Nudge, Predictably Irrational, and Thinking Fast And Slow. Personally, I’ve drawn my models for the canvas mainly from the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioural economics.

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A new value proposition canvas template

I’ve created a canvas to guide startups into examining the human experience of their customers. This canvas contains questions and sections that manoeuvre users of the canvas into thinking through the end-customer experience.

Each section of the improved canvas includes questions to ask when filling in the chart.

The new product section of the canvas uses the widely accepted marketing syntax of features and benefits with the addition of a box for “experience” (taking from the fields of design thinking and UX architecture). The product understanding section includes:

• Features – A feature is a factual description of how your product works. The features are the functioning attributes of your product. The features also provide the ‘reasons to believe’. Many FMCG marketers deride the importance of features because features are no longer a point of difference in most FMCG marketing. But for technology products and innovative new services the features on offer can still be an important part of your value proposition.
• Benefits – A benefit is what your product does for the customer. The benefits are the ways that the features make your customer’s life easier by increasing pleasure or decreasing pain. The benefits of your product are the really core of your value proposition. The best way to list out the benefits of your product on the canvas is to imagine all the ways that your product makes your customer’s life better.
• Experience – The product experience is the way that owning your product makes the customer feel. It’s the sum total of the combined features and benefits. Product experience is different to features and benefits because it’s more about the emotional reasons why people buy your product and what it means for them in their own lives. The product experience is the kernel that will help identify the market positioning and brand essence that is usually built out of the value proposition.

The customer section draws on nuero-lingusitic programming and psychology research into motivation and choice architecture. It focuses less on “pains” and “gains” because people can be motivated by both pains and gains in different ways. The customer empathy sections include:

• Wants – The emotional drivers of decision making are things that we want to be, do or have. Our wants are usually conscious (but aspirational) thoughts about how we’d like to improve our lives. They sometimes seem like daydreams but they can be powerful motivators of action. The wants speak more to the pull of our hearts and our emotions. I may need a car to get from A to B, but I want a BMW.
• Needs – The customer’s needs are the rational things that the customer needs to get done. Interestingly, needs are not always conscious. Customers can have needs that they may not know about yet. Designers call these “latent needs“. The best example is that none of us knew that we needed a portable music player until we saw an iPod for the first time (we also then suddenly wanted an iPod rather than any other perfectly good music player). The needs speak more to the pull of our heads and rational motivations.
• Fears – The dark side of making a decision is that it often carries a fear of giving up optionality. Fear of making a mistake, fear of missing out, fear of loss and dozens of other related fears. Fears can be a strong driver of purchasing behaviour and can be the hidden source of wants and needs. Customer fears are often the secret reason that no one is buying your widget. For any product there is a secret “pain of switching“. Even if your product is better than the competition, it might not be a big enough improvement to overcome the inertia of the status quo.
• Substitutes – Some companies claim that they have no direct competitors. The substitutes on the canvas aren’t just the obvious competitors, instead look for the existing behaviours and coping mechanisms. This is on the canvas because it shocks us into remembering that our customers are real people with daily lives who have made it this far in life without our product. No matter how much better your product is than the competition, if it isn’t better than the existing solutions then you don’t have a real-world value proposition.

A key finding from the process of mapping a value proposition is often “we don’t have enough information to answer this section”. That is a perfect moment to adopt a lean startup approach and to get out of the building to ask existing customers and potential customers about their wants, needs and fears. A value proposition canvas can be a great place to begin the process of identifying and validating your assumptions.

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Examples of a value proposition canvas

Mapping a company’s value proposition is a great shared exercise for a cross-functional management team. It gets people from outside the marketing team to contribute to marketing insights without having to admit that what they are doing is “marketing” (because marketing can be a loaded term for some professions).

Startup accelerator: Uncovering new value in an existing feature

The Innovation Warehouse is an angel investing syndicate with a co-working space for the member investors and their portfolio of startups. Building a value proposition canvas helped them to identify that a key need for the startups that they want to serve is a quiet and productive space.

The Innovation Warehouse value proposition was adjusted to highlight productivity.

The productive environment was already a feature of the existing space but wasn’t being promoted in the existing marketing materials. It was a simple matter to add the feature into the collateral to address the customer need more clearly in their marketing.

https://bit.ly/3T3y263

How to Enhance the Customer Experience

Customer centricity is key to generating higher revenues and profits. For example, a rise of as little as 5% in customer retention increases profits by up to 125%. So how can customer retention be improved? And what metrics are important to incorporate into a research program to enhance customer experience?

To find out how you can enhance your customer experience, check out the infographic below.

https://bit.ly/3vrlSKq

Creating The Ultimate B2B Experience

 

We understand the importance of creating a seamless, superior experience for B2B brands. We do this by stepping into the shoes of our clients’ key stakeholders, including prospects, customers, and employees. We bring their voice into the heart of everything our client does and at every stage of their journey. After all, how can you create the total experience if you do not understand the unmet needs and challenges of your customers and prospects? How can you be considered a B2B brand of choice if your employees are not even satisfied? How can you develop your brand and propositions if you do not understand how it is perceived to begin with?

https://bit.ly/39eV47L

7 Ways To Help Your Brand Stand Out

 

Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash

Small businesses are up against plenty of competition, which is why it’s important to differentiate yourself. There are lots of ways that you can help your brand to stand out, so let’s take a look.

1 . The Customer Experience

According to Zendesk, ‘Customer experience (CX) is everything related to a business that affects a customer’s perception and feelings about it.’ The customer experience includes all of the different interactions that a consumer has with your company. These interactions could be in-store, on social media, through chatbots, your website or app. There are so many things that you can do to improve the customer experience, including:

• Make your website user friendly.
• Provide great training for your customer service staff.
• Host live events and workshops for extra value.
• Use CRM systems to improve the sales journey. 

2 . Video Marketing

One of the best ways to help your brand to stand out is to use video marketing. There are lots of different options including webinars, live-streaming, video advertising or Insta Stories. Working with a talented video production company is the best way to create some great content to support your brand. There are lots of different advantages to video marketing such as:

• You can present your brand story to your audience.
• Visual content performs better on social media.
• Video marketing can help you to build a rapport with your consumers.
• Helpful to increase conversions.

3. Corporate Social Responsibility

If you want your brand to stand out you’ll need to focus on CSR. Consumers want businesses to care about social justice, the environment and politics. They expect brands to use their voice for good, and contribute to charitable causes. You’ll need to ensure that you represent the values of your audience, and help consumers to make green choices where possible.

There are so many ways that companies can go green, whether it’s the materials they use, sustainable marketing strategies or recycling initiatives. Once you create green initiatives you’ll help your brand to stand out from the crowd.

4. Strong Brand Story

If you want to help your brand to stand out you’re going to need a strong brand story. The story should focus on the problem that your product solves, you’ll need to ensure that your story evokes an emotional response. These questions may come in handy when you’re developing your brand story:

• Why did you start your company in the first place?
• What is the overall vision of your business?
• What makes you different from similar brands?

5. PR Strategies

If you want to stand out from the crowd you’ll need a winning PR campaign. A PR company can help you to increase brand awareness, improve your reputation, engage certain communities, improve your CSR, and generate good publicity. When you’re choosing a PR company you’ll need to conduct research, check out reviews and establish your needs. To maintain a good reputation you might also want to work with a reputation management company. When you hire an RM company they can help you to get positive reviews, oversee your social media mentions, drive SEO, and plenty more.

6. Amazing Content 

To stand out from the crowd you’ll need the best content possible. Whether it’s blogs, videos or images, everything you create needs to be top quality. Your blog content should be innovative, well researched, and SEO optimized. There are plenty of content tools which can help you to improve, get ideas and access analytics. To help you improve your content the following considerations may be useful:

• Focus on your audience and their preferences.
• Work with the right influencers.
• Use analytics to help you improve.

7. Host Live Events

Live events are a great way to market your business, you’ll have the chance to meet your consumers in person, and represent your brand. You might put on an entertainment event, or an educational workshop? We’ve all got tired of being stuck indoors, and now that events are back on the cards many brands are taking advantage. There are several benefits to hosting live events, including:

• Events can increase leads and sales.
• Give you a space to present your brand story.
• Events are often a good place for networking.

With these strategies you’ll set yourself apart from your competitors. In general, it’s a good idea to do plenty of competitor research. Doing so will help you to understand your position in the market and take steps towards improving.

6 steps for retailers in this crisis and the next

 

Ed Valdez, partner and CMO with Chief Outsiders, shares six steps and additional strategies that retailers should use to lead their business through the COVID-19 and economic crisis.

The global challenges unfolding across the country in the past few weeks have presented a huge humanitarian and economic challenge. While medical professionals, governments and industry leaders are tirelessly working towards containment and stabilization, business leaders and owners have a similar challenge: leading your business through the coronavirus crisis and beyond.

One of the best articles published about how to navigate the road ahead stems from Harvard Business Review: Lead Your Business Through the Coronavirus. While the authors outline 12 lessons for "Responding to unfolding events, communicating, and extracting and applying learning," the infographic below recaps six of the most pressing actions you can take to:
• Ensure the health/safety of your employees.
• Centralize communications.
• Stabilize operations to bolster a way forward toward recovery.

The summary below also augments the strategies with a few supportive tactics gleaned from prior client engagements that required immediate and decisive action.
1. Update intelligence daily: Since virtually all firms have had to operate remotely through networked teams, mobilizing your leadership team daily can help you and your teams make the most out of rapidly changing information. It's also important to separate the signal from the noise: to identify what is essential for the wellbeing, efficiency and effectiveness of employees. Decide what channels to use (Microsoft Team, Google Hangouts Chat, Zoom, Slack, etc.) for real-time, daily and weekly communications for now, near-term and your next priorities.
2. Constantly reframe and adapt: A Chinese proverb reminds us to be like bamboo: "The higher you grow, the deeper you bow." Balance the big picture with the tactical: decide what's urgent versus what's important. Be open to change: what was first priority yesterday may be the second priority today.
3. Choose agility vs. bureaucracy: Large firms need to embrace an agile mindset not only for software development, but also for marketing, sales and operations. Regularly evaluate what you need to stop doing, start doing or continue to do (if the latter is still working well). Encourage your teams to ask their respective leaders what barriers they can remove (or what they can do differently) to help streamline what's best for the customer.
4. Balance response in seven areas: Communications, employee needs, travel, remote work, stabilizing the supply chain, business tracking/forecasting, being part of the broader solution. (See the HBR article for more detail.) While all teams need to regroup to determine the "new normal," constantly reassess marketing/sales alignment and alignment across all operations - especially, customer support.
5. Use six resilience principles: Redundancy, diversity, modularity, evolvability, prudence, embeddedness. Encourage teams or sub-teams to be modular in their problem solving and encourage diverse thinking. As Einstein said, \"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." Rise up to look beyond your own company ecosystem to look at your team's ecosystem in your community: are there some ways in which you or your team can help those around you?
6. Prepare for the next crisis: Establish a new cadence for scenario planning: What else can happen that we haven't expected? And what other contingency plans do we need to minimize risk? What do these plans look like from the view of the supply chain, partners, operations/logistics, our customers and all stakeholders and/or investors? Be transparent inside and out to identify critical paths and backup plans to minimize future disruptions and increase cross-functional team proficiencies.

Ed Valdez is partner and CMO with Chief Outsiders, a leading fractional CMO firm focused on mid-size company growth.

https://bit.ly/34k5o8H

Top 7 Customer Experience Trends in Banking for 2021

 The coronavirus crisis radically magnified the importance of CX in the banking sector, with a heavy emphasis on digital channels. Here are the major trends banks and credit unions must prepare for that will define the "new normal" in the year ahead.

By Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand, CEO of the Digital Banking Report

Customer experience has always been defined as the consumers’ perception of how your organization treats them. These perceptions are based on each individual’s own priorities, and they impact each person’s level of engagement with your financial institution and their future buying decisions and loyalty.

In other words, if your institution gives them positive experiences, they will continue to do business with you, increase the scope of their relationship, and recommend your bank or credit union to others. Beyond simply resulting in more transactions, positive experiences translate to trust and the potential exclusion of competitors when consumers decide who to give their business to next time.

When Digital Banking Report asked financial institutions globally about their top strategic priorities through 2021, improving the customer experience came in second only to focusing on digital transformation. This is understandable, given the almost immediate shift to digital channels caused by the pandemic.

The foundation of an improved customer experience is the need to know your customers, understand their behavior and needs, and reward them for their relationship. This “reward” is often not in points or special offers as much as is it in the ability to provide contextual guidance and financial recommendations based on real-time needs and opportunities.

The key is to use data and advanced analytics not just to know the customer within the organization, but to continually illustrate to the customer that you understand their customer journey. Without the deployment of insights for communication to the customer, the most important component of customer experience is missed.

The good news is that when you improve the experience from your customers’ perspective, there is proof that your organization will improve satisfaction, increase sales, expand depth of relationships, increase retention, and positively impact your institution’s bottom line.

When we look at the major customer experience trends for 2021, clearly the pandemic impacted expectations. It is also clear that the importance of positive customer experiences has never been greater. While some of the trends for 2021 are extensions of what we have seen in the past, others are new expectations caused by the combination of digital, economic and social changes we have seen in the past 12 months.

1. Speed and Simplicity Rule. Customers will no longer base their experience perceptions solely on price, product or convenience. Instead, expectations will be based on digital speed, simplicity and contextuality.
2. Channel Uniformity Assumed. More than ever, consumers will expect a consistent experience across all channels and platforms, in real-time.
3. Design Matters. Consumers will make a decision whether a website or mobile app is right for them in milliseconds based on the design alone.
4. Proactive Personalization Required. The importance of personalization and proactive recommendations has increased significantly as consumers have become used to the experiences of digital tech firms like Amazon, Netflix, Google, and numerous new fintech players.
5. Sustainability Increases in Importance. Consumers will expand their evaluation of experience with financial institutions to include social components that include community investment, gender and racial equality and other sustainability issues.
6. Technology as an Enabler. While consumers want the impact of what advanced digital technology can provide, they will mostly want things to work … quickly and without friction.
7. Customer Impatience Grows. The impact of a poor customer experience will be faster and more dramatic than ever … and often undetectable initially.

1. Speed and Simplicity Rule the Customer Experience Race

When we look to a pandemic-impacted customer experience criteria set, digital simplicity and speed of engagement — rather than clever words and expanded product options — will drive trust, loyalty and retention. In the future, simpler experiences will be viewed as more valuable to consumers, with the majority of consumers willing to pay a premium for it.

Google, Netflix, Apple and Amazon are all brands built on services that are highly complex in terms of digital capabilities, but ultimately offer solutions that are tailored to users and make their lives easier via simplicity. That is where competitive differentiation will be achieved in the future. However, while clarity will help set competitors apart, financial institutions will still need to simplify products, redefine back-office processes, and provide straightforward customer communication.

At a time when people have less free time and increased decision-making responsibility, a culture of simplicity demonstrates customer centricity. When simplicity and clarity are the primary objective for an organization, the customer will feel in control, bolstering their confidence and providing peace of mind.

2. Channel Uniformity Is Assumed and Institutions Must Adapt

Today’s consumer no longer distinguishes between digital or offline engagement, and interacts with their financial institution through different touchpoints. These touchpoints will change over time based on where a customer is and what else they may be doing.

The same transaction may be accomplished online, using a mobile channel, in a branch, with a call center representative, on a voice device or even using a video channel. Whatever option the consumer selects, they will expect to have the same brand experience – in real time – every time. In a digitally enabled world, banks and credit unions must adapt to this expectation of uniformity of the buying and contact experience.

When we add the need to personalize the experience in real time, financial institutions will be dealing with a new approach to the customer which requires a significant transformation of current internal processes. Part of this transformation will be the monitoring and measurement of the customer experience across the entire customer journey.

3. Design Matters And You Can’t Blow It Even Once for Most Consumers

A bad online or mobile experience can significantly damage your brand and the potential for sales and future engagement. For example, 57% of customers won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website or mobile app. And if a website isn’t mobile-friendly, 50% of customers will stop visiting it, even if they like the business.

What is amazing is that it takes about 50 milliseconds for your customers and prospects to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like it or not — whether they’ll stay or leave. That opinion is developed even faster for a mobile app.

Remember, for any given search query, there are dozens or more search results that fit the needs of the user. With the consumer scrolling for the best fit for any inquiry, they will determine which firm to do business with based on first impressions. And these impressions are usually being made from a mobile device.

So, if you can focus on the redesign of any of your platforms, start with the mobile app. Our research has shown that the biggest banks are redesigning their mobile platforms at a much greater frequency than their website.

4. Proactive Personalization Required

Just knowing who your customer no longer suffices. As a result of the many new digital interactions consumers have experienced since COVID disrupted life, people now want you to be in a position to help them manage their money like a GPS system manages direction to a destination.

Banks and credit unions will take information from past interactions, combined with internal and external insights to use it to instantaneously customize the customer’s experience. Amazon’s recommendation engine and Netflix’s intelligent viewing algorithm are excellent examples of how this will play out.

While remembering what a customer did in the past is a good start, the proactive personalization capability will also need to optimize the customer’s journey on their behalf. This includes building new customized solution sets that will optimize financial outcomes, similar to how a GPS system changes the recommended route due to real-time changes in traffic patterns.

Part of the proactive personalization process will include focusing on how an investment in journey mapping improves the economics of delivering products and journeys to a customer segment — and how powerfully it reinforces engagement – as opposed to just how it drives sales or reduces costs.

5. Sustainability Increases in Importance

The global health challenges and social justice protests over the summer highlighted the importance of creating a customer experience that reflects the broader scope of sustainability. Globally, consumers will expect banks and credit unions to operate in a way that supports community investment, social and gender equality and even environmental issues.

As more consumers seek out firms that meet their own personal values on social, economic and environmental issues, financial institutions will need to put words into action that customers see as part of the organization’s brand and culture.

According to a 2020 survey, customers are most likely to return to a brand for the product’s quality, but sustainable business practices come a close second. In fact, 68% of consumers say they’re motivated to be loyal to a brand by knowing that they share the same values.

Sustainability isn’t just about switching your own organization’s practices to become more socially aware, environmentally friendly or ethical. Going forward, consumers want you to help them behave more sustainably, too.

6. Technology as an Enabler of Superior CX

While technology will be an important component of the overall customer experience, it will not be what consumers look to when assessing how well an organization is doing. The technology that drives an experience will be invisible.

According to PWC, “Customers expect technology to always work (and are unlikely to take note of new technology unless it malfunctions or interrupts the seamless, friendly experience). They want the design of websites and mobile apps to be elegant and user-friendly; they want automation to ease experience. But these advances are not meaningful if speed, convenience and the right information at the right time are lacking.”

Investing in the next shiny object is not a winning strategy. Financial institutions need to decide which digital tools to use after business objectives are established and leadership commits to integrating the technology, people, process and culture to support the consumer experience.

The customer experience needs to be designed from the outside in and built from the inside out. This means that technology is determined once the customer provides input and processes are reset for digital.

7. Customer Impatience With Substandard CX Grows

The impact of a negative experience will be faster than ever before, possibly without the opportunity to get it right once a customer becomes upset.  One in three consumers (32%) say they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience, according to PWC.

Adding to this impatience are the countless options consumers have at their fingertips. If your bank or credit union doesn’t immediately appeal to them, another brand certainly will. According to recent research, 29% of mobile users will switch to another app or website if they fail to find what they are looking for within three seconds. With so many new products and services available, once a consumer starts shopping, they already know the experience they want.

An additional warning: When a current customer becomes disenchanted, they may not tell you, and they may switch providers without formally closing their current relationship. In other words, in a digital world attrition may be both invisible and non-negotiable.

Where Financial Institutions Should Start Their CX Rebound

No financial institution can achieve digital banking transformation or improve all components of customer experience overnight. The best strategy is to start with looking at what your customers expect from you in a pandemic-impacted world.

While they may have been satisfied with the almost instantaneous digital transformation you did when the physical world shut down in early 2020, new, much more elevated expectation lie ahead. Find the best opportunities to create fast, simple and customized digital experiences that enhance the overall customer journey.

Use the same level of urgency and crisis management to create differentiated experiences that provide a competitive advantage in 2021. While much about the future remains unknown, it is clear that financial institutions that prioritize the integration of digital and CX will be best positioned for it.

https://bit.ly/2PEKptq

What is Customer Experience Management (CXM)?

Bob Thompson

While industry experts generally agree that customer experiences include all interactions and the resulting customer perceptions[1], there is more confusion about what Customer ExperienceManagement (CXM) entails. These perceptions were explored with survey respondents, 92% of which were CX team leaders or members.

There was emphatic agreement that key elements of CXM include delivering the brand promise and increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. In this respect, CXM is a new term for loyalty management practices that have existed for decades. Also, everyone agreed that engaged employees were essential to CX success.

In contrast, there was strong disagreement that “CXM is the same as Customer Success Management” (CSM), or that “CXM is a replacement for Customer Relationship Management (CRM)”, or that “CXM is another term for a Voice of the Customer program.”

Most respondents also rejected the notion that CXM is difficult because experiences can’t be “managed” as some have suggested. According to industry analyst Thomas Wieberneit, “ … customer experiences are living in the perception of the customer, and hence are solely managed by the customer, not by any company.”[2]

Of course, CX managers are unlikely to agree that their role is fundamentally flawed because customers are in control! Pragmatically speaking, CXM is not about controlling customer experience, but about making changes that the company can control (processes, employee behaviors, product capabilities, etc.) to influence perceived experiences in a positive direction. While “CX Influence” might be technically a better term, CXM has been widely adopted by the industry, including hundreds of consultancies and a growing number of technology firms.

There were mixed reactions to other statements. One of them gets to the heart of what CX is — and isn’t.

For instance, 74% agreed: “By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.” Taken literally, this statement is a logical fallacy. If CX includes all interactions and perceptions, then it must include price and product. CX can’t “overtake” something it includes.

But, CX thought leaders don’t parse it this way.

CX is a representation of everything an organisation does to contribute to the delivery of the “end to end customer experience”.

— Ian Golding, CX consultant

CX (as seen from customers’ eyes) includes product/pricing/interactions plus customers’ behind-the-scenes efforts to select, get and use a solution toward their goals. The behind-the-scenes efforts include integrations throughout select/get/use with emphasis on “use” — integrations with various people, environs, hardware/materials, software, and processes.

— Lynn Hunsaker, ClearAction Continuum

Customer Experience is what wraps around product and price.

— Colin Shaw, Beyond Philosophy

So, when is an organization not practicing CXM? According to market researcher and CX consultant Dave Fish of CuriosityCX, CXM should not include companies that only emphasize one element such as product or price or customer service — and ignore the larger narrative of what customers are experiencing on their journey.

Krista Sheridan, a CX leader with 20 years of CX experience at TELUS, agrees (emphasis added):

“Until companies take a broader view, things won’t really improve. There are so many decisions and work done by so many different people and teams and departments leading up to an eventual customer interaction. And if all that work has created a poor product, poor selection process, annoying payment experience, aggravating policies etc. your interactions with customers can only do so much — they can’t undo all those systemic things!”

Given the foregoing, it’s no surprise that 69% disagreed that the “primary goal of CXM is to improve customer service” and 65% agreed that “CX initiatives must include products and pricing.” Still, roughly one-third of respondents see CXM in a more limited perspective than experts advocate.

Source: Customer Experience at a Crossroads: What Drives CX Success?

Furthermore, while CXM may be about “delivering the brand promise,” some brand promises are not compatible with a holistic definition of CXM. Pushing low prices above all else, with little concern for customer satisfaction, is not considered CXM. Ryanair has prospered with such a model, but CX experts are loath to include this as a CX success story.[3] Indeed, no CX initiatives in this study were focused primarily on low prices.

In recent years, spurred by the success of Amazon, many companies have pursued making experiences easy or effortless. In fact, “easy” was the top CX attribute believed to drive customer loyalty, cited by 83% of all respondents. But, 76% disagreed that: “To be successful, CXM should just focus on making experiences easy.” While being “easy” is clearly important, it’s not the only thing that matters. And indeed, it’s not a differentiator for “Winning” CX initiatives, as will be explored later in this report.

Finally, there was nearly an equal split in agreement on whether a Chief Customer/Experience Officer is required for CXM success. This is consistent with prior CustomerThink research that found a slight majority of organizations believed that a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) would be of benefit to the company, to facilitate cross-department coordination and get support from the CEO and Board.[4]

What Does CX and CXM Mean to Your Business?

The implication for CX leaders is that key stakeholders may — and probably do — have widely varying perceptions about CX and CXM. Some may think of CXM in a holistic way, but others may believe that CX is just another term for customer service, process improvement, or customer surveys.

Furthermore, CX leaders who present CXM as narrowly focused may run into another objection: Why do we need another term for product excellence, price leadership, or customer service? CXM should bring new thinking and value to organizations, not be used as a new trendy label for existing activities.

Therefore, it’s imperative for CX leaders to clearly define the scope of CXM at the company and communicate and secure agreement to that scope with sponsoring executives and key stakeholders. This can be accomplished, according to seasoned CX leaders interviewed for this study, by meeting with stakeholders early in the planning and strategy development process to:

• Understand perceptions about CX and CXM
• Differentiate CXM from Voice of Customer programs, customer service, etc.
• Clearly define the organization’s intended experiences
• Identify key business issues where CXM might help
• Assess potential buy-in and support

Otherwise, according to one Vice President leading global CX efforts at a large technology firm, the tendency is for people to jump on immediate problems without stopping to think and analyze the key business issues that, if solved, would make a significant difference in performance.