Customer Experience – Part I – How has transformed the Customer Care and Services

How the subject of Customer Experience Management has transformed the Customer Care and Services

Today the subject of Customer Experience is widely used and has aroused interest from several different audiences:

Areas of Companies that want to improve their relationship with the client, usually: Marketing, Customer Service, Sales, Alliances, etc. and seek to innovate from new practices linked to the theme

Entrepreneurs seeking to increase their revenue with greater market share (Market Share), gaining new customers and reducing the evasion of revenues and operating costs from various sources

Business Consultants, Systems and Software Suppliers that accelerate or enable the implementation of Customer Experience practices in companies

Business Partners of Companies whose attention to the Customer Experience influences the success of their own businesses.

In this context, there is a development of actions and actors that participate in Customer Experience. How could we define this term in the business world?

Customer Experience would then be the entire story that the customer goes through in the relationship with a particular service provider or product seller. This company and the client (or user) has a unique relationship, described by the types of interaction and the impacts that the relationship produces.

Several relevant actions emerge from these interactions, such as customer use satisfaction; knowledge of the company’s offers; ease of decision making; opinions that will be given – positive and negative about the company, affecting its image; differential behaviors made by segments of customers, products, regions; freedom to choose a channel of communication among the many possible, whether traditional or via the digital world.

These actions are the object of study by all these audiences, in an attempt to understand this experience as completely as possible.

One area that knowledge and performance that gives special attention in this digital world is Marketing. Professionals and Marketing departments are interested in expanding sales with new ideas, new products, a new communication. At the same time, they are not intended to cause everyday use disorders in this complex universe. They are especially interested in these concepts and in these actions.

Getting to Know Each Digital Channel Is Vital to Good Customer Service

To study the digital channels, the behavior of the client according to each interaction is basic for an outstanding performance of the Marketing area.

Therefore, this area has dictated to a great extent the evolution of the theme in the company, because with the rapid pace of change, brings innovative solutions changing processes, systems, information and even changing the very people of the organization.

Being an initiative of Marketing departments, it is not, however, restricted to a unique area, and always involves several groups of the company, in the focus of maintaining the customer, increasing the market and taking care of the company’s image and products. Areas such as IT, Customer Service, Commercial and Communication are essential in this process, for example.

As we see, working with the client in a winning way involves not only a systems solution, business process review, an operational framework, investment, training – but a mindset – a customer-focused mindset, the so-called extended customer view. In other words, it is not just a customer recorded register or historical question, but a holistic view, or as it is said in the market, a 360º view of the client.

When a company develops Customer Experience projects, it usually has a maturity or develops with some organizational initiatives, which includes to:

• Have a Customer Experience program with escalation to the company’s executives, the board that understands the importance of a strategic program like this and how the results of the program is related to the corporation’s own mission.
• Provide resources or investment to achieve Customer Experience goals, including personnel, training, solutions, consulting, etc. This program is not secondary to the scheme of other business programs, given its importance. I.e., it is an autonomous program.
• Realize that innovations for the treatment of Customer Experience in the digital world will also bring adaptations in all areas and therefore the management of the responsible area needs to have the authority to introduce the necessary changes in the company.
• Not fragment management of customer experience themes and journey, bringing disconnected solutions with the program (to serve customer segments, products, or only a few channels of interaction). Those solutions bring short-term benefits to a particular customer relationship focus, but in long-term it increases the complexity to provide 360-degree customer insight, speed of introduction and changes in customer interactions.

For this same reason, one must think of the end-to-end customer journey, going through all departments, across all channels, across all segments and territories and building processes with this focus, aiming to bring the best experience.

Measure the results of the area with KPIs in a systematic way, with business impact with improvements in customer satisfaction, revenue increases, decrease in revenue evasion, decrease in service costs, improvement in brand / product sentiment analysis, etc.

Thus, the maturity of a company with Customer Experience can and should be measured in several ways. One way to quickly analyze this maturity is to examine in more detail the concern with this subject. In the chart below, see a summary where these points of analysis are highlighted, suggesting a maturity curve.

There is a lot of information above, which can be analyzed from a business appraisal.

So, to analyze the potential and realized behavior of the customer, the following table presents some dimensions.

Usually a company walks from the bottom up and left to right, in order to know about previous experiences for analytical purposes (outside the moment of interaction) or during the interaction itself. This is essential to know the customer.

In a second moment, know what alternative experiences this client takes (other channels, other products, contact outsourcing, etc.).

Next, knowing which competing alternatives can attract a customer’s decision at each step, in each situation, makes the experience management more powerful.

Walking in the knowledge of the client, having data of their behavior or orientations as – attraction by technology; demographic information; trends of the segments to which he/she belong; tendencies to choose by price; by innovation or by relationship – take the next step, making this customer’s information more complete.

Finally, predicting the outcome of each client’s action in an emotional, social, cognitive and physical context completes the picture extensively.

What happens is that the more one grows in maturity, the more complex the information to recover, the more subjective and exposed to error. However, looking for them and getting information even with some degree of uncertainty is better than not having anything.

In the right side of the same chart, we can check that companies try to understand the interaction at each point of contact with the customer. Based on a very basic management based on product / service PRICING and composition of PORTFOLIO, a corporation can analyze in more detail its interactions or its INTERFACE SERVICES, whether traditional (face to face, telephone service, IVR service) or belonging to the digital world (such as Web, mobile or tablet interactions, etc.).

In a next phase, the company is concerned with what individual comments on matters relating to the company or its products; What the segment of this type of individual also comments; which feelings or inferences can be deduced from these interactions; how competitors are being evaluated in the social network by each segment; what actions are taken as a result of certain types of posts in social networks; etc.

Finally, understanding the atmosphere or influence of aspects of the ENVIRONMENT on the behavior of the individual is considerable to predict and prevent actions, such as: Climate; Local culture; Economic Status; Competition situation; seasonal effects; influence of the environment; etc.

Complementing customer information with less common but relevant data can give the Customer Experience manager an unprecedented advantage by incorporating the new information sources and a more holistic approach to customer behavior.

(to be continued)

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