Many companies are attempting to improve their Customer Experience focus on some of the right things and then ignore the others. Why? They don’t know what to do next. So while the vast majority of companies today know that putting the Customer at the heart of everything they do is important, when it’s time to do it, they are flummoxed.
Here is a step-by-step guide to help you implement your new and improved Customer Experience.
Step one: Get the buy-in of the entire organization
The emotional, irrational side of a Customer Experience is important for every member of your team to believe, from top to bottom. This fact is plain when you propose changing the goals of your company to report to a metric based on this fact. Start at the top, as their influence is keenly felt on down the line. Furthermore, they direct the resources. But don’t forget to convince the rest of the team, too. Once everyone is rowing together toward a deliberate emotional experience, there is no stopping the pace of change.
Step two: Have a plan
Once you have buy-in from the people in your organization, you also have a plan for getting to the new goal. In other words, you need to be able to answer the question, “So what do we do about this new finding that emotions play a part?” The answer requires discovering these emotional moments in an experience and designing a better experience that appeals to those moment’s emotions. You must find out where you are to plot where you want to go. Customer Mirrors, where you walk your experience as if you were a customer, and the Emotional Signature Research, which discovers what emotions your present experience evokes, are examples on how to establish this baseline. From there you can map out these moments and design them to have a different emotional outcome that drives value for your organization.
Step three: Train everyone on specific ways to deliver the experience you want.
Getting the outcome you want requires educating people on how to get those results. Training is of particular importance for those members of the team who interact with customers directly. They should have a good understanding of why you chose the emotion you did for your design, the research behind your decision and how it affects behavior, as well as the specific cues and customer behaviors that indicate a departure from the desired emotion has occurred. With this information and the specific actions you prescribe to get the experience back on course, the team will have what they need to be successful—which also has an excellent result for your employee satisfaction.
Once you have taken these steps, employ your best change management skills. Incent the behavior you want. People do what they are measured on, so measure the right things. Remember the employees here, too. Their experience needs to provide them the right opportunity to do what you need to with customers to achieve the desired outcome. So clear the way for them.
Finally, support them. Change is hard; empathy can go a long way to facilitate extra effort in a difficult situation. Choose positive reinforcement whenever possible to keep the energy high.
Tony Robbins is famous for his quote, “Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.”
If you are feeling pain in your Customer Experience, the question you need to ask is how much pain? Is it enough to take your understanding of the influence of emotions on the Customer Experience to the next step by making it a priority to change?
To learn more about these fascinating and compelling concepts for business, please register for our latest book and FREE book launch webinar: The Intuitive Customer: 7 Imperatives for moving your Customer Experience to the next level (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:
- Industry Secrets Leaked: Predicting Customer Behavior
- How to Measure Customer Emotions
- 3 Critical Change Management Steps
Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations.
Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX