Defining CEM through princples

During my research I found that many of my interviewees defined Customer Experience Management in their organizations using principles….. and so I began collating and grouping CEM principles and over a few months had a list of over 800 CEM principles. I find that principles provide a great foundation for defining, explaining and operationalizing customer experience management. Below are my top 25 – let me know what you think and what you would add?

My top 25 CEM principles:

CEM Principle #1: Leadership should be actively and continually involved in CEM efforts

CEM Principle #2: Leadership should keep looking for new ways to maintain enthusiasm around CEM efforts

CEM Principle #3: Make CEM one of the companies top priorities

CEM Principle #4: Have a clear and well communicated strategy

CEM Principle #5: Develop trust relationships with your customers

CEM Principle #6: Consider the functional AND emotional value you are providing to your customers

CEM Principle #7: Always deliver on your promises

CEM Principle #8: Reinforce your brand with every interaction

CEM Principle #9: Consider customer experience beyond marketing communications

CEM Principle #10: Find ways to meet customer needs not only deliver product features

CEM Principle #11: Know what drives customer purchases

CEM Principle #12: Employees need to be motivated, competent and innovative

CEM Principle #13: Reward and recognize customers for delivering excellent customer experiences

CEM Principle #14: Align key performance indicators with customer experience

CEM Principle #15: Engage employees in the customer experience process

CEM Principle #16: Provide employees with the right tools to deliver good customer experiences

CEM Principle #17: Think about segmenting customers by their needs

CEM Principle #18: Use customer segmentation to predict behavior

CEM Principle #19: Document customer experiences across touch points

CEM Principle #20: Have an integrated view of the customer across systems

CEM Principle #21: Know and understand all customer touch points

CEM Principle #22: Segment and prioritize customer touch points

CEM Principle #23: Find ways to measure customer experience

CEM Principle #24: Love customer complaints

CEM Principle #25: Embrace customer complaints

Importance of building trust relationships

Mr. Company how can I trust you when you lie to me?

I recently had a scheduled appointment with a representative from one of my service providers. Further – it was an initial assessment and I hadn’t even handed over any money yet. After waiting for 20 mins (too long) in the waiting area I decided to call him and find out where he was. I was presented with a ridiculous lie. Details unimportant but if only he had told the truth and said “I got caught up” or “I’m so sorry I completely forgot how can I make this up to”.

This silly lie cost him and his company my trust and my business.

Having recently read the SAS Institute Inc’s ‘2009 Customer Experience Maturity Monitor’, this got me thinking about the importance of building trust relationships with customers. The SAS Institute Inc. sum up this concept nicely and say that “a customer’s trust is a belief that the company has her and his best interests at heart and can be depended upon for respect, openness, tolerance and honesty”.

What a fabulous philosophy for companies to use?

This article also describes the gap between how companies think they behave towards trust and how they actually behave. --- I think a key problem in developing customer centricity.

We are all human and we can all make mistakes but this can be overcome with a simple philosophy of respect, openness, tolerance and honesty.

It really matters how you respond to customer feedback

I use the term “customer feedback” which to me sometimes means “compliments” but most of the time this means “complaints”.

As a customer I often give feedback as I believe this is part of my role to play in having my expectations met. And I try to do it in a collaborative way. So this morning I gave some “customer feedback” to a well known local butcher where I often buy meat and also to a beauty spa where I recently had a treatment. Without providing you with the long winded tales here are some basic principles that I learned:

1. Provide customers with easy to use channels to provide feedback. Customers have different preferences so offer options such as a phone number, email address, website etc. I like to have a number to call.
2. Be open to feedback. I mean encourage customers to really tell you how they are feeling.
3. i.e. Don’t be defensive. Some customers will be offensive, don’t retaliate with defense.
4. Avoid denial. Customers don’t want to be told that they are telling fibs. If you don’t believe them rather say that you will investigate the problem. And then investigate it.
5. Don’t blame an employee or a broken system. It is your company, take ownership.
6. Thank customers for providing feedback. And really mean it.
7. Follow up with some information on how the problem was resolved.
   

Then lastly I personally DON’T like to be offered freebies when I give feedback. In my opinion freebies don’t buy good will and encourage the wrong kind of feedback, showing you care will keep me coming back… but this point is up for debate?

So….. I’m really looking forward to my massage next week but can anyone recommend a good butcher?

Your brand belongs to your customers

There is a desperate need for companies to move from the mindset that they own their brand to an understanding that their brand is in fact driven by their customers.

When describing your brand can you say:

• It is clear in the customers mind? Or is it about the internal processes of the company?
• Can it easily be delivered to the customer? Or could it leave empty promises?
• Does it relate into value for the customer? Or is the value proposition unclear?
• Is every customer interaction identifiable with the brand? Or could your customers be experiencing brand confusion?

Is it not the brands that are clear, customer directed and consistently delivered the ones that outsmart their competitors time and time again?

Why is CEM so difficult?

Few companies will deny the importance of CEM while many fail to deliver. Below I have discussed some of the reasons why I think companies continue to struggle with CEM.

Fuzzy definitions: CEM often means different things to different people inside companies. Perhaps companies need to have clearly defined customer principles which are well communicated and become part of the company ethos.

Visibility: Often there is nobody senior to oversee the entire companies CEM efforts which results in a loss of visibility, momentum and focus. Assigning a senior member of the company to guide the CEM strategy will surely ensure sufficient resource allocation, gain organisation wide support and provide continuous monitoring.

Lack of management approaches: This is the case of good intentions but no game plan. There seems to be a general lack of clear CEM approaches and management tools. Companies need simple and implementable CEM practices that work.

Not a priority: If CEM is not one of the companies top priorities it will always take the back seat to other initiatives. Unfortunately CEM cannot be successful unless it is accepted as a continuous journey- one that requires constant focus and attention.

No strategy: Many companies claim to be managing their customer experiences yet lack a formal strategy with allocated resources. Good customer experiences will only happen when a company has taken intentional and calculated steps towards providing them. It just doesn’t happen on its own.

Conflicting perceptions: A customer’s perception of their experience often differs to the company’s perception of the experience they provide. Until companies can put themselves into their customer’s shoes they will struggle with their CEM efforts. Furthermore few companies know what customers value and what keeps them coming back.

Once-off efforts: CEM cannot come in the form of short project bursts but should be managed as a continuous function of the business. This is achieved by allocating a permanent CEM team that embarks on a CEM journey with constant feedback, measures and new initiatives.

These are just some of possibly many reasons, but hopefully a quick assessment of the above could help companies determine why and where they continue to struggle with CEM.

What matters to customers has changed

Another thought on why companies struggle to effectively manage customer experiences may be the massive changes in customer expectations…

Historically companies focused primarily on delivering products and product features to customers- which often met customer expectations. A typical sales process from the customer perspective would include gathering information about different product offerings, comparing features, maybe testing the products by speaking to others and then making the purchase. For companies this is a fairly easy process to understand and design.

What matters to customers now has however changed. Product features have become a given and purchase decisions now include a strong emotional and experiential factor- how the purchase makes the customer feel. This emotional factor drastically increases the complexity of managing customer experiences. Furthermore while customer experiences could previously be managed in silos by single functional areas such as marketing, the shift in customer expectations now requires the involvement and shared responsibility of cross functional teams and leadership.

I truly believe that the companies that accept and manage the things that really matter to their customers will reap the rewards.

Three Must-Haves of Customer Experience (CE)

Defining CE appears to have created mass confusion and disagreement among academics and business professionals alike. These definitions are often defined from different functional perspectives or in the pursuit of specific business objectives. Furthermore it can easily be argued that a common problem of Customer Experience Management (CEM) is that CE means different things to different people across and within organizations. Therefore without structured definitions- clear CEM strategies and the implementation thereof become highly challenging.

While it is difficult to define CE in a way that makes sense to companies and customers alike, I do believe that there are three undeniable key elements to customer experience.

1. Firstly, CE must be the customer’s interpretation of the experience. This means that companies cannot assume to guess how customer’s experiences must consider the customers perspective regardless of whether there is agreement. This explains some of the complexity of CEM because the customer’s interpretation is influenced by a number of factors- many of which will not be controllable by the company such as a previously poor experience with a similar service provider or a customer simply having a bad day. These uncontrollable factors vary from person to person making them very difficult to isolate.

2. Secondly, CE is the summation of experiences across all a customer’s interactions with the company. These interactions can include TV Ads, sales enquiries, service calls and sponsored events. Furthermore, each of these interactions has a different weighted contribution to the total customer experience. This can make defining all possible customer interactions and their impact on the total CE somewhat tricky. This also means that while measuring individual transactions is useful in improving isolated processes, it falls short of providing indicators of total customer experience.

3. Lastly, CE must result in value being created for the customer and the company and a bad CE will inevitably destroy value. Value in terms of the customer could mean quicker resolution times, ease of use, better prices or a positive emotional experience. For companies value could be up-selling opportunities, increased customer loyalty, promotion of brand advocacy or fewer complaints or support calls. Therefore in designing and managing CE’s, companies should understand the value that is created for both themselves and their customers.

Therefore while defining CE is difficult and somewhat confusing, what really matters is that is that CE: is always the customer’s interpretation; considers the experience across all interactions; and creates value for both the company and the customer.