Customer Experience

Collaborative Articles in Customer Experience

LinkedIn provides community knowledge in customer experience based on insights and advice from people with real-life experiences.

John Triggs

Nov 8, 2023 • 26 min read

LinkedIn provides community knowledge in customer experience based on insights and advice from people with real-life experiences.

Contributions include:

Digital CX
- Personalization

How can you create a customer experience that is both digital and human?
How can you use customer insights to create personalized touchpoints for engagement and loyalty?

What are the most effective customer segments for personalization?
How can you personalize the chatbot experience for customers?
How can you segment customers based on purchase history for better CX personalization?
How can you balance efficiency with personalization in CX?
How can you balance personalization and privacy concerns in CRM and CX?

Technology
- What are the latest technologies for measuring customer satisfaction and improving customer experience?
- How can you use technology to support CX culture and leadership?
- What are effective AI solutions for customer escalation management?
Innovation
- What are the most effective ways to scale and launch new services?

What are the key success factors for service development in a competitive market?
How can you use customer data to create a website that customers love?

Customer Journey Mapping
- Design
  - How can touchpoint design increase customer satisfaction and loyalty?
  - How can B2B companies create effective customer journey maps?
  - What are the most effective digital customer touchpoint design practices?
  - What are the most important touchpoints to improve your CX performance?
  - How can you create journey maps that are accessible to everyone?

Insights
- How can you get the most out of customer journey mapping?
- How can you identify which touchpoints need personalization?
- How can you identify customer experience challenges with a journey map?
Action
- How can you use journey maps to create a seamless omnichannel experience?
- How do you map your customer journey to reflect your culture?
- What is the importance of diversity and inclusion in customer journey mapping?

Customer-Centricity
- Transformation
  - How can your organization be more customer-centric?
  - How can you identify and prioritize CX improvement opportunities?
- Culture
  - How can you create a culture of customer experience excellence after a merger or acquisition?
  - How can you develop a customer-first mindset?
- Customer Segmentation
  - How can you apply CX principles to specific customer segments?
  - How can you use customer segmentation to prevent escalations among customer groups?
  - How can you personalize your CX approach based on customer preferences?
CX Measurement
- Business Value
  - How do you show senior management the value of customer experience?
- Tools & Processes
  - What's your system for tracking customer experience success?
  - How can you measure the effectiveness of CX in CRM?
  - What are the most effective data analytics tools for identifying complaint trends?
- Voice of the Customer
  - How can you use Voice of the Customer to create innovative products?
  - How can customer feedback improve your CX strategy?
  - How can you balance quantitative and qualitative satisfaction metrics?
  - What innovative approaches can you use to analyze voice of the customer?
CX Design
- Best Practices
  - What are the best practices for CX design?
  - What steps can you take to design a customer-centric product?
  - What are the most important elements of a customer-centric website?
  - What are effective ways to validate service design concepts?
- Delightful CX
  - How can you design a CX experience that delights your customers?
  - What are effective ways to design customer touchpoints that evoke positive emotions?
  - What are the key principles for designing a mobile app that delights customers?
CX Strategy
- Tactics
  - What are some ways to involve employees in developing a customer experience strategy?
  - How can you prepare for the future of customer experience?
  - What are the most common CX challenges and how can you overcome them?
  - How can you create an emotional connection with customers that is unforgettable?
- Customer Satisfaction
  - What are effective customer satisfaction strategies that won't break the bank?
  - How do you define and differentiate customer experience from customer service and customer satisfaction?

What innovative approaches can you use to analyze voice of the customer?

Innovative approaches to analyze VoC feedback include:

Integration of survey data with CRM/operational data
Survey management platforms (i.e. online, in person, NPS)
Text analytics (i.e. social media, email, feedback forms, live chat)
Predictive analytics (i.e. website behavior)
Voice analytics (i.e. call data, focus groups, interviews)

In addition to collecting and analyzing VoC data, innovative companies tailor customer insights to meet specific business needs and link to organizational processes, from operations to strategic decision-making. The key to success is using VoC insights to improve the CX.

At Amazon, we analyzed VoC insights for our advertising customers using dashboards and curated communications from VoC teams.

How can you use customer data to create a website that customers love?

You can use customer data to create a website that customers love by understanding their needs and using technology to facilitate digital interactions that are holistic, predictive, and focused on value.

The following capabilities help you create a great CX:

Automation: streamline the customer journey
Contextual: deliver relevant interactions based on journey stage
CX Insights: mine customer data to identify relevant, valuable services
Experimentation: continuously test & prototype new services or features
Personalization: use customer data to customize CX based on preferences & needs

At my financial services firm, we had a dedicated customer program to offer these services to help teams create great websites for its customers.

How can you create a culture of experimentation in CX leadership?

Creating a culture of experimentation requires that executive set the example for CX leadership by encouraging a customer-focused mindset through innovation and acceptance of failure.

In order to be experimental, companies must understand their customers by measuring the CX and acting on these insights by working backwards from their pain points to quickly develop innovative solutions that are meaningful and delightful. Continuous delivery through agile practices requires teams to embrace customer-centric improvement by accepting failure and learning from the pain points.

At Amazon, we used experiments to incubate new capabilities and prioritize our long-term solutions based on measurable, sustained value identified through these tests.

How can you balance personalization and privacy concerns in CRM and CX?

You can balance personalization and privacy concerns in CRM and CX by the following practices:

Offer users transparency & control over how their data is used
Comply with industry privacy regulations & audits
Manage data effectively via corporate governance practices to ensure privacy, security, inclusion, traceability & ethics
Anonymize, secure, encrypt & minimize the use of customer data
Train employees via compliance & courses
Continuously improve to adapt privacy practices

At my financial services firm, we followed these practices when defining and delivering our enterprise platform to personalize the banking app CX. We also leveraged our in-app messaging platform to educate or alert users about security best practices.

How can you balance efficiency with personalization in CX?

An effective placements strategy helps you balance efficiency with personalization in your digital CX.

Digital CX enables companies to streamline customer interactions through automation and also deliver contextually relevant experiences customized based on their preferences and needs.

Placements, which are specific locations on a page where personalized content can appear, enable you to customize customer content in predefined areas that enhance - not disrupt - the primary goal of efficient interactions.

For example, we personalized the CX in four placements on the account summary page in our banking app. Depending on the placement, we personalized the CX with content focused on humanity, servicing, engagement, or marketing messages.

How can you create journey maps that are accessible to everyone?

According to the UK government, customer journey maps need to be accessible to everyone in order to engage all stakeholders through a simpler format and make them actionable even when you're not in the room.

You can create accessible journey maps by:

Using accessible software that meets Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) requirements
Breaking down the map to show what you want, reducing clutter and making it easier to understand
Using accessible colors that are muted and have a high contrast to text to avoid overstimulation
Keeping things in straight lines, reducing arrows or other information to make it easier to navigation
Fitting map on one screen, allowing people to scroll left to right, so it's not too big

How can you create an emotional connection with customers that is unforgettable?

According to the book "Empathy in Action: How to Deliver Great Customer Experiences At Scale, Customer Experience is not just about customer satisfaction - it's about creating an emotional connection with customers in order to drive repeat business, positive word-of-mouth, and increased customer lifetime value.

Keys to delivering great CX include:

Technology (AI, cloud & iOT) to improve CX and make it easier for customers by automating tasks, personalizing CX, making predictions, and understanding customer insights
Customer interactions via engaged employees and thoughtful processes
Empathy, simplicity, personalization, convenience, and engagement for customers
Empowerment, collaboration, learning, and well-being for employees

How can you balance quantitative and qualitative satisfaction metrics?

Balancing quantitative and qualitative satisfaction metrics helps identify issues to fix before they impact more customers and uncover opportunities to drive business growth.

It is important to use quantitative data to dive deep into a qualitative insight and to carefully analyze instances where quantitative and qualitative data diverge in order to improve CX.

A core element of Amazon's customer-centric innovation culture to giving builders access to tools to collect, analyze, and utilize customer data. This helps teams capture customer feedback to guide innovation, analyze trends, and understand customers in order to invent on their behalf. According to Jeff Bezos, "when anecdotes and data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right."

What are effective ways to validate service design concepts?

The most effective way to validate service design concepts is to use the lowest-cost, fastest method of prototyping to get actionable feedback:

Hand-drawn sketches of solution
Mockups of solutions
High fidelity prototypes that are visually complete and interactive
Functional prototypes for feedback on form factors, sizes, and operational requirements

Prototype validation methods include user research, usability testing, and stakeholder feedback. Additional methods to evaluate design concepts in production environments include A/B testing and consumer behavior analysis.

Service design is an iterative process and requires continuous monitoring of customer feedback, usage data & market trends to identify improvement opportunities.

What are the most important elements of a customer-centric website?

According to Google, the most important elements of a customer-centric website are:

Clear and concise branding
Easy and intuitive navigation
Relevant and engaging content
Fast and reliable performance
Personalized and interactive features
Responsive and adaptable design
Accessibility
Mobile-friendly design
Clear and accessible information
Strong calls to action (CTAs)
Effective search functionality
Social media integration
Customer feedback mechanisms
Security and privacy
Customer reviews and testimonials
Easy contact information
Regular updates, fresh content, and maintenance
Continuous optimization

How can you use service innovation to leverage emerging tech?

You can use service innovation to leverage emerging technologies, including:

AI: automation, personalization, predictions, customer insights, & experimentation across multiple channels.
Cloud: computing power & storage to collect/analyze data & deliver digital CX.
IoT: Internet-connected devices for customer data collection & personalized CX.

Businesses can innovate their services by:

Establishing frameworks to drive CX, sales, loyalty, issue identification & process automation
Centralizing customer-level data for call center, CX & digital technology teams
Optimizing the employee experience (EX) for great customer service
Innovating services through user-centric design, collaboration, experimentation & continuous improvement

How can you personalize your CX approach based on customer preferences?

You can personalize your CX approach by using customer segments based on preferences and needs to customize the following techniques:

Digital CX
Customer service
Customer loyalty programs
CX measurement
Customer journey mapping and personas
Marketing, offers, and recommendations
Employee experiences

Personalization uses technology to:

Identify customer segments
Collect and organize customer data by segment
Activate personalized CX for the segment
Continuously measure and act on feedback and insights

However, personalization is not just about technology. It is also about empathy and understanding the needs, preferences, and feelings of customers. Segments help businesses be more empathetic to their customers.

How can you use customer segmentation to prevent escalations among customer groups?

Customer segmentation is the process of dividing customers into distinct groups based on common characteristics, such as demographics, interests, purchase history, and online behavior.

Customer segmentation can help manage customer escalation by:

Identifying drivers of customer loyalty by segment
Personalizing the CX across the customer journey to meet the specific needs of each segment
Adjusting service levels, resources, and costs to serve by focusing on segments that matter the most
Understanding the needs and preferences of each segment
Analyzing CX metrics and business performance by segment
Predicting churn risk and upsell opportunities by segment
Developing targeted training programs for customer service by segment

How can you apply CX principles to specific customer segments?

You can apply specific customer segments to personalize CX techniques, including:

Digital CX
Customer service
Customer loyalty programs
CX measurement
Customer journey mapping and personas
Marketing, offers, and recommendations
Employee experiences

Personalization uses customer segments to instantly customize CX based on the preferences and needs by:

Identifying customer segments
Collecting and organizing customer data by segment
Activating personalized CX for the segment
Continuously measuring and acting on feedback/insights

Personalization is not just about technology. It is also about empathy and understanding the needs and feelings of another person. Segments help businesses be more empathetic to their customers.

What are the most effective data analytics tools for identifying complaint trends?

Effective data analytics tools for identifying complaint trends allow businesses to deliver great CX via conversation intelligence and insights that drive improvement.

CX insights include:

Track mention volumes across social media
Know the sentiment, effort & emotions
Evaluate performance across teams, user roles & bots

Data analytics include:

Text analytics
Data visualization
Predictive analytics
Sentiment analysis
Topic modeling
Machine learning
Business intelligence (BI) platforms
Natural language processing (NLP)
Customer relationship management (CRM)
Real-time analytics

Data analytics helps increase revenue by optimizing automated and self-service channels. It also helps assess and improve team performance.

What is the importance of diversity and inclusion in customer journey mapping?

Diversity and inclusion in customer journey mapping are key to collecting better data and considering the basic human need to feel a sense of belonging, respect, and freedom.

In order to get accurate customer insights, you must put aside your own biases - both conscious and unconscious - and consider respondents' languages, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. When you map based on your limited experiences, you introduce bias into the process.

In order to be more inclusive:

Always consider what you are trying to understand
Acknowledge & identify ways to correct your assumptions
Apply cognitive testing to identify how respondents understand & answer questions
Test your maps after translation to ensure insights are not lost

How can you measure the effectiveness of CX in CRM?

You can measure the effectiveness of CX in CRM by:

Determining a core CX metric to measure overall CX
Set achievable goals for CX metric aligned with business objectives
Identify key drivers that impact CX metric, including moments, journeys, interactions & customers
Establish key driver metrics to evaluate performance
Make the suite of metrics actionable to drive CX improvements

Common CX metrics include:

Customer satisfaction (CSAT): customer happiness with CX
Net promoter score (NPS): customer loyalty and advocacy based on likeliness to recommend
Customer effort score (CES): Perceived ease or difficulty of doing business with company
Customer lifetime value (CLV): total revenue generated from a customer over a lifetime

How can you use technology to support CX culture and leadership?

You can use technology to support CX culture and leadership, including:

AI: automate tasks, personalize experiences, make predictions, understand customer needs/preferences, and experiment across multiple channels.
Cloud: provides computing power and storage to collect/analyze data and deliver digital CX.
IoT: connects devices to the Internet, allowing businesses to collect data on customer behavior and deliver personalized experiences.

The most common use cases for technology include:

Digital CX: elements of CX that happen online or with the support of digital/analytics in order to facilitate interactions.
CX Measurement: Understand customers' needs and build a customer-centric organization with a continuous improvement mindset.

What are the most important touchpoints to improve your CX performance?

Important customer touchpoints to improve your CX performance include:

Website
Mobile app
Product or service
Outbound messaging (email, SMS, push notifications, paper)
Call center / customer service
Social media
Online chat
Sales

Organizations often have multiple touchpoints with customers, from sales to support to accounting. In order to drive measurable business impact, you'll need to have the ability to collect and analyze customer feedback from all touch points. After collecting these insights, it's important to analyze, act, and continuously monitor to improve your CX performance over time.

How do you define and differentiate customer experience from customer service and customer satisfaction?

Customer Experience (CX) includes Customer Service and Customer Satisfaction is a metric for CX.

Customer Experience:
Everything an organization does to deliver superior experiences, value, and growth for customers. Techniques include:

Customer Journey Mapping
CX Measurement
Digital CX
Customer Service
Customer Loyalty Programs
Employee Experience Optimization

Customer Service:
Assistance that a company provides to its customers before, during & after they purchase a product or service. It is an aspect of CX & encompasses all interactions across the customer journey.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT):
Measures customer happiness with a product, service, or experience. Methods include:

Surveys
Feedback forms
Customer reviews

What are the most effective digital customer touchpoint design practices?

The most effective digital customer touchpoint design practice is to map customer journeys, which are visual representations of customers' interactions and relationships with an organization to help you identify and optimize the moments that matter to them.

The steps to designing a customer journey map include:

Identify the buyer persona
Define the stages along the customer journey toward accomplishing their goal
Gather voice of customer feedback and employee input during touchpoints to identify the needs, interactions, sentiment, effort, and contact duration at each stage
Identify the moments of truth or gap between desired and actual CX
Determine what matters most to customers and when based on feedback volumes and frequency

How do you map your customer journey to reflect your culture?

You can map your customer journey to reflect your culture by:

Listening to customers at critical points along the journey
Monitoring metrics to see how successful the journey is from the company's perspective
Engaging cross-functional teams to prioritize improvement opportunities identified through mapping process
Using journey map and CX metrics as communications tools to align cross-functional teams around customer understanding
Setting up a governance model to assign ownership of action plans to different areas of business
Evaluating and prioritizing improvements & investments using journey map as framework
Continuing to iterate and update customer journey map as CX evolves

Make sure to set goals when implementing changes!

How can touchpoint design increase customer satisfaction and loyalty?

Touchpoint design can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by focusing on customer journeys, which are visual guides that help you identify and optimize the moments that matter.

The benefits of journey mapping include:

Understanding CX from the customers' perspective
Building customer empathy
Determining where to listen to the Voice of the Customer along the journey
Creating or redesigning customer interactions
Aligning stakeholders around customer centricity
Providing employees with visibility to what happens upstream and downstream of their customer interactions
Tying CX back to business goals

Touchpoint design via journey mapping helps companies deliver to the desired CX to drive customer loyalty and satisfaction.

How can you identify customer experience challenges with a journey map?

You can identify CX challenges with a journey map by gathering and analyzing customer feedback to fully understand the stages of the customer journey and interactions your customers have with your business.

Sources of feedback include:

Employee interviews, workshops, and surveys
Customer interviews, observation, journals, and surveys
Social media and emails
Website analytics
Call center and chat transcripts
App feedback and third-party review sites

Use journey map insights about your customers and their emotions/interactions across various touchpoints to identify CX improvement opportunities, such as where to implement closed-loop process, where to reduce customer effort, or where to more proactively address customer needs.

How can you get the most out of customer journey mapping?

You can get the most out of customer journey mapping by:

Gaining executive buy-in to ensure that cross-functional teams will assist with the process and take ownership of improvement initiatives
Defining the scope, objectives, personas, and stakeholder roles
Gathering and analyze feedback from all customer interactions with business
Designing the journey map, which is written in the customer's voice and includes stages, needs & interactions, key expectations, and moments of truth
Creating a culture of action to implement changes based on insights

By identifying and optimizing moments that matter when customers interact with your business, you can make sure that the CX matches their expectations and drives business results.

How can customer feedback improve your CX strategy?

Customer feedback can improve your CX strategy by connecting and engaging with customers at key points along the customer journey.

Customer feedback enables you to:

Customize products, services, and features for potential and existing customers
Identify and prioritize solutions based on market needs and wants
Gather feedback to fix issues and enhance products or services
Evaluate new concepts, ideas, and solutions to innovate

Key considerations for using customer feedback to improve CX strategy include:

Collect feedback across all customer touchpoints
Analyze feedback for insights to right stakeholders
Act upon and take corrective action based on insights
Monitor results over time to uncover patterns, gaps & improvements

How can B2B companies create effective customer journey maps?

In order to create effective journey maps, B2B companies must:

Gain executive buy-in to ensure that cross-functional teams will assist with the process and take ownership of improvement initiatives
Define the scope, objectives, personas, and stakeholder roles
Gather and analyze feedback from all customer interactions with business
Design the journey map, which is written in the customer's voice and includes stages, needs & interactions, key expectations, and moments of truth
Create a culture of action to implement changes based on insights

Note that CX in B2B differs from that in B2C:

Relationships go deeper
Journeys are longer, more complex
Customization is widespread
Stakes are higher (high value customer relationships)

What's your system for tracking customer experience success?

My system for tracking CX success is:

Define CX goals & metrics
Collect data on these metrics & customer feedback
Measure & regularly review progress
Analyze data to identify trends & patterns
Take action to improve CX based on analysis & feedback
Share CX insights & updates with stakeholders

My common metrics include NPS, CSAT, CLV, ROI, and metrics relevant to my specific CX. For example, my CX metrics for a market research product included coverage and accuracy.

My standard tools include CRM, surveys, VoC, experiments, trouble tickets, and BI dashboards customized based on my product. For example, I used BI dashboards to measure campaign performance, audience insights & service delivery for a personalization platform.

What are the key success factors for service development in a competitive market?

The key success factors for service development are:

Customer Centricity: mindset that focuses on creating positive CX & customer engagement
Design Thinking: process to develop services that are feasible, viable & sustainable
Develop on Cadence: routine activities on a fast, synchronized release cadence
Release on Demand: make value available when customers & business need it
Continuous Delivery: automated pipeline for reliable, skillful releases

The key success factors for service differentiation are:

Great CX at every touchpoint
Employee engagement to provide excellent service
Continuous improvement by measuring results, gathering feedback & acting on it
Product marketing to get services to market & keep them there

How can you personalize the chatbot experience for customers?

I have not worked with with chatbot applications specifically, but you can provide personalization technology as a platform service (PaaS) to personalize the CX across multiple products, including your mobile app, website, and more.

A platform that allows developers to build personalized chatbot CX requires the following services:

Customer Data Platform (CDP) - aggregate customer & contextual data for user session
Request Message - fulfill message based on a request, using CDP, ML & NLP
Get Message Content - get personalized content for a message based on CDP & CX
Respond to Message - record customer interactions to inform models & insights

It important to define what CX you want to personalize and continuously test your services!

How can you use journey maps to create a seamless omnichannel experience?

You can create a seamless omnichannel experience by first designing it with customer journey maps, which are visual representations of customers' processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationships with an organization.

Journey mapping helps you identify the moments that matter, so you can design experiences in the moments that match customers' expectations across all channels. Steps to design customer experiences include:

Identify and determine what features will deliver on the benefits customers wants
Use story maps to ideate, plan, and group activities in a workflow or user journey
Design UX through wireframes, mockups, and prototypes
Collect stakeholder feedback before investing in development

What are the key principles for designing a mobile app that delights customers?

According to Google, the key principle to designing a mobile app that delights customers is to begin with attention to usability and comprehension before adding features.

Usability and Comprehension Principles:

Speak the same language as your users
Provide text labels & visual keys to clarify 22 visual information
Be responsive with visual feedback after significant actions
Let the user control level of zoom
Ask for permissions in-context

App Navigation and Exploration Principles:

Show the value of your app upfront
Organize and label menu categories to be user-friendly
Allow users to “go back” easily in one step
Make it easy to manually change location
Create frictionless transitions between mobile apps & mobile web

How can you develop a customer-first mindset?

You can develop a customer-first mindset by focusing on creating positive experiences that delight the customer through your portfolio of products and services.

Customer centricity is a mindset that helps you make decisions based on a deep understanding of its effect on customers and end-users. Customer-centric behaviors include:

Focusing on the customer
Understanding the customer’s needs
Thinking and feeling like the customer
Building whole product solutions
Knowing customer lifetime value

Customer-centric activities include:

Market research to drive product strategy
User research to guide empathic design
Whole product thinking based on entire CX
Contextual understanding of solution needs
Customer value measurement

How do you prove customer experience is valuable to your boss?

You can prove that CX is valuable to your boss by demonstrating a return on investment using lift measurement for a key metric of your CX solution vs. the original state.

ROI calculations often focus on total revenue impact, but a CX solution can also lead to other positive outcomes, such as:
• Cost savings
• Lower volume of support cases
• Fewer defects
• Extension of customer contracts
• Higher renewal rates
• Cross-sell/upsell opportunities

This approach helps companies quantify over time the benefits, ROI, and long-term value associated with improving the CX. Demonstrating a positive impact on existing CX investments will help convince you boss that CX is valuable and get his/her buy-in for future CX initiatives.

How can you identify and prioritize CX improvement opportunities?

You can identify and prioritize CX improvements by measuring the CX, exploring customer problems via Design Thinking & determining which solutions will produce the most meaningful outcomes.

CX Measurement:
Foster a culture of continuous improvement by reviewing & acting on insights into customers' needs across their journey. Best practices multichannel listening & predictive insights.

Design Thinking:
Discover and define the right problems to solve via market/user research to identify unmet needs. Best practices include personas, journeys, prototypes & feedback.

Prioritization:
Prioritize solutions by forecasting economic value; evaluating impact on OKRs & North Start Metrics, or operationalizing requests using a priority support system.

What are effective ways to design customer touchpoints that evoke positive emotions?

You can design customer touchpoints that evoke positive emotions by focusing on customer journeys, which are visual representations of customers' processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationships with an organization.

Journey mapping helps you identify the moments that matter, so you can design customer touchpoints in the moments that match their expectations. Steps to design customer touchpoints include:

Identify and determine what features will deliver on the benefits customers wants
Use story maps to ideate, plan, and group activities in a workflow or user journey
Design UX through wireframes, mockups, and prototypes
Collect stakeholder feedback before investing in development

What are effective customer satisfaction strategies that won't break the bank?

Effective customer satisfaction strategies that won't break the bank include:

Customer Journey Mapping: Attend to end-to-end CX with a business, product, or service in order to optimize all customer interactions
CX Measurement: Foster a culture of continuous improvement by reviewing and acting on measurable insights into customers' needs
Digital CX: Facilitate customer interactions through digital technology and analytics, including automation, contextual interactions, multichannel services, experimentation, and proactive personalization
Customer Service: Assist customers before, during, and after they purchase a product or service
Customer Loyalty Programs: Reward customers for repeat business
Employee Experience (EX) Optimization: build customer-centric culture that empowers employees to provide excellent customer service

How can you identify which touchpoints need personalization?

You can identify which touchpoints need personalization by focusing on customer journeys - instead of individual touchpoints or transactions.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of customers' processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationships with the organization. Customer journey mapping helps you identify the moments that matter, so you can personalize the CX in the moments that match their expectations.

Per Qualtrics, the customer journey map should include:

Buyer persona
Goal
Stages
Needs & interactions within each stage
Customer's expectation
Listening posts
Moments of truth
Customer quotes
Sentiment at each stage
Effort at each stage
Contact duration at each stage

What are the most effective customer segments for personalization?

The most effective customer segments for personalization depend on the customer journey stage:

Awareness:
Goal - turn strangers into prospects

Demographic
Affinity (lifestyle, passion or habits)

Consideration:
Goal - turn prospects into leads

Life events (i.e. graduating from college, getting married)
In-market for specific products

Action:
Goal - convert leads to customers

Similar audiences
Remarketing

Loyalty:
Goal - drive CX loyalty

Products upsell/cross-sell
Transactions
Digital interactions
Modeled segments
Profile/preferences

Any Stage:

Location
Customer match
Custom audience
Behavioral

These are the common ways to segment audiences for personalization throughout each stage of the customer journey.

How can you prepare for the future of customer experience?

The future of CX will transform as technology continues to evolve. We will increasingly use AI to personalize the CX and predict customer needs, IoT to connect with customers across devices, and virtual/augmented reality to let customers experience products and services in new ways.

According to "Empathy in Action: How to Deliver Great Customer Experiences At Scale", you can prepare for the future of CX with these tips:

Get everyone involved
Use technology
Measure your progress
Create a culture of empathy and respect
Set clear expectations for customer service
Provide CX training
Incentivize great service
Listen to your customers
Make it easy for customers to do business with you
Go above and beyond for your customers

What are the most common CX challenges and how can you overcome them?

Delivering great CX at scale faces many challenges, including:

Cost of change: requires a change in mindset and behavior
Need for training: train employees, particularly those not servicing customers
Need for technology: carefully use it in a way that makes customers feel respected.
Risks in personalization: protect & respect customer privacy, collect/manage large amounts of data, and prevent bias.

Companies can overcome these challenges by:

Starting at the top to set tone and create a culture of empathy
Get everyone involved in customer-centricity
Set clear expectations for customer service
Measure your progress to deliver ROI for CX investments
Be transparent about and give customers control over how their data is used

What are the latest technologies for measuring customer satisfaction and improving customer experience?

Companies invest in the latest technologies to measure customer satisfaction and improve the CX.

Measuring CX is important because it helps companies understand their customers' needs and build an organization focused on the customer. Investing in technology that captures feedback on a daily basis from multiple channels and integrates this data, including survey results, into comprehensive dashboards for customer insights.

The goal of investing in digital & analytics technology is to facilitate interactions that are holistic, predictive, prioritized and focused on value. 5 technologies are key to improving the CX:

Customer journey automation
Contextual interactions
Multichannel services
Experimentation
Proactive personalization

What are some ways to involve employees in developing a customer experience strategy?

Companies can involve employees in developing a CX strategy by improving the employee experience (EX) and creating a customer-centric culture.

EX is important to CX because employees are the front line of customer interactions. When employees are engaged and satisfied, they are more likely to deliver great CX. Factors that contribute to EX include a sense of purpose, meaningful work, growth opportunities, a positive environment, and equitable treatment.

A customer-centric culture that empowers employees to create opportunities to ask for and act on customer feedback will help companies optimize the CX. Common CX techniques include:

Customer Journey Mapping
CX Measurement
Digital CX
Customer Service
Customer Loyalty Programs

How can you design a CX experience that delights your customers?

The book "Empathy in Action: How to Deliver Great Customer Experiences At Scale" offers strategies to help you design CX experiences that delight your customers:

Use technology to personalize the customer experience
Train their employees to be empathetic
Create a culture of empathy

Design Thinking is a customer-centric development process that creates delightful products by emphasizing problem understanding, the solution context, and the evolution of that solution. Mechanisms include:

Problem definition
Personas
Journey maps
Benefits matrix
Feature workflows
Wireframes
Prototypes
Design feedback

Once you have empathy for your customers, you can design human-centered experiences that delight your customers.

How can your organization be more customer-centric?

An organization can be more customer-centric by focusing on creating positive experiences that delight the customer through its portfolio of products and services.

A customer-centric culture includes four CX competencies:

Purposeful Leadership: Operate consistently with a clear set of values
Compelling Brand Values: Deliver on brand promises to customers
Employee Engagement: Align employees with the organization's goals
Customer Connectedness: Infuse CX insights across the organization

Customer-centric organizations apply:

Empathic design
Whole product thinking
Market and user research for actionable insights
Deep understanding of customer's perception of value
Cost reduction
Revenue enhancement
Design thinking

How can you use customer insights to create personalized touchpoints for engagement and loyalty?

Companies use customer insights to create personalized touchpoints by aggregating this data in a Customer Data Platform (CDP), measuring key levers that influence engagement and loyalty via AI/ML models, and integrating an intelligent experience engine to personalize the experience.

An intelligent experience creates personalized touchpoints by:

Connecting data services, including CDP and models
Fulfilling requests according to the customer's context
Continuously testing

In order to successfully deliver these experiences, companies must:

Set up their teams to be customer-first
Infuse analytics across the business
Dynamically create and tag content for reuse
Develop products through agile with rapid experimentation & learning

What are effective AI solutions for customer escalation management?

Organizations should use AI for handling complex, urgent, or dissatisfied service requests to manage escalations using a ticket support system. This includes:

Automating the categorization process to save your team time and ensure that tickets are categorized and handled correctly.
Using AI to analyze ticket information and determine the urgency of each request.

There are a number of tools and technologies available to help teams automate and streamline your customer support prioritization process. For example, Zendesk is a multichannel customer support platform. Zendesk Guide helps teams scale by deflecting support tickets to relevant knowledge base articles using AI-powered tools to increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs.

What are the most effective ways to scale and launch new services?

Launching a new product vs. scaling an existing product requires different mindsets and organization models:

"Zero to One" (New):
Creating a new product requires that teams learn and validate, prioritize humility, and cultivate the creators. Specialties include user research, validation, iteration, and one-off activities.

"One to N" (Scale):
Scaling an existing product requires teams to focus, rally around the right metrics, encourage continuous learning, and celebrate cross-functional heroes. Specialties include operations and supply chain. Resources are predictable.

Organizational Models:

New: general managers own resources to nimbly launch new products.
Scale: Functions are centralized and separated to scale products.

How do you show senior management the value of customer experience?

An effective way to show senior management the value of CX is to demonstrate a return on investment by evaluating the lift in a key metric for your CX solution vs. the original state.

This approach helps companies quantify over time the benefits, ROI, and long-term value associated with improving the CX. Demonstrating a positive impact on existing CX investments will help convince senior management of the value of CX and get their buy-in for future CX initiatives.

How can you segment customers based on purchase history for better CX personalization?

There are many common ways to segment customers by purchase history.

Targeting based on historical data often depends on the customer journey stage:

Awareness: often segments customers by affinity (i.e. sports fans, travel buffs, technology enthusiasts) to target audiences by lifestyle, passion, or habits.
Consideration: targets audiences who are in-market for specific products or based on life events, such as graduating from college or getting married.
Action: uses targets similar audiences or remarkets, upsells, or cross-sells to customers
Loyalty: targets users based on their products, transactions, interactions, or modeled segments.

These are the common ways to target audiences throughout each stage of the customer journey.

How can you use Voice of the Customer to create innovative products?

The key to creating innovative products using VoC is to gather information across all customer touch points and use the insights so that technology teams can deliver timely solutions.

While continuously capturing data from surveys and all customer listening points (internal and external), it's important to deliver clear and actionable insight to the right stakeholders so that the technology team can take action.

Organizations need to operationalize customer requests using a trouble ticket system that technology fulfills based on predefined workflows. Any requests that fall outside service-level agreements (SLA) must be collected by product management for consideration in the product backlog for the development workstream.

How can you create a customer experience that is both digital and human?

Companies increasingly use predictive insights to create a CX that is both digital and human through proactive personalization.

Companies can customize the CX based on customer preferences and needs using a predictive CX platform, which consists of the following:

Customer Data Platform (CDP) - aggregate customer, financial, and operational data to analyze and understand the CX
AI/ML Models - measure key levers that influence customer satisfaction & business performance
Intelligent Experience Engine - connect data services, activate the personalized experience across channels, fulfill according to customer's context, and continuously test

Predictive platforms link CX to business value by using models to personalize the experience.

What are the best practices for CX design?

How a business delivers for its customers is just as important as - if not more important than - the products and services it provides.

Best practices to optimize the CX include:

Customer Journey Mapping: describe the customer's end-to-end experience with a product or service
CX Measurement: understand customers to focus on their needs
Digital CX: Facilitate interactions that are holistic, predictive, prioritized & focused on value
Customer Service: support customers before, during & after a purchase
Customer Loyalty Programs: reward customers for repeat business
Employee Experience (EX) Optimization: engaged & satisfied employees provide great service

Optimize the CX to attract and retain customers, while increasing sales.

What steps can you take to design a customer-centric product?

You can use Design Thinking and Working Backwards frameworks to design a customer-centric product.

Design Thinking is a customer-centric framework that creates desirable, profitable, and sustainable products. It emphasizes the problem to be solved, the context for solving it, and the long-term growth of the product.

Amazon's Working Backwards method guides the definition of every customer-centric product it develops by identifying the customer needs, business context, and target vision - and by answering key questions from customers/stakeholders.

Key artifacts include customer insights, problem statements, personas, empathy maps, customer journey maps, solution text, benefits matrix, workflows, wireframes, prototypes, and PR/FAQ.

How can you create a culture of customer experience excellence after a merger or acquisition?

Companies pursue organizational changes due to external disruptions or internal drivers, such as a merger or acquisition that necessitates cross-business integration, coordination, or de-duplication.

In order to achieve long-term success, the company must create a customer-centric culture through the following:

Purposeful leadership with clear and consistent values
Compelling brand values through customer fulfillment.
Employee engagement with the goals of the organization
Customer connectedness through CX monitoring and insights

Helpful mechanisms for creating a customer-centric culture include a voice of the customer program, closed-loop feedback, design personas, customer journey maps, design thinking, and CX measurement.

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