My friend told me a story about his experience with a large bank. He logged in to their self-service to update his profile data. He just needed to change his postal address. Two weeks later this company sent him a new bank card by post to his old address. My friend was disappointed, though luckily he still got his card from his old place. This is just one example how the customer experience is ruined because of non-existing or poor customer experience strategy.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience is absolutely every interaction with a company. It consists all kinds of customer contacts. For example Google search, visiting self-service, getting a greeting card for a birthday, a shipment from the post office, or using warranty services.
Nowadays, the trends have definitely shifted towards customers and their power to help or reject companies. Therefore, an effective customer experience has skyrocketed and become ever more important. What it means is that any bad experience can quickly scale into a problem seen at the highest levels of your company. Or vice versa, if a company does not value their customers’ experiences, they might face serious risks in operating at all.
Different perspectives from either end
It makes a lot of sense that the customer experience has become so important. Think about yourself as a customer. In order to be an advocate for a brand, you expect quick, consistent, contextual, and personalized interactions. You want to feel good and to be sure that the company you interacted with, understood you. It’s as simple as that, at least from your point of view.
Now think about from the company’s point of view and again look at the story with my friend. It showed that the company had designed a feature – changing personal information in self-service. They made it possible, but never thought it through. As the change made by the customer did not have an effect when it needed to, it was obvious this process was not tested.
Service design is essential to every customer-centric company. It holds the course. It makes you think through customer’s journey, map it, and deliver it through the journeys of actual personas. Every new feature/ functionality should go through steps to design, process, and test it to ensure maximum value for the customer. Why? Because customer enjoys flawlessly designed services when he/she has a feeling that everything is thought through.
This is what we’re thriving for – helping companies change their services for their customers. Read about our conversation analytics tool that helps companies use information from their customer service channels to design their customer’s experience.
