Who delivers the Experience

The CX’s customer(s)

Whoever ‘offers’ the experience to the customer is not the CX Team.

The sentence above is worth rereading.

Your customer relates to your company throughout the many touchpoints along the customer’s journey. Who are those responsible for the design or the operation of these touchpoints? I imagine those responsible for those touchpoints are almost every other team, except the CX team.

It is marketing creating e-mails, copy, blogging our even the sales force, responsible for taking care of the relationship of the customers before they have signed contract. It may also be the development and product teams, responsible for creating the best interactions between the customer and your tecnology. Anyway, I think you see my point :)

If this is reality in your company, your CX team must be organized as a team of internal consultants, responsible for monitoring this journey and proposing to the other teams many ways of improving the experience that they are delivering.

First of all

The first step so that your internal consultants team works is to understand that everything is about the customer’s journey. The journey is the most important document there is and the basis for any work related to the customer’s experience.

The secret is to involve every team since day one and, posteriorly, use the material in the internal communities. Only this way you’ll be able to create the sense of unity necessary to enable CX work. The document shows that everyone is working together on the same goal and everyone is a fundamental piece to ensure that, from start to finish, the customer gets the best experience possible.

As a first step I recommend you draw a map of the possible interactions the customer has with the brand. In brainstorming style, invite every team, you must try to note down literally every possible form a customer can interact. Following brainstorming rules, begin with every participant anonymously writing as many interactions as they are able to, make no judgements, don’t overthink, just jot down and have a maximum time set.

Don’t worry about chronologic order, use the moment so that every team can contribute the most with possible interactions. After the interaction map is ready, it will be the CX team’s job to draw the ideal journey, organizing every interaction in chronological order, creating a beautiful art and sharing it with the team.

Ideal journeys are those who make it the easiest for the customer to achieve success and have the best experience along the path. However, the ideal journey does not exist in practice, each client treads their own path, our objective here being to know the ideal scenario and continually approach reality and ideal.

Plurality of journeys

Each customer profile has their ideal journey, there are people who like to buy online and people who like to shop at the store, you must have in mind that there are many ideal journeys.

There are two benefits in drawing the customer’s journey from an interactions map created jointly between every team. The first one is that it shows to the team which path the customer should follow so that they can compare it with what the customer is currently doing.

The second is that a team’s role in improving the delivered experience is that much clearer.

These two benefits help a lot when the subject is transforming your CX team in a team of internal consultants.

The profession’s core

The essence of a CX team’s work is the continual monitoring of the experience the customer perceives, the mapping of the weak spots and distribution of this information to the teams in charge of delivering that part of the experience. This work is done by cross-referencing operational data with satisfaction surveys.

Only with this cross-referencing will it be possible to have a complete view of the customer’s satisfaction throughout the entire process and identifying the principal gaps, what interactions are those that today prevent the customer from leaving with a positive memory of your brand.

Adopting the posture of consultants, the CX team must aid the team responsible for the specific interaction in solving the issues pointed out by the customers.

Mapping operational data to survey satisfaction data is much easier when the other team understands the reason for providing such data. Afterwards, when the involvement of said team is needed to draw up improvement plans, they will be much more open, understanding where the demand is coming from and what the company has to lose should the company not receive the best experience.

CX is a cultural issue

We’ve previously mentioned and you too must have realized in your company that for there to be profound change in the manner with which people think and work customer experience a cultural change is pre-requisite. This happens because CX is a daily matter, delivered at every little interaction and whoever “delivers” these interactions are other teams.

The focus of these other teams is not the consideration of CX. Marketing teams must bring in leads, commercial teams must sell and so on and so forth. Your role is to remind them and help them achieve these same objectives while simultaneously delivering the best experience to the customers.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.