The Secret behind Creating a Successful Customer Experience Operating Model

Delivering an exceptional customer experience is the top priority of brands across various industries. Yet, many still fail to integrate the elements that will help them achieve it.

Today’s marketing landscape is witnessing the evolution of customer experience at an unprecedented pace. With brands having no choice but to rely on digital tools to sustain their business operations, delivering an exceptional customer experience has become a top priority for not only CX leaders but also their counterparts. But adopting CX-oriented goals doesn’t always align with the traditional goals such as buy-cycle orientation, reach as well as brand awareness.

Though the two worlds shouldn’t disrupt each other’s operations, many brands, as per experts, have experienced resistance while pursuing the new goals with the existing ones. The collision between these two can greatly impact an organization’s ability to achieve its long-term goals. Hence, it is critical that brands should have a framework or operating model that can reduce the complexity of customer experience and enable them to focus on factors that will retain and strengthen customer loyalty.

Rethinking about “Who, When, What, and How”

Before starting to develop their customer experience framework, brands should rethink and reevaluate their “Who, When, What, and How” model. These factors can help brands to understand and effectively target their desired customers. By understanding ‘Who’ their customers are, brands will have clear definitions of persona. Also, they should use that information to spread it across the organization to avoid common persona mistakes.

Also Read: Insights Take Center Stage in Customer Experience

With ‘What’ and ‘When’ businesses can get the key insights for understanding where the customers have the most interaction with the brands in the entire lifecycle. They can enable brands to understand their customers’ needs, goals as well as expectations. ‘How’ allows brands to dig into details of systems, data, and processes.

Outlining Goals

After establishing the ‘Who, When, What and How’ framework, brands should focus on outlining goals. They should start the process at the top, meaning, they should put efforts for understanding exactly what the leadership team in the organization considers success. This will enable the marketing leaders to understand how their priorities align with their broader organizational goals and what CX metrics they need to concentrate on to support them.

Identifying the Customer Experience Data

In this step, the brands should focus on collecting the data from sources such as customer data, customer voice as well as customer and competitive insights.

These four elements enable brands to measure their progress against goals, identify problems and opportunities, better personalize their experiences, refine their journey maps and compare the experiences against their competitors.

Also Read: Think Big, Start Small – Top Strategies for Delivering Exceptional Customer Experiences

Leveraging Insights for making informed decisions

To deliver a great experience, brands must emphasize the involvement of all stakeholders in the process of persona and journey mapping. Instead of relying on CMOs for everything involved in the customer experience model, brands should invest in early buy-in from a broader set of team members that will help them to influence the customer journey and experience.

After having all the essential elements in place, the best way for brands to achieve sustaining value is by continuous improvement. They should close the loop by embedding customer feedback in the native processes, and ultimately, into the front line of customer experience in real-time.