How to Improve Customer Experience

Gerhardt Schwandtner: Hi my name is Gerhard Schwandtner and welcome to Selling Power TV. Today we have the pleasure of meeting with Lior Arussy, who is the author of a wonderful book called Customer Experience Strategy. Welcome Lior. Lior Arussy: Thank you very much for having me Gerhard. Gerhardt Schwandtner: So you have built an entire company around the theme customer experience management? Lior Arussy: In fact. In fact the interesting thing is when we started, we started with a question, why companies and customers do not get along as they should be? Why don’t companies reap the loyalty and customers feel satisfied? By not having any bias, as we saw with these questions started to research best practices, failing points, potholes, whatever you want in terms of corporate strategy and then we build a complete methodology to help companies really move from a product centricity to a customer centricity. Gerhardt Schwandtner: Can you describe the customer journey in a typical company? Lior Arussy: Sure. The customer usually starts with the exciting touch points so we’ll put some powerful marketing campaign in front of them, if you mean advertising it could be on the web, it can be in the form of events. These are the parts that we delight customers, dazzle them with the promise. This is what we call the promise element of the experience and companies are doing a phenomenal job. Sales people also, very involved, promising, promising, promising. That’s the first part of the journey. Then comes the signing the agreement. That’s when the experience goes from here to -- going somewhere over here, the legal terminology, all these other things all of a sudden starting to create anxiety among customers. Now comes delivery. You get the product, your service is being implemented and so on and so forth and that’s when you start running into frictions. But I understood differently, you know, doing the promise, it sounded differently or it fell differently and that’s when you are very inconsistent and fluctuating your experience on the journey. So we start very high then legal kind of took us into a dive then the service and delivery are kind of like up and down, depends on the understanding in doing the promise stage, then comes problem resolution. Everybody run into problems and that’s where we need to shine and that’s the true moment of truth, when customers who are serious about relationship will be generous during that moment and customers who are very transactional in nature will be very cheap and very difficult during that moment. After that comes invoicing, cross sale, up sale, loyalty programs. But the journey is kind of like fluctuating, depends on who is delivering and how much they are aligned with the customer expectations. Companies need to map touch points and assess how well they’re doing on each touch point. How is that done? So, the first thing that we need to do is really -- I mean you touch upon the journey. Companies today are organized and structured around silos. So sales does what sales does and marketing does what marketing does and the web team is doing what they do. And this is where the problem starts because each one of them has a fragmented view of what the customer really wants. And the first thing we need to do is unify everyone, it says, “Don’t operate in isolation but really look at the complete journey because a lot of things happen in between the silos.” And the way we do that is we first start with a major workshop where we put on the wall the complete journey, what this customer is asking and how do we respond. You start with, customer would like to have a demo. Well, these are the steps that we follow, these are the documents that are taking place, these are the potential exceptions that they might have, these are the channels that they want to do. So you met that request. And then you move from that request to the next request. You know I need a quote, I need an order, something like that. And you want to look at the complete journey and you need to map the journey especially against who is the customer because here is the interesting thing, when you deal with consumers, the same person who pays is usually the same person who buys. What if you deal with a business to business relationship? The purchasing department might be issuing another fee but the users might be different, the VP who approves the deal is different and you need to make sure that you distinctly understand who that customer is that you are mapping that journey. The journey mapping which takes into account as I mentioned the processes, the documents, the way we communicate, the channels, and then we look at where the cracks are, where are the pain points, where the customers are complaining because it doesn’t work for them? This is where we need to be also be very careful. Not every touch point is a delighter. Sometimes the customer says, “Just make it work,” you know invoices. I’m not looking for excitement there, you know unless you want to waive the dollar amount and then I’ll be very delighted if I get a zero dollar invoice but that’s not the point. The point is, fix the process, make sure it’s accurate, if we have a dispute, have it processed to address them very quickly, versus for example when you implement the project, you know this is where I expect to see generosity, commitment, delight and so on and so forth. So, after doing the journey, you need to put importance in place as to which touch points are really creating loyalty for me and which touch points are only going to erode loyalty if they don’t do it but they are not necessarily going to create loyalty. Gerhardt Schwandtner: Right. Lior Arussy: So the moment you got the journey mapped, owners, processes, communication exceptions, channels, then you look at where do I start and you need to focus first on loyalty creators as opposed to loyalty eroders. Gerhardt Schwandtner: Right. Well thank you Lior. We’re going to continue our conversation with Lior Arussy tomorrow where we talk about a customer case study, complete transformation. Don’t miss it.