Reanimating the Customer Experience

Think about the best film or show you recently watched. It was likely immersive and refreshing in an entertainment era where quality production has become an afterthought. Conversely, when was the last time you stopped watching a film or show because the characters were grossly unbelievable or the plot was incongruous?

Customer experience in business succeeds or fails for similar reasons that movie productions succeed or fail. Customers seek an immersive experience orchestrated by authentic people that consistently delivers. Do this well and you will build long-lasting, predictable customer relationships. Do this poorly and the discontinuity of an unpredictable experience will churn customers out of your portfolio.

Continuing the same analogy, qualifying customer context is exactly what the online streaming services do with the entertainment they present to us. Their algorithms have created the context of what we expect to see and enjoy. What exactly is customer context? It is a clear understanding of customer expectations and characteristics utilized by your customer-facing workforce to meet them at every point of need.

To reanimate the customer experience let us evaluate two types of context: “New” customer context and “Nurtured” customer context.

New Customer Context

New customer context focuses on prospects who are evaluating your company and value proposition in an effort to determine if they want to partner. This includes the awareness, evaluation and early engagement stages of the buying process. In this customer experience economy, buyers have moved away from price and product as the primary brand differentiator. The differentiator is now the depth and authenticity of the customer experience. 

How then can you arrive at this depth of understanding about prospective customers and the experience they expect? You must objectively know your capabilities as well as your limits. Socrates scribed as one of his ancient axioms, “Know thyself.” If you have an objective understanding of your current operating reality, then you have the framework within which you can consistently deliver value. 

Here are four steps to building context in new prospective customer relationships:

1. Qualify customer needs. “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Too many sales teams are ill-equipped and approach the market with a transactional mindset. Sales teams are trained only on products, and they spend exorbitant amounts of time and effort looking for a place for the product to fit. Rather, ensure your team is actively seeking to understand customer challenges and devising solutions. The greatest sales people and high performance teams are genuine problem solvers. 
2. Qualify customer fit. Is the opportunity your team is pursuing worth winning? There are deals that look magnificent on the surface but will sap resources and create an imbalance in your business delivery system that negatively affects your core business. Live within your operating reality and strategic growth plan.
3. Qualify your value. Once you clearly understand customer challenges, pivot to align measurable value with specific customer needs. Value drivers that are within your operating reality should be correlated with previous successes. Demonstrating sustainable, repeatable success that have been delivered for other customers will cement your value in the critical closing stages of the sales cycle.
4. Qualify expectations and outcomes.  Work in partnership with your prospects to define their expectations, and correlate them to the value of the ultimate outcome. Taking time to translate customer expectations into an agreed-upon definition of success will build the underpinnings of a partnership that will flourish over time.

Nurtured Customer Context

Nurtured customer context is where promises made must become promises kept. This is the process of ensuring that the ascribed value your customers accepted during evaluation is proven in execution. 

Here are four steps to nurturing the customer experience promised to your customers:

1. Ensure continuity across the entire customer experience. It is imperative that you have mapped out the journey and touchpoints that the customer experiences every day in their interactions with your team. In doing so, you can examine each interaction point and establish internal communication standards that ensure the continuity of experience. Continuity dictates that anyone in the workforce knows how to address issues. While this seems like common sense to most, the reality in execution is woefully lacking. A well trained, well-informed team with a bias for action will ensure continuity across the entire customer experience.
2. Ensure speed and accuracy of information. The premiere customer experience is where relevant information is pushed to the customer in a timely fashion. Deliver on each stage of your promises by bridging expectations to performance realities with fast and accurate updates. For large projects, these can be milestone driven updates, regularly scheduled updates or a more formal performance review process. For transactional business, this means digital disbursement of critical job information. Online dashboards can be updated in real time and a host of notifications can be pushed to customers' mobile phones or emails. Customers expect seamless access to accurate information as an ante just to be in the game. 
3. Ensure convenience and reduced effort. Combining continuity across all touchpoints with speedy and accurate information will transform the customer experience into one of convenience and little effort on the part of customers. Train your team to think multiple steps ahead of your customers and anticipate their needs. An effortless relationship, where your team is proactively providing everything the customer needs, is a nurtured, long-lasting relationship.
4. Ensure measurable and repeatable value. Without a measure for success, you expose your customer relationship to the risk of subjectivity and whim. Change is inevitable at your customer's place of business. While relationships will come and go, quantifiable performance will stand against the winds of change. No matter the change endured, a disciplined, measurable and repeatable process to track results and continuously prove your worth will nurture an enviable customer lifetime value for your company.

Keep a pulse on changing customer preferences and expectations. These changes will require regular investment in innovation and people development in order to create an ever-improving customer experience and journey.  Immerse your customers in an experience that has a predictable outcome every time. While it may not earn you an Academy Award, it will earn you brand loyalists and fans clamoring to see what comes next.