Connor BrookeCustomer experience management is the blueprint to effectively implementing a customer service action plan.
Experience management is the organization of all of your service actions, touchpoints, and components that will build your exceptional customer experience. Whether it’s a story you want to tell, an emotion you want to create, or an action you want your customer to take, customer experience is the strategy to making sure that your desired customer outcome takes place.
Too often, however, we fail to differentiate between “customer experience” and “customer service”. They are indeed two different things.
Customer service is the raw materials, the building blocks of your service experience.
It’s the “Hello’s”, “My pleasure’s”, and other verbiage, actions, behaviors, and atmosphere that contributes to the overall plan.
Just as a pile of nails, wood, and carpeting doesn’t make a home, in customer service, words, actions, and behaviors have to be organized around a plan in order to work together to create a memorable, exceptional customer experiences.
Successful customer experience design begins with the end in mind.
Establish what you want to achieve. What actions do you want your customers to take after experiencing what you offer? What feeling or emotion do you want to invoke with your customers?
Then, work backwards and determine the right words, actions, behaviors, and atmosphere that will have the greatest chance to accomplish that desired outcome.
Step backwards again and identify the structure that will be required in order to create a team of experts that can deliver these customer experience actions.
Step backwards again and look at the people you enlist in your mission and ensure that they will fit, commit, and excel in the program.
Aligning these components and understanding their role in helping your implement your unique customer experience is critical to creating the type of experience programs that develop customer loyalty and ensures that your organization consistently delivers an exceptional customer experience.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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It is the Customer Service that defines the Customer Experiences; this is inevitable, simple cause and effect. the challenge comes to meet and exceed the expectations, the superlative performance sets the stage for the next. they are complementary and to deem other is short sighted.
Excellent point, Flavio! So often we hear that customer service is about treating the customer in the manner that we would like to be treated, when in fact, it should be “Treat the customer as s/he would like to be treated.” Your article illustrates this — How does the customer wish to be treated/want to receive from this transaction? From there, step backwards, and figure out what and who is needed to make that happen. Excellent!
That’s right Jodi. Too often we find ourselves taking over for the customer in terms of deciding what is needed.
We have to remember that the customer is the expert in the need, we are the experts in how to meet that need.
I finally found a group on linkedin that I share a deep passion for. The “client experience”. More important to me personally, is the need for CEO’s to recognize the critical need to improve overall profitability with this concept. Too often, front line CRM’s are not valued as they should be. Sales, management are quick to dismiss the role as a necessary but subservient role. My success is solely because of my passion for the customer ( I prefer client). Listening skills resulted in more business. Asking the right question and treating them like an equal, resulted in more business. My dream career position is to be asked to train teams for companies to improve their client’s “EXPERIENCE”. What truly makes your company different from your competition? Do you know that is what your client’s realllly want?