10 Customer Experience Mistakes
Published August 10, 2012 11:14 AM
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Updated August 10, 2012 1:22 PM
1 Min Read
1. Faking Executive Commitment
In order to sustain positive change in this area of your business, action and commitment from the top-down is key. Temkin provides eight questions to evaluate your commitment, here are a few: Do internal and external communications from the CEO/President regularly include discussions of customer experience? Do most of the executive team members have goals based on a clear set of customer experience objectives? Does the organization believe that the CEO/President would trade some short-term financial results for longer-term experience gains?
2. Over-Relying on Customer Surveys
Temkin says companies should abandon some of the outdated assumptions that drive current market research practicesfor example, the assumptions that data and insights provide value, that companies have limited access to information about customers, that there's no easy way to analyze unstructured data and that meaningful insights require deep analysis. To get over these common pitfalls, the group suggests, among other things, building a complete VoC (voice of the consumer) program that uses continuous feedback to design and deploy methods of improving operational processes.
3. Neglecting Experience Design
In a recent Temkin study, the group found that 74 percent of customer experience professionals think that customer experience design is important or critical for their company, but only 34 percent think that their firm is good at it.
4. Treating All Customers the Same
It is important for companies to break down consumers into customer segments, track their needs across the customer lifecycle, prioritize the segments and design segment-specific experiences after getting to know them qualitatively and listening to them for strategic insights.
5. Un-Engaging New Customers
In order to prevent customers from feeling buyers' remorse, companies need to focus on the part of the product lifecycle just after the salethe engagement phase. Companies should focus on and track customers' point of value, the point beyond the purchase where customers expect to get the value of their decision, in order to better-design the engagement phase.
Piotr Bizior
6. Ignoring Employees
While executive commitment is infectious and spurs the rest of the organization toward improvement, employees can make or break any efforts put forth. To avoid this, Temkin recommends including employee engagement in the planning process, use the knowledge front-line employees gain from working directly with customers and spread this knowledge throughout the organization.
7. Obsessing About Detractors
Customer feedback tends to overemphasize problems, according to Temkin, and executives then overreact to those problems. The book claims advocacy building is just as essential an activity as finding and fixing problemsand understanding dissatisfaction does not lead you to understanding loyalty, so a company's focus needs to be balanced between the two.
8. Forgetting to Celebrate Success
One of the ways focusing on understanding brand loyalty will help an organization is by reinforcing positives. It's important for companies to seek out points of success, acknowledge it and communicate it throughout the company. This helps prevent burn-out and remain enthusiastic.
9. Falling in Love with a Metric
Metrics are often helpful for highlighting strengths and weaknesses, but they cannot answer exactly why those strengths and weaknesses are there and how to affect the necessary changes to account for your company's unique goals. To effectively use metrics, companies should avoid setting metric goals that are too specific and also measure relevant attitudes and behaviors.
10. Mapping Internal Touchpoints
Map your customers journey to identify key touchpoints and focus improvement efforts on them. To do this, companies should remember that there will be differences across customer segments and that customers are likely viewing their journey differently than you. It is recommended that companies invest in a lasting framework that establishes a common understanding of customer needs while offering easier touchpoint analysis.