10 Characteristics of Customer Experience

• The best understood tenets of CEM (top half of graph below) reflect aspects of customer perception measurement.
• The lesser known tenets describe the customer's high degree of control in characterizing customer experience, and the need for organizations to maintain insatiable curiosity and uncanny adaptability for delivering superior customer experiences.




Here are the ten ways that customer experience is unique from customer satisfaction:

• 1. Perspective: customer experience is defined entirely by the customer, not the solution provider.
• 2. Preventive: customer experience gravitates toward the easiest and nicest methods to get and use solutions that address customers' needs.
• 3. Duration: customer experience encompasses the point from which customers become aware they have a need until they say that need is extinct.
• 4. Dynamic: customer experience evolves with the customer's context — the purpose and circumstances of their need, and overall experience reference points.
• 5. Choice: customer experience is built on trust and mutual respect for variety; share of budget is more important than loyalty.
• 6. Multi-faceted: customer experience is measured by functional and emotional (social and personal) judgments related to the customers' expectations.
• 7. Operational: customer experience is shaped by all the contributors to an organization's processes, policies and culture, in addition to the physical product or service associated with the customer's need.
• 8. Integrative: customer experience is impacted by the degree of alignment among departments, technologies, channels, etc.
• 9. Anticipatory: customer experience is ongoing, where the present and future are equally or more important than the past.
• 10. Transparent: customer experience sees through the solution provider's motives and intentions, and favors genuine sincerity for the customer's well-being.



Customer Experience Management Success Factors

CEM has evolved to a more mature, customer centric field with roots in total quality management and customer satisfaction, and metamorphosis through customer loyalty, customer relationship management (CRM), experiential marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing. CEM encompasses all of the above, with an operational emphasis on enterprise-wide engagement for alignment of what you do and your customer's priorities.

How do you identify those priorities? Best practices in customer sentiment monitoring differentiate between enablers of customer experience (the firm's solution) and customers' desired outcomes, focusing feedback mechanisms on the customer's world rather than the company's world.

If your organization has become disillusioned with customer-focus initiatives, rate your historical use of these essential tools for initiative momentum:
• Executive sponsorship
• Formal business process for CEM
• Employee empowerment & engagement
• Organizational learning (knowledge management)
• Quality tools (Pareto, fishbone, etc.)
• Systems thinking
• Change management
• Internal branding
• Recognition and awards
• Incentive pay
• Balanced scorecards
• Relationship skills training
• Benchmarking

Customer Experience Management Best-Practice Examples:
Here are some great things underway in leading companies:
• Conduct a monthly customer interview with live streaming to all employees, including Q&A and a follow-on action workshop. — Sungard Energy & Commodities.
• Visit customers' homes/businesses to observe how they're using the product/service, including work-arounds and integrations with other products/services — CenturyLink and Maersk Line.
• Correlate customer survey ratings with revenue and customer relationship duration, to prioritize funding decisions for product and business development — Citrix.
• Set aside a day for every executive (300+ !) to shadow a front-line employee, and then champion ways to help put customers first throughout the entire company — TELUS.
• Follow-up with every dissatisfied customer survey respondent to apologize and find out what could be done to improve the situation — Virgin Mobile and Intuit.
• Center internal data not on financials, but on customers, with an eye toward growing customer value — Cisco.
• Listen to customers in-depth to understand their pressures as a basis for negotiating more realistic service level agreements that energize front-line employees and foster customer delight — NCR.

As the dynamics in the customer's world are constantly evolving, an insatiable curiosity about customers is a key to success. Company-wide alignment with customers prevents waste (improves profit) and prevents customer hassles (improves organic revenue growth).

ClearAction has personal experience implementing these best practices in large, fast-paced organizations that emphasized acheiving strong business results. Let us share practical methodologies and solutions to aid you in your customer experience management journey.