Optimizing Your Customer Experience

Your customers are telling you what they want. Are you listening?

Data warehouses, data lakes, big data, dark data, operational data, real-time data, structured data, unstructured data, semi-structured data; data, data everywhere. The proliferation of customer data has been consistent over the last several years, yet most companies still don’t have a good way to harness it to improve their employee and business processes to enhance their customer experience. 

Even with the abundance of data, a survey of 450 senior marketing executives found that 40% say insufficient data is an obstacle to developing and managing customer experience strategies. The next largest obstacle at 38% is siloed organization structure, largely because many of the customer data points are stored in siloed business units, with no cross-functional use. Siloed business units in and of themselves also hamper a seamless, cohesive experience for customers, as some are measured using customer touchpoint data, while others are scored only on productivity measures.

Along the customer journey, many of the data points collected are for specific business units, housed and utilized by those units, but not looked at for a holistic view of the customer as they progress. Each business unit optimizes their specific function, and companies can see great gains by optimizing their existing processes. Combining and managing these data insights in determining the customer progression, fault points, and potential solutions across and between the business units can drive holistic customer experience optimization strategies, or even business transformation. While many companies pursue customer experience improvements because it is absolutely the right thing to do, many companies are seeing that

it’s also profitable. A moderate increase in Customer Experience generates an average revenue increase of $775 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues, driven mostly by retained sales, additional sales, and word of mouth referrals. So customer experience investments are a profitable endeavor as well.

Existing siloes within organizational structures can produce disjointed experiences, so the challenge is in leveraging the disparate data points to create connectivity between the business units. Using data to view it as the customer migrates through the touch points gives you the insight on which processes and procedures need to be bound together to close the gaps. They also foster communication between departments to drive the connectivity your customers expect. 

So how do you start? Most companies likely have a wealth of existing customer information but are likely only categorizing data from their customer service department as customer experience touch points. Integrating data from other business units provides a more cohesive view of the customer and enables you to start having those cross-functional conversations based on data, not anecdotal observations. Review the customer life cycle from the outside-in approach, across all of your business units, with a focus on the customer transition points between them:

• Are you duplicating efforts across business units that may be confusing customers?
• If customers fall out of the process sequence is it easy to put them back in where they left?
• Do you have processes that actually conflict with one another?

Your customers want to be viewed as an individual as they journey through the different interactions with your company. They expect to be able to seamlessly transition between your business units, and those units know where they’ve already traveled, what was done, and what they want. Connecting the data points is the start. Business unit cohesiveness is the goal.

It is definitely more than just data, it’s:

• People – employees and customers
• Processes – what you let employees do and block them from doing
• Technology – how you equip employees to satisfy customer needs, and customers to self-help

In the current quarantined environment, and likely even after restrictions start to be lifted, many employees are working remotely, and the technology needs to continue may need to be augmented. Managing productivity will likely require more digital apparatus to keep productivity constant with pre-quarantine levels. And while many studies have shown that productivity has actually increased with more work-from-home deployments, in the CNBC Technology Executive Council survey for Q2 2020, 34% of employees surveyed said the their job had, “Gotten somewhat harder,” and 20% said their job had, “Gotten much harder.” So technology supporting employee efforts, not just to manage productivity, will also need to be reviewed, but it’s important to ensure that you review all three (people, processes, technology) in tandem, and not just invest in the newest technology promising results. How you introduce new technologies to your employees is at least as important as the technology itself.

So again, where do you start? Evaluating and connecting your data points is step one. There’s a quote by Jonathan Raymond, “you can’t know what you don’t know.” Building your data view from the customer view is the start, with a keen eye on employee satisfaction gauges as they are the catalyst for success with your customer interactions.

It provides the building blocks to map out the changes your customers want and your business needs. You can then start to craft how your employees, processes, and technology support these needs, the refinements or changes that are needed, and make decisions on which to prioritize for deployment.

For feedback and questions:

- Jason Biske @ linkedin.com/in/jason-biske

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Blackstone & Cullen delivers a sustainable competitive advantage to its clients by transforming their business, digital and human capital through its proprietary process USX®, The Ultimate Solution Experience.

If you have a near-impossible problem, let’s chat. Jason Biske 404-946-8801