Three steps to tuning your customer experience

My last blog post presented four priorities companies should embrace as they work to build excellent customer experiences – for their clients and employees. It covered the importance of the real-world experience even as we all push digital boundaries, the need to perfect the last mile, the reality that customers are not the same the world over, and it emphasized that all those considerations apply equally to your employees.

Those four priorities build the foundation of an excellent customer experience (CX). Now, it is time to fine-tune that effort.

Seek to be nimble

Our clients have come a long way in terms of changing the technology landscape for many functions, such as inventory, HR, payroll, supply chain, process automation, etc. Those upgrades and transformations have been critical, but relatively little of that has been focused specifically on CX.

The one exception has been the move to the cloud, which has helped greatly and will do so more in the future. Why? Because it is one of the main ways companies are becoming more nimble.

Excellence in CX relies heavily on being agile and moving with the changing needs of customers. For example, shoppers assume without questioning it that they can return an item to a store that they purchased online, yet we see many retailers struggle with this process. They have not caught up to the experience expectations of their customers. The lack of this functionality is an example of the many roadblocks that exist to implementing new corporate systems and functions. The remedy for basic experience failures is to remove those success hurdles – to become nimble.

Pursue repeatable processes

Capgemini customers often come to us wanting to build big things, or they tell us “We want to be like Amazon.” I think of this as the big-shiny approach to system transformation. And I understand it; who doesn’t want to build the next big thing? However, I always encourage them to ask if they really want to invest the money required to be an Amazon or would it be better to spend on smaller and smarter implementations that make a few processes, or even one, work better.

The biggest CX benefits come from repeatable processes, the three or four new things that will deliver 80 or 90 percent of the functionality that will improve your CX. This is a variation on the 80/20 rule of productivity, and it works the same: concentrate on the small fundamentals that deliver the greatest value

Embrace the simple

One of the biggest challenges our customers face as they pursue CX transformation is change management – dealing with the disruptions and the benefits of the new systems and processes they just implemented.

Often, they underestimate the amount of work involved in change management and devote insufficient resources to it, but they also need to step back for a moment and ask why such extensive resources are required.

It is because the systems they build are too complex; the more complex the system, the more work it is to manage its integration. Any new system should be so straightforward from an experience perspective that very little change management is needed for your clients and employees to embrace the new approach. It is also valuable to continuously evaluate customer behavioral data while they interact with you, to improve the experience in the next iteration.

Customer experience is all about how pleased or annoyed your stakeholders become as they work with you, and how you can continuously tune your processes to ensure they are delighted. It is like listening to a competent guitarist play a blues song and then listening to Eric Clapton. Every company can deliver Clapton-level CX, it just takes some continued fine-tuning.

To learn more about Capgemini’s Digital Client Experience practice, contact Bibhakar Pandey, North America Digital Customer Experience Lead, at bibhakar.pandey@capgemini.com.

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Bibhakar Pandey

Expert in Customer Experience, Digital Transformation

A dynamic leader with more than 25 years of industry experience leading global, multi-cultural experience teams across North America, Europe, and APAC. Bibhakar has built a career on achieving year-on-year success in driving business-growth objectives and empowering organizations to address challenging business needs through the application of cloud, mobile, content, commerce, analytics, and social technologies. Built teams with lean and agile cultures and employed new and emerging digital technologies. Has been an enterprising leader, mentor, and coach, driving continuous performance excellence within his team. Has successfully incubated and scaled businesses including marketing services and interactive and digital engineering.