Since childhood, we have been taught that the customer is the king. But in today's world, the statement holds more weight than any other statement because everything has come down upon what will make the customer happy?

Customers have more options than ever before in today's digitally connected world. Providing a great customer experience is the only way to build true differentiation and ensure a profitable company. This entails first gaining a thorough understanding of your client, including what they do, think, and sound, before creating a personalized customer journey. As a result, every company's top priority is to manage the customer's experience during their journey.

Let's start by defining the customer experience.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience (CX) has received a lot of attention as a primary differentiator and catalyst for growth and sustainability in the consumer industry. But, what exactly is a good customer experience, and what makes it so?

As defined by Gartner, customer experience is "the customer's perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier's employees, systems, channels or products."

Forrester Research defines customer experience as: "How customers perceive their interactions with your company."

Perception and engagement are, without a doubt, the two most important aspects of a customer experience concept.

Simply put, Customer Experience (CX) refers to how a customer feels about a brand during their entire customer life cycle. Customers are more educated and linked than ever before in the new digital age. With the abundance of contact platforms, brands are relying more and more on technology to improve customer experience across all channels.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Journey: What's the Difference?

Consumer service is a critical component of the overall customer experience. Customer service is described as a company's assistance to customers who are having problems buying or using its goods or services. On the other hand, customer experience is a brand's cumulative understanding due to many experiences during the buyer's journey.

Let's look at the difference between customer service and customer experience now that we've addressed the fundamentals.

Customer service is a reactive service, which means it is enabled only when a dissatisfied customer contacts the company. The company will only intervene if anything goes wrong, not until it happens. On the other hand, customer experience is proactive: a company should improve the customer journey until it becomes dissatisfying.

Customer experience is a holistic approach that includes everyone in a company and extends beyond the customer service department. Unlike customer service, which focuses on a single particular encounter, customer experience considers the whole customer journey when establishing long-term relationships.

Brands must recognize that providing reliable, smooth customer support over time can affect the customer's view of the brand. Making customer service more accessible to consumers would result in a more robust customer experience and increased customer loyalty.

What is Customer Experience Management, and what does it entail?

Customer Experience Management (CEM or CXM) is how a company handles and organizes every customer interaction with a company during the buyer's journey. Customer experience management (CEM) is described by Gartner as "the practice of planning and reacting to customer experiences to meet or exceed customer expectations and, as a result, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy."

CEM aims to match consumer experiences with the customer's desired brand experience and meet their expectations to nurture and improve long-term customer relationships. In today's hyper-competitive marketplace, customer experience management is evolving as a crucial strategy for gaining a competitive edge.

More than half of businesses, according to Gartner, will refocus their investments in the future on customer support innovations. This also suggests that the rival is 50% or more likely to concentrate on customer service in the future, necessitating the customer experience management software implementation.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is built on three pillars:

Know Who Your Client Is

Brands that have a deep understanding of their customers can develop significant customer interactions. To offer customized experiences, businesses must pay more attention to consumer data to gain insights into their desires and preferences.

Create a CX strategy that is as effective as possible.

Following the identification of the consumer persona, it is critical to identify a customer engagement strategy that maps all applicable touch points during the customer journey to better prepare and coordinate how a brand can engage with consumers at each touchpoint.

Measure Customer Satisfaction

To assess the effectiveness of a CX plan, it is essential to evaluate customer satisfaction in real-time. A consumer satisfaction index can be built based on daily customer feedback, which will provide a direct measure of customer opinion of the brand.

Why Manage Customer Experience?

Although the principle of customer service can seem romantic or sentimental, anyone who dismisses it is woefully out of touch. In today's hyper-competitive, hyper-connected global marketplace, customer service has become a critical differentiator. Successful customer service management has a measurable market value.

Customer experience management will assist you in the following ways:

> Differentiated interactions can help to strengthen brand preference.

> Increase revenues by growing existing customer transactions and attracting new sales through word-of-mouth marketing.

> Customer satisfaction (and advocacy) can be improved by providing valuable and unforgettable customer experiences.

> Reduce customer turnover to save money.

House of Customer Experience

The CEM Paradigm is inspired by the House of Lean and incorporates Customer Service and the Continuous Improvement cycle into one framework.

The following are the key components:

 Foundation- The elements of the Foundation are CX Leadership & Alignment, CX Training & Awareness, Customer Experience Mapping, and Customer Experience Analytics.

Pillars- The elements of the Pillars are CX Strategy & Planning, CX Organization, CX Culture, CX Integration (with people, process and technology)

 Roof- The elements of the Roof are Customer Experience Design, Customer Experience Alignment & Optimization (CX Maturity), Customer Experience Excellence

The Cycle - CI & Communication- The elements of the Cycle are the Continuous Improvement loop and Communication cycle.

Let's understand each of these elements in detail.

THE FOUNDATION ELEMENTS

CX Leadership & Alignment

With leadership commitment and buy-in, customer experience transformation program implementation would be swift, efficient and highly effective.

Why is leadership buy-in essential?

The buy-in of your leadership team is critical to the success of your learning initiative. You must put in the effort if you want to engage with management at work. Request an in-person meeting or link on a social level after hours at a company function. Developing relationships with senior management will only help the team and results in the long run.

Getting out of your comfort zone and attending events where you can meet leaders would undoubtedly aid in the development of those connections. If it's an after-work happy hour, a team-building session, or even a group lunch, building relationships with leadership makes it easier to pitch your ideas and get them to be more open to improvement.

What does leadership buy-in mean?

Of course, you're ecstatic about your new training programme. Having leadership buy-in, however, necessitates more than excitement. It necessitates study, preparation, and listening.

- Alignment on objectives.

- Alignment with strategy.

- Access to the resources.

- Informed decision making.

- Establishing trust.

- Change management.

- Shared outcomes.

Now to get leadership buy-in:

CX Training and Awareness

Any change management programme should include preparation and understanding, and you should invest in training your staff to enhance the customer experience. It should focus on ensuring that there are sufficient resources to involve consumers and be efficiently trained.

According to Forrester, experience-driven companies invest heavily in people, processes, and technology. This involves learning and development programmes aimed at providing a superior customer experience. A good customer experience necessitates a close relationship that begins before the sale and continues through acquisition and your full collaboration.

Even if you think you and your customers get along swimmingly, keep an eye on their use habits, retention, and whether or not they make further purchases from you. A drop in any of these metrics could mean that internal CX training is needed. An agile L&D approach lets the company get the most out of a learning management system investment by improving the consistency of your customer experience and, most likely, your profitability.

CX Awareness and Training includes :

- Assists in maintaining awareness and promotes a sense of belonging.

- Employee participation is encouraged.

- Allows for the creation of a shared vision.

Customer Experience Mapping

To raise the bar on customer experience, businesses must have a holistic view of all customer experiences through the entire customer journey—this aids in identifying and focusing on crucial moments of reality for consumers and exposing CX holes. To achieve this, customer experience mapping is needed.

Experience with Customers (CX) The strategic method of visually plotting and setting out all customer experiences, events, and engagements during a customer experience with a brand is known as mapping. It basically covers everything, from the first point of contact to the last interaction, and it includes every single touchpoint. The intelligent customer experience tool assists in the mapping of the customer journey by providing an interactive customer journey map that captures key moments.

Customer path maps are important, according to Gartner, because they provide a roadmap for consensus and action among customer experience leaders. By organizing diverse participation, developing valuable customer knowledge, and building personas that drive required customer attention, customer journey maps lay the groundwork for effective journey mapping initiatives.

Customer Experience Mapping is a process that is

- Mapped from the customer perspective

- Describing what happens at each stage of the interaction,

- What touchpoints are involved,

- What obstacles and barriers they may encounter

 Read Features of Customer Experience Mapping

Customer Experience Analytics

Consumer experience analytics is the compilation and analysis of customer data to understand consumers' perspectives, pain points, and interactions with a product or service.

Quality customer experience analytics offers valuable insights that enable brands to make data-driven, intelligent decisions, potentially enhancing their customers' shopping, care, and service experiences. Furthermore, the data gathered will aid in the development of optimized marketing campaigns, Go-To-Market strategies, product creation, and more.

Customer satisfaction, revenue, and profits also increase as a result of enhanced customer service. As a result, determining the appropriate metrics for tracking and analyzing customer experience is critical.

PILLAR ELEMENTS

CX Strategy & Planning – 1st Enabler

If you don't have a solid customer service plan in place, the brand will become intangible, and consumers will be turned off by their inability to communicate with it.

The main elements of a CEM strategy are as follows:

Customer Experience - The mechanism by which a company designs and changes the customer experience from the first conversation to the final purchase or operation in collaboration with customers is referred to as customer experience.

Services- When a company participates in the purchase or leasing of goods and services are referred to as service. The distribution of a commodity is one of them. For example, the distribution of a product or service, the purchasing or leasing of goods and services and help enable a company to offer a service to customers.

Values: Values include the ones that the company provides to its customers. This involves service with a favourable result that represents the service's efficiency.

CX Organization - 2nd Enabler

Without the proper CX organization and operating model and the embedding of customer-centricity in the CX community and the organization's DNA, a customer service approach cannot be implemented effectively.

It is possible to incorporate CX Organization by having:

- Dedicated function on CX with roles such as Customer Experience Officer

- Customer experience responsibilities part of each job role

- Hybrid of a dedicated function that coordinates CX activities across all other functions

CX Culture and Engagement- 3rd Enabler

Customer experience culture and employee engagement are essential for a CX Transformation programme to succeed, and they necessitate a collaborative effort from all staff, including C-level executives. They should work together to recognize, define, create, and conform to values, standards, and cultural traits that will enable them to achieve customer-centricity from the outside and the inside out.

Ways to build a customer-centric culture are:

●      Appoint customer-centric leaders and find opportunities to pair them with customer-centric teammates.

●      Cultivate a culture of empathy and positive thinking.

●      Encourage team members to brainstorm customer-centric solutions, build customer journeys, and go the extra mile to delight - customers.

●      Highlight a great customer experience. Customers are more than happy to share their experiences with others, and as a company, you'll more readily get customer feedback.

●      Hold customer-centric team gatherings regularly, where you can learn from each other and focus on customer insights.

Without a positive employee experience and commitment, establishing a customer experience culture is impossible. A customer-centric culture will inevitably lead to increased revenue, and it has the potential to propel your business to new heights.

CX Integration - 4th Enabler

CX Strategy and Planning, CX Organization, and CX Culture and Engagement are essential elements, but they're not enough. Only when the above enablers are combined with individuals, operation, and technology can the customer experience be transformed. When customer-centric processes and resources support customers, they are the ones that build better customer interactions.

CX Integration requires:

●      Customer experience-centric technology.

●      A single view of the customer.

●      Customer analytics or business intelligence (BI) capability.

●      A set of consistent customer experience standards to be used for all system and process design initiatives.

ROOF ELEMENTS

Customer Experience Design

CX design is often confused with user experience (UX) design. While all are concerned with the overall experience of using a product or service, CX design adds another dimension to the equation. When a company focuses on CX design, it usually wants to improve the user experience when engaging with the company.

From initial knowledge and study to conversion and retention, this experience is a journey of many touchpoints. As the design team works on CX design, you must refine those touchpoints so that consumers have a positive impression of the brand and the brand stands out as customer-centric.

As a result, businesses must prioritize promotional strategies, customer support, continuity and adopt a customer-centric mindset. Even if a company has a superior product, it will struggle if it does not hit consumers at all stages of their interactions.

Customer Experience Alignment And Optimization

The Customer Experience (CX) company does not begin and end with Customer Support. It pervades an organisation, affecting every department, team, and employee, and has an effect on the overall customer experience your brand provides.

Due to rising customer demands, disjointed organisational processes, and obsolete legacy technologies, businesses seeking to provide an exceptional customer experience face unprecedented challenges.

It's critical to create a unified plan across all departments in the enterprise to affect customer engagement results directly or indirectly if you want to excel at customer experience optimization. This initiative can be significantly simplified by using a single platform approach.

Customer experience alignment and optimization is an ongoing process moving upon customer experience maturity.

This process requires:

●      Aligning strategy, organization, culture and technology to the customer's journey and jobs to be done.

●      Identify Moments of Truth and optimize the customer's journey.

●      Prioritize underperforming journeys for investment.

●      Continuously fine-tune the customer's journey.

●      Orchestrate all resources to achieve customer-centricity.

THE CYCLE ELEMENTS

Continuous Improvement (CI) Loop

Continuous improvement, also known as continuous improvement, is the method of making gradual and breakthrough changes to goods, facilities, and processes over time. These initiatives will aim for "continuous" progress or "breakthrough" improvement all at once.

The continuous improvement loop is the actual glue that binds all elements of the CEM framework and enables moving up on the CX Maturity stages.

The CI loop consists of activities of:

- Understand the customer.

- Map the current state of the customer experience.

- Analyze gaps in the current customer experience.

- Ideate and identify solutions to element gaps

- Design the future state of the customer experience.

- Implement CX improvement projects.

- Don't stop and continue the ongoing improvement in the customer experience and achieve a higher level of CX.

Communication Cycle

A communication cycle is a mechanism in which one person sends messages or shares ideas and knowledge with another person or a group of people. The communication process describes how knowledge, messages, ideas, or thoughts are conveyed and understood.

Any management or change plan must prioritize communication. Sending emails, announcements, newsletters, and meeting minutes aren't the only ways to communicate. When followed through all aspects of the CEM system, communication management will ensure the efficient execution of a CX transformation programme.

Roadmap to Implement CX Transformation Initiative

he CEM framework or House of CX also provides a roadmap to implement the customer experience initiatives.

The implementation steps are:

Step 0: Get the leadership buy-in on the CX program.

Step 1: Conduct training and awareness on the CX program.

Step 2: Manage the current customer experience or customer journey.

Step 3: Baseline the current performance and perform the gap analysis.

Step 4: Design the future customer experience.

Step 5: Align and continuously optimize the customer experience and Achieve Customer Experience Excellence.

Conclusion

As a result of increased competition, changing customer behaviour, and rapid technological adoption, the consumer business industry is rapidly evolving. The fundamental strategy for businesses is to improve the digital customer experience in all consumer sectors. One of the major influences on how customers engage with brands through multiple channels at their leisure is digital transformation. One major influence on how customers engage with brands across multiple channels at their leisure while demanding consistency across interactions is digital transformation.