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Why has CX become such a fundamental component of brand success?

While certain brands that have understood the power of the customer experience for many years and have continued to refine their CX delivery in new and profitable ways, the notion that all organizations need to consider the experience that they provide to their customers as a competitive driver has really only become something of note over the last decade. One primary reason for this is due to the great leaps and continuous improvements that these CX leaders make to their customer experiences which continue to raise customer expectations.

Brands like Amazon, Apple, and even Uber Eats have provided customers with the ability to engage in experiences that are designed around their specific needs and wants- and they like it. As expectations around experiences evolve those brands that are unable to deliver will undoubtedly lose the affection of their customers. This reality creates the need for organizations in all sectors and industries and of all sizes to ask themselves what they are doing to both understand what their customers want and need and what steps are they taking to be able to evolve their experiences to deliver on those expectations.

The experience that a customer has with your brand, positive or negative, can have a significant impact on your organization. Several years ago, I wrote a column about my experience at Walt Disney World- a trip that I was not looking forward to. To my great surprise, the experience that Disney created at every touchpoint that I had with their brand completely won me over. Since this experience and my reflection on it, I find myself continuously taking mental notes of the way in which my experiences with other brands live up to my expectations (or fail to do so).

A study published in 2018 by Forrester Research compared the stock prices of a sample of CX leaders and laggards to the S&P 500 and found that leaders significantly outperformed both laggards as well as the S&P. The message is clear, those organizations that are better positioned to meet and exceed the experience expectations of their customers in a consistent and repeatable way and those that are best able to adapt to the changing needs of their customers are those who will continue to outperform the competition.

The performance benefits of improving CX make it hard to ignore. From increasing customer engagement, trust, and likeliness to forgive a brand for making a mistake, to improving voluntary compliance to requests, CX has been shown to make the delivery of services more cost-effective. Oftentimes, in fact, the savings gained by improving CX delivery can make the financial arguments against the investment moot. Many organizations that embark on improving their CX delivery find that the effort becomes, in effect, a “self-funding” activity where the savings they see from improving CX delivery outweigh the investments to improve.

Who is your customer?

For many, day-to-day contact with end-user customers is rare. If this is the case for you, it doesn’t mean that CX is not important. Support, or back office, personnel may find themselves serving multiple customers though they may be internal customers. The same principles that serve organizations well when enhancing the end-user customer experience can be applied internally to your internal customers to help facilitate your interactions.

I asked David Hicks, CEO of CX advisory firm TribeCX to weigh in on what differences may exist between improving CX delivery for end-user customer versus internal customers. “There really aren’t significant differences, CX is a way of thinking. Seeking out, what is it that I do in my job that really makes a difference for colleagues/customers and then being fanatical about persistently and consistently improving on it and delivering it can benefit customers regardless of who they may be,” Hicks suggests.

CX in government agencies.

Recent research by McKinsey & Company shows clearly that government agencies, particularly those in the federal government, are lagging behind when it comes to the level of customer experience that they provide. Government organizations have their own, sometimes unique, challenges that make delivering high levels of consistent CX a challenge without a doubt. Many subject matter experts are retiring, draining critical institutional knowledge. Legislative and regulatory rules can make collecting data from customer difficult. Agencies may collect a great deal of data but a lack of integration of legacy systems can make drawing insight from this data a real nightmare. In addition, the role of CXO seems to still be something akin to seeing a unicorn in the public sector indicating that CX has not been at the forefront of managers.

What the most successful organizations do.

McKinsey’s (2018) research on the topic found that the most successful organizations do three things exceptionally well and consistently:

1. They put themselves in the shoes of their customers. Really, truly taking a hard look at the brand experience through the lens of the customer can be tough but opening the curtain to understand the realities that exist is critical to understanding the opportunities that exist.
2. They understand their end-to-end customer journeys.
3. Isolate the moments that disproportionately shape the experience.

Where do you start?

Understanding that you have an opportunity to take a long, hard look at your current customer experience and committing to improve that experience over time is a good first step. David Hicks suggests that leaders begin by, “… buddying up with a front-of-house colleague for an entire day and to listen carefully to them and to the customers with whom they interact. Ask them what the single most important thing is to focus on first. This sends a powerful explicit and implicit message to your staff.”

Regardless of your sector or industry, customer experience is a factor of organizational life that is here to stay. Those that are best able to adapt to meet the changing needs of their customers and that are able to continuously increase the ease of interacting with their brand at key touchpoints are those who will enjoy a substantial and sustained differentiator over their competitors. As customer continue to get comfortable with their newfound new-found power to choose when and how they interact with brands, those that are unable or unwilling to make the effort to truly understand what their customers want and need run the very real risk of becoming irrelevant.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com. 

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The biggest brands in the world become what they are with the help of one elusive ingredient: customer loyalty. In a world over-saturated with scattershot marketing messages, successful companies take the time to truly get to know their customers — their motivations, fears, ideas, and priorities — and tackle customer service with relentless dedication.

If you’re an entrepreneur, this is good news and bad news.

The bad news? You’re likely competing against established brands that have worked for years — or even decades — to build loyalty among customers.

The good news? You can make customer-service commitment part of your company’s mission early on and be hyper-focused on giving a smaller number of customers the best experiences possible.

If you commit to offering better customer service than your competitors, then your customers are far more likely to tolerate growing pains and stick with you as you scale. This is why developing a customer service culture should be a table stakes commitment for all startups.

Power of the People

Over the past several years, there’s been a constant influx of new technologies designed to make the customer service experience better for both businesses and customers.

Often, bigger companies will invest heavily in sophisticated customer service automation tools, quality call center technology, intelligent customer relationship management systems, and vast knowledge databases, hoping to “solve” customer service.

If you’re at a startup with a limited budget, you may think you can’t compete because you can’t afford the latest tools. But the simple fact is that world-class customer service starts with people.

Maybe you’ve invested time and money into building a custom platform to help you serve customers better. Maybe your customer service technology of choice is your cellphone.

Regardless, you need to be sure that the people on your team who regularly interact with customers can communicate with empathy.

As a founder, you should get comfortable speaking with customers in their language and thinking about your product from their viewpoint.

Set the tone, the rest of your team will follow, and you’ll be on the path to developing a customer service culture that permeates all aspects of your company.

Find a Balance and Keep Learning

Especially in the early days of your startup, you’re going to have to do things that don’t scale. But as you grow, you have to balance quality service with cost.

Despite all your best intentions, having your lead developer or top product manager regularly answering customer calls isn’t a good idea.

As soon as you can, either hire someone or transition a current team member into a full-time customer success role. You’ll want this person to be able to handle a variety of customer touchpoints.

It’s great to have live phone support, but it’s not always enough: Live chat and email, along with automated FAQs and tutorials, are all extremely important today.

You’ll often find that what worked one year may not work the next year because of growth, new product offerings, and the emergence of new communications tools.

Likewise, keep in mind that different customers have different communication preferences. Learn what those preferences are early on and coordinate with your team to make sure you’re always up to speed on how customers are trying to communicate with you.

A True Customer Service Culture is an Investment

I speak from experience when I say that investing in customer service pays off.

At Phone. com, we do everything we can to make using our product as easy as possible — offering tools like a customer control panel and self-guided tutorials.

But when customers do need help, we make sure they’re able to easily get in touch with an experienced, friendly customer service rep.

Every day, we have customers both old and new write us unsolicited thank-you notes describing their experiences.

Quality customer service has always been a key component of business success. But it’s arguably more important today than ever before, simply because it’s easier than ever before — anyone can do it, and customers have come to expect it.

Take advantage of the array of tools and channels available to facilitate customer interactions. Avoid making assumptions. Instead, try to get feedback from customers whenever you can — and not just anonymous surveys.

When you’re talking with a customer, ask them how they think you’re doing. Feedback is a gift!

Finally, remember that you can’t please everyone, so don’t try to. Instead, focus on providing top-notch service to those customers who best fit your business.

Stick to your word, do your best, and try to improve each day. Your customers will reward you.

By Ari Rabban on 12/28/2016. Originally published on Startups. co – The world’s largest startup platform, helping over 1 million startup companies.

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I’d never been LEGOLAND before, so I had an opportunity to experience the park with zero expectations — minus the lingering concerns of crowds and hour-long lines that any parent faces with two days in a theme park.

Not only did our family have a great time; we spent most of our flight home reliving the details. And as we put the pieces of our trip back together, I began to deeply appreciate LEGOLAND’s approach to building an exceptional customer experience for their fans.

Now, I’m not naïve enough to believe these brands haven’t taken painstaking efforts to craft the experience to have a certain effect — which usually includes me spending money. Most competitive businesses today understand that cultivating exceptional customer experiences is critical to customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

But how do they do it? How do companies empower their employees to engage customers in ways that create unique, authentic and unscripted experiences?

Building Employee-Driven Customer Engagement

You may not know it from all the colorful LEGO décor, but LEGOLAND California is owned by Merlin Entertainments plc, a global leader in location-based, family entertainment. The British company operates more than 100 attractions, 13 hotels, and 5 holiday villages in 24 countries. Its locations attract more than 63 million visitors and employ about 27,000 employees.

A while back, I wrote about my experience at Disney World. I was particularly impressed with the story of how the janitorial staff, in an effort to turn their somewhat thankless jobs into a way to delight Disney’s customers, began to fill their rubbish cans with water and paint well-known Disney characters on the walkways.

At LEGOLAND, customers are invited to interact directly with their Model Citizens (LEGOLAND employees) throughout the day through the process of trading Minifigures, the iconic LEGO people that come in a million different configurations. Any customer, at any time, can approach a Model Citizen and trade a Minifigure (with all parts attached, of course) for one that the employee has on their brick badge (name tag), or in display boxes that they carry, for free.

“Our Model Citizens play an important role in creating an engaging environment for all our guests at our LEGOLAND Parks, helping enhance their interactivity with the park and in turn delivering them an experience they won’t forget,” shared Merlin Entertainments’ CEO, Nick Varney.

The Minifigure trading program is worldwide at all 7 LEGOLAND Parks, but originated at LEGOLAND California in 2013. Model Citizens have trading stations in retail and food and beverage locations across the Park and there’s a ‘Tip Board’ in the Beginning (first section of the Park) along with a trading station for guests starting their day.

This simple activity doesn’t cost the company a dime (in fact, parents often purchase Minifigures for their children to trade) and it provides a unique and unscripted opportunity for employees to engage and develop deeper connections with the customers they serve.

The Benefits of Employee-Driven Customer Engagement

Customer engagement may be designed and encouraged by the company, like at LEGOLAND, or they may develop in a more organic, grassroots way. Either way, the benefits are undeniable.

According to Gallup research, fully engaged customers represent an average 23 percent premium in terms of profitability, revenue, and loyalty compared with the average customer. In hospitality specifically, fully engaged guests spend 46 percent more per year.

But the benefits of customer engagement reach far beyond revenue alone. Investing in a culture of exceptional customer experience can also:

• Increase customer promotion and referrals to your product or service;
• Increase the likelihood that they will return and repurchase;
• Increase employee engagement as they see the impact of their work and feel empowered;
• Enable peoples’ creativity, allowing them to shine in ways that improve the experience and benefit everyone involved;
• Tangibly reinforce the notion that employee input and ideas are not only welcome, they are valued.

Customer engagement isn’t a single grand gesture. Much like opening that new LEGO set, it often means unpacking and organizing all of your customer touchpoints, identifying opportunities for new pieces to fit, and building new ways to improve the entire customer experience from beginning to end.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

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Today, social media and other digital platforms are allowing brands a unique opportunity to connect and communicate with their customers in a way to get their voices heard. Instead of simply talking at clients, businesses can now talk with them—which, as more millennials are becoming consumers, is the best way to connect and build authentic relationships with them. Because authentic relationships are becoming more important when interacting with your customers, social media helps to open the conversation and allows companies to actively engage and strengthen those professional relationships. This is why it is important to collect as much customer data as you can through cdp (customer data platforms) to that you can strengthen your professional relationship more with your customers.

To help you provide customers with a positive experience, here are five simple steps to implement:

1) Be Proactive

The more you can anticipate the wants and needs of your customers, the better service you can provide according to those needs and desires. To better anticipate their needs, listen to your customers and reflect on their personal experiences, evaluate which tactics you could implement today to provide better service and review which marketing plans are most effective in order to help customers understand your brand’s objective.

As you are more proactive in making positive changes to further serve your customers, I guarantee you’ll see a greater ROI from your efforts not only in revenue but in customer loyalty. You could also consider learning about the customer journey and how you can attract more customers. There are many sites that will give you help and advice on a customers journey.

2) Be Empathetic

Relate to your clients through empathy. This is one of the best I have found to give your customers better support and service. Enhance the customer experience on your website by creating a user-friendly site which allows customers to move through the checkout (or download) process with ease.

Make your site more visually appealing and helpful to not only lower the bounce rate on your site but to optimize your site to improve customer engagement and interaction. While you take time to provide customers with the best service or quality products, be sure to ask them to participate in surveys and online reviews. Not only will this help you to improve your customer experience tactics, but will also help to increase your clients’ trust and loyalty in your brand.

As you understand your customer more, along with their individual wants and desires, you can design and share specific sales, promotions, and even product recommendations just for them. This is important because specialized promotions and personalized engagement can make your customer’s feel like you care about them and what they have to say.

3) Empower Your Employees

Your employees are the face of your company and the ones your customers are interacting with daily. Equip your employees with the training, tools, and resources to not only provide your customers with superior service and efficiency but to help them to go above and beyond the customer’s expectations.

Encourage your employees to provide feedback to managers and executives to find ways to continuously improve the customer experience. I would also recommend encouraging your employees to share approved company content (such as from the company blog) on their social media platforms to further promote your brand and boost engagement. This is also a good time to train employees how to respond to negative reviews or comments from irate customers in a positive, professional manner. Not only will this empower your employees, but it will also serve as a sign to clients that your staff is passionate about your product or service.

4) Collect and Consider Customer Feedback

Here are a couple of questions to consider: how do your customers feel about your products or services? Are they continuously satisfied with their experience? Do they talk with their friends and family about your company in a positive manner?

You can’t simply assume how your customers are feeling or what they need from your company; you have to take the time to ask them. If you never gather feedback, you’ll never know what adjustments need to be made or how to improve the experience your customers receive.

5) Go Above and Beyond

You want your company to stand out from your competition and one way to do that is by always looking for new ways to improve and provide your customers with a great experience. As you continue to improve the customer experience and the way you serve your customers, the stronger your company will stick in their minds as a brand that goes above and beyond to meet their needs and one they’ll keep coming back to again and again.

Remember that you’re not simply attempting to outshine your competitors. I have found these five customer experience tips to be helpful in improving every aspect of your business and marketing plan to further grow your business and continue to exceed customer expectations.

About the Author: Brooke Cade is a freelance writer who’s committed to helping businesses and sales professionals build stronger connections with their customers. In her spare time, she enjoys learning more about InMoment.com—her CX platform of choice—reading books/articles on industry news, engaging on twitter, and exploring her local neighborhood coffee shop.

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In fact, it happened to me just recently at my local fitness club. Upon checking in, the host issued me a locker room key and I proceeded to change into my workout clothes.

Now, I’ve been around long enough to know that there’s not much in life that one can count on, but men can be reasonably confident that they’ll be assigned a locker directly next to the one other guy who happens to be changing at the same time, even when the entire rest of the facility is empty. Nine out of ten times this mysterious coincidence results in a joke between the two people who are stumbling over each other to cram their gear into their lockers while the other fifty feet of locker room sit empty. In fact, this has happened to me and everyone else I know so many times at multiple fitness centers over the years that I began to really try to understand what was behind it.

It makes perfect sense when you think about it, actually. In an effort to stay organized, the person at the front desk issues locker keys in numerical order. It keeps things orderly and efficient for them. What they fail to understand is the impact this has on the customer.

Here’s another example: Many years ago I was working with the members of the student counseling center of a large university. During our assessment we came to the realization that staff members were decorating their offices to suit their own style and comfort in an effort to make themselves feel more at home. Unfortunately, the effect on their student customers was anything but. Students felt uncomfortable entering these spaces because they felt as if they were trespassing into someone else’s personal space. The counselors obviously were not intentionally trying to cause distress for their clients. In fact, this ran exactly counter to their goals.

For everything you do, ask yourself; is it for your comfort or theirs? These are two minor examples of how our drive toward efficiency and order in our work may have unintended consequences on the customers that we are trying to serve.

How to Avoid the Comfort Trap

Here are a few things you may want to consider before patting yourself on the back for your perfect, and fully optimized process.

1. Analyze it from multiple stakeholder perspectives. Just as the examples above highlight processes that work for employees but not for customers, there are just as many examples of this working in reverse. Processes that work very well for customers may leave employees having to leap tall buildings in a single bound to deliver day-to-day. A great way to help ensure that you take into account diverse perspectives is to ask these stakeholders to help you develop the processes from the start. It may take a little longer initially but it can help you avoid costly unintended consequences down the road.
2. Create continuous feedback loops. Organizations that are able to obtain in-the-moment feedback from their stakeholders and adapt their ways of working quickly are at a distinct advantage in the market. These organizations are able to correct deficiencies and move to a vantage point where they can anticipate future challenges and preemptively address them before they have a chance to sour the experience of a key stakeholder group.
3. Create a safe space for soliciting feedback. While some organizations have established enough trust with their stakeholders that this isn’t an issue, others may not be able to get the feedback they need if they take this on themselves. In the case of the student counseling center, it took an unbiased third party investigator to create a safe enough space for the students to feel comfortable voicing their discomfort with the décor of the offices.
4. Immortalize your processes but don’t die by them. These key processes for delivering on your brand promise to all of your stakeholders are not something you should leave to chance. By capturing these processes and expectations, training your team to deliver in a consistent way and holding people accountable to it, you will help ensure that everyone clearly understands their role and responsibilities in the bigger picture. Job aids can also be a great way to help people remember the standards and to be sure that nothing slips through the cracks.

Nobody said business is easy. In our best efforts to drive efficiency and to help reduce the burden on ourselves, we may be inadvertently altering the experience of our customers in ways that we’ve never even considered. Without bringing together the diverse stakeholders that impact or are impacted by your processes, there is no way to ensure that you’re not falling into your own comfort trap.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

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