Unlocking CX at Scale
Everybody can think of a great customer experience they’ve had.
Maybe it was that time your mechanic talked you through the details of what he did to your car during a service and surprised you with a free detail, or perhaps it was when that online retailer made it super easy to sort a complicated return.
Dreaming up stand-out customer experiences is the easy part. Designing them to work at scale is what trips a lot of businesses up – and unfortunately, stops many from actually delivering them. That’s a real shame, especially considering customers are willing to pay up to 16% more for great customer service, and 32% will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.
I work through this particular challenge with clients all the time – how can we create competitive customer experiences, but ensure they work across all of our locations, meet the needs of various client groups, and last over the long term… and are something we can actually build now? How do we ensure we’re not part of the 60% of marketers who believe they’re at a competitive disadvantage because of their CX?
I truly believe there’s a creative solution to every CX challenge. Here are a few simple concepts that have allowed us to overcome some of these hurdles to design and build great experiences for our clients (and their customers).
Remove the room for human error
Many of the world’s great customer experiences depend on fantastic, customer-focused staff who just *know* how to make a customer’s day. Unfortunately, we cannot yet clone these exceptional individuals, and there are as many poor customer service reps as there are great ones.
That’s why removing the room for human error by automating as many processes as possible is a great way to start improving a customer experience. Whether this is your onboarding programme (can you switch from an in-person handover to a series of videos, delivered to the
customer’s platform of choice?) or your booking process (can you automate reminders and follow ups?), automation both gives you control and allows you to scale.
Plus, more and more of your competition are already getting started. A Gartner survey found that 68% of CMOs intended to increase spending on marketing technology (martech) from 2020 to 2021.
At krunch.co, we work with a number of marketing automation platforms that allow us to design complex automated experiences, driven by (and personalised with!) data.
However, automation does rely on a certain standard of data, data hygiene, and technical capability, which leads me to my next point…
Your MVP is your MVP
What? That’s right – when you are just starting out designing a great customer experience at scale, your minimum viable product (MVP) will be your most valuable player in the process.
After dreaming up a beautiful automated experience that delivers everything a customer could dream of and more, it can be disappointing to feel like you’re stripping back some of the best bits and only delivering the bare minimum.
But guess what? Something is better than nothing. If you’ve been letting customers slip through the cracks in a particular area of your business, having a minimum viable product built and running is going to make a world of difference to them and also to your bottom line.
Once you have this MVP up and running, you can test and learn, and then gradually layer on your awesome ideas – think advanced segmentation, AI-powered video, a VIP experience – onto a much more solid foundation.
Make it work for you first
Personalised content, dynamic product suggestions, seasonal giveaways… it’s all possible, and it’s all awesome. But this is the part where most marketers get overwhelmed with all the potential – and the amount of work it would take to get their systems and teams to back up their big dreams.
So my advice is – yes, design an incredible customer-first experience, but make sure it works for your business, too. If you don’t have a team that’s capable of fulfilling a seasonal prize, don’t promise that. If your data can’t be segmented by interests, save that feature for phase 2.
This goes back to my point on the power of MVPs. Just remember, the best customer experience is the one that you can actually support and deliver.
What has your experience been trying to improve (and/or digitise) your business’s customer experience? Are you getting held back by insurmountable technical or data limitations, or is it just your way of thinking about it?