Seven Lessons to Ensure Success of Customer Experience Initiatives

“To optimize both your market share and your margins, you must provide customers with consistent, compelling experiences—before, during, and after their purchases—across all channels.” – Oracle, Seven Power Lessons for Customer Experience Leaders

With the increasing use of social media, it is more important than ever for organizations, both public and private, to provide their customers with the best customer service experience possible. When an individual has a bad customer experience, they vent their problems to the world, not just friends and family, through Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. Oftentimes, if the experience is really bad, the experience turns into a major news story, completely ruining an organization’s brand. To avoid potentially devastating customer service experiences, leaders can follow seven simple lessons to ensure the entire organization is working towards the customer and not competing organizations interests.

Lesson 1: Customer Experience Is Political

Customer experience leaders must act as political champions for customer experience, especially as competing interests, such as budget cuts and short-term revenue grabs, begin to undermine the quality and consistency of the customer experience provided. To ensure the customer experience remains a priority, leaders must emphasize the importance of customer experience as a critical business differentiator.

Lesson 2: Customer Experience Is Cultural

Customer experience leaders must ensure that the entire organization is focused on improving customer service. This requires leaders to have a vision that emphasizes (1) aligning everything the organization does with customers’ goals, (2) assigning high value to customers’ real needs and desires, and (3) rewarding employee initiative that benefits the consumer. This will ensure the entire organization works towards a positive customer experience.

Lesson 3: To Thine Own Customer Experience Be True

Customer experience leaders should design initiatives that are unique to the organizations. Every business faces different challenges and requires a customer service initiative that addresses those challenges.

Lesson 4: Many Business Problems Are Really Customer Experience Problems

Many customer experience capabilities, such as customer behavior data technology, can be applied to common organizational problems. It is important to think about how customer service tools and techniques can be applied to these challenges. Some ideas include (1) ensuring that product development is driven by customers’ needs, (2) reducing staff turnover impacts by quickly ramping up new hires on institutional knowledge about customers and markets, and (3) streamlining communications with vendors and contractors.

Lesson 5: The Right Data Is Better Than More Data

Customer experience leaders should limit the amount of data presented at a given time to make it easy for customers to navigate to additional data. While having a lot of information is important, oftentimes too much information can be just as bad as too little information, as the sea of information can overwhelm customers.

Lesson 6: Build Customer Experience into Your Brand

An organization should ensure that customer experience is a critical component of external messaging. This will ensure that customers know the organization values customer service as well as reinforce the commitment with in employees.

Lesson 7: Become a Chief Customer Experience Officer

More organizations are realizing the importance of the Chief Customer Experience Officer (CXO). The CXO is responsible for transforming the organizations culture so that it is driven by customer needs and desires rather than by product features or sale performance. They must work closely with the CEO and the rest of the executive team to ensure there is a clear customer service mission within the organization.

To learn more about these seven lessons, check out Oracle’s Seven Power Lessons for Customer Experience Leaders.

What Do You Think? What other lessons would you add to the list?

More Customer Service Resources:

Video: The Changing Face of Customer Service

Guide: Re-Imagining Customer Service in Government

Online Training: Customer Service in Government- Real World Case Studies

Oracle offers an optimized and fully integrated stack of business hardware and software systems that helps organizations overcome complexity and unleash innovation.. Check out their Optimize with Oracle group on GovLoop as well as the Technology Sub-Community of which they are a council member.