4 Steps to Understanding Your Customers

In my last two posts about customer experience (CE), I talked about the importance of defining a brand and setting a business-wide target. The way I see it, there's a method to improving CE -- a cycle -- and these are the steps within it.

This model has been inspired by a lot of CE thinking at Beyond Philosophy, Ant's Eye View and especially the former CE leadership team at Vodafone.

Here's how to do it:

1. Design Detailed Measurement. If you have the resource to develop research that really probes into what customers value and how well you deliver, do it. Ideally, this is completed in at least two stages. First, to understand, specifically, what your customers -- possibly by segment -- want and what would delight them. You should take a more qualitative approach to this stage. What you learn from this exercise should help you find out how well your channels deliver what customers expect.
2. Map the Experience. Chances are: nobody in your organisation understands, end-to-end, what customers actually go through when they interact with your organisation. We tend to work in silos --your retail channel managers understand retail, web managers understand the web, and so on. Customer Experience Managers have to piece this all together because customers don't interact with just one part of your business. They go into store, call your call centre, browse your site, use your products. So, map out their experience. I guarantee it will reveal a lot that could be improved. You have the resource to do this.
3. Consolidate Feedback Channels. You already collect a great deal of feedback about your experience. If you have a call centre, they hear it every day. You have a complaints manager. You may have a forum, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed. If you don't, your competitors do. There are consumer forums out there for every industry. What you need to do is find a way to consolidate and filter this mass of information and turn it into key messages and priorities for the business. If you do, not only will you improve the CE, but you will also empower the front-line employees you survey.
4. Experience It Yourself. Be a customer of your own organisation. Trust me, you will find things that need improvement. Encourage your stakeholders to do the same. It will make your job easier when we get to gaining buy-in -- a subject for another post.