How to Ensure a Successful Customer Experience Transformation 

Modern businesses understand that customer experience is their priority. Scanning through the latest headlines and research, you will come across the strategic importance of CX. It is critically important to prioritize customer experience for their business. In this digital era, customer experience can make or break a brand.

Meeting and exceeding the expectations of consumers is critical for the success of any business post-Covid. Customer experience transformation leads the way as a proven strategy to capture and upgrade customer experience. However, the overwhelming innovation and challenges often seem to create risks for businesses. Moreover, the shift in consumer behavior and expectations also forced companies to transform their interaction with customers in order to serve them better.  

What Is Customer Experience Transformation?

Customer experience, or CX transformation is a practice to streamline various sales as well as service processes within the business to enhance customer interaction with the brand.  

This instance dampens customer retention. A survey suggests that Covid-19 worsened customer service. 75% respondents voted that customer service aggravated during the Covid-19 outbreak. It clearly indicates that only intending to make changes is not enough; it is time to bring about a transformation and deliver impactful customer experience solutions. 

How To Bring About CX Transformation?

However, implementing a new change is often a daunting task. Typically, organizational changes span across various departments of the business. To execute this systematically, the approach should be backed by a solid framework.  

Fortunately, you could follow a simple formula to easily incorporate CX transformation into the business without causing much distress to the organization and its people. The end result will be that your customers will enjoy a seamless and easier experience through thoughtful customer experience transformation.  

To approach customer experience differently, you must rethink and apply new building blocks and critical strategies that matter. Here’s your quick guide: 

#1: Visualize Your Business Deliverables 

As a customer service outsourcing company, what kind of customer experience do you want to deliver? On the aspirational side, you have to ensure that you are focused on the purpose of the brand and the promise. To achieve that, you must consider the mission of your company and determine the changes you expect in customer behavior. Once identified, you can focus on the metric that matters – people, not numbers. 

#2: Run A Business Overhaul 

To change something, you have to transform the way things have always been. To ensure successful customer experience transformation, you must commit to those necessary changes to make sure it works.  

To begin with, build a new cross-functional team with technical expertise, willingness and problem-solving attitude to take on the overhaul process. Avoid involving different departments as it only creates a chaotic process and lack of communication. Instead, a new team will have innovative ideas to design the entire customer experience transformation process, develop products and services, and stay aligned to the brand.  

#3: Build Innovative Business Competencies 

When these changes will be implemented, the business infrastructure should be able to offer support. However, this differs depending on the industry and business. In this regard, there are some critical aspects to consider: 

1. Ongoing training to ensure employees develop the skills to deliver outstanding customer experience solutions. Training includes hard skills like software-specific knowledge and technology, and soft skills like communication and empathy.  For instance, if the first customer support assistant answering the call is not empathetic enough or fails to provide the expected help, customers will be exposed to wait times; customers will be frustrated and bored with each passing minute and drop off. To avoid this, proper training is mandatory. 
2. Technology supports omnichannel customer experience transformation with positivity. Ensure all platforms integrate with others to offer seamless connectivity to customers. You can only imagine a situation in which a customer calls for assistance after ordering a product online, and finds out that the employees do not even have access to the ordering system. Hence, correct omnichannel integration is the need of the hour. 
3. Leverage Big Data to bridge gaps in customer experience transformation. Customer feedback is invaluable. However, it cannot give you the accurate view of customers’ feelings, their experiences, and what they are sharing with their friends. With Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics, quality of customer interaction can be determined. It can also predict customer satisfaction and their intent to patronize the business in the long run.   

Here, it is important to note that the journey of customer experience transformation is all about your customers. To understand the situation, you may have to slip into the shoes of your customers and reevaluate your business. Any feedback received during the same time should be considered. While negative feedback may seem unbelievable, try to understand how your customers perceive your brand.  

A Holistic Approach to CX Transformation

Successful customer experience transformation entail reevaluating your business model. It is the only prudent way to achieve full spectrum of transformation and be sustainable at the same time. A fundamental shift in mindset is required to focus on your customers along with IT and operational improvements. 

The Building Blocks of CX Transformation You Want to Explore 

Customer experience transformation execution is now much easier because of a strategic and proven formula. It comprises series of steps across the building blocks of a fail-proof CX transformation strategy, which includes a definite aspiration, an agile approach to transformation, and a careful approach to deploy the new capabilities, typically latest analytics. When these blocks are combined, businesses can make way for a competitive edge in the industry.  

Build objective and motivation 

The first and most significant step to initiate customer experience transformation is to have the clear definition of the kind of experience you intend to deliver. When businesses try to define their aspirations with respect to CX transformation, they fail to establish a connection due to various reasons. One of the reasons could be when the aspiration is vague and not aligned with the motivating factor of the company. 

In addition, if there is no clarity on how this aspiration creates trackable and measurable value, it will lead to failure. As a result, the entire CX transformation endeavor lacks coherence and clarity. An impeccable CX objective delivers on brand promise and reflects the purpose of the company. Organizations can then successfully translate their objectives into expected value by defining the distinct changes in the expected customer behavior.  

For example, to measure the success of a bank looking to improve customer relationships, you can consider the number of customers choosing the bank for all core banking requirements. Contrarily, the focus on key customer behavior changes completely in C-suite. Leaders consider customers instead of financials. They even prioritize experiences leading to expected behavior as customer requirements change over time.  

Top companies use statistical analysis and quantitative research to decide what customers expect and value the most. Based on the findings, they prioritize experiences that truly matter in shaping the future action plan. Advanced companies also use latest analytics and run simulations of the predicted impact of potential investments to build compelling use cases and deliver impeccable customer support solutions.  

Once the experiences are prioritized with the potential of greater impact on overall consumer behavior, leaders in CX identify their technology capabilities and internal processes required to reimagine them substantially. All data and analytics are consolidated to build the road map to success. 

Consider business transformation 

Whereas executives develop detailed CX transformation plans and roadmaps, many often get swayed by business-as-usual programs. There are key areas of difference that makes it important to be watchful at this stage. For example, communication challenges, accountability errors, and ownership problems may arise, which may sink the transformation objectives.  

Customer experience transformation initiatives that company undertake successfully often appear completely different. Agile and cross-functional teams take ownership of respective projects, possess technology expertise, and develop a continuous improvement culture with design thinking elements. Companies committed to the rising CX transformation culture seek innovative ways to transform and reimagine products, services and experiences, to deliver on brand and on company.   

Defining customer personas takes the CX team a step closer to understanding their needs. Agile cross-functional teams can leverage advanced analytic and design thinking toolkits for ethnographic and quantitative research. They carry out cocreation workshops and develop prototypes with innovative concepts addressing the pain points.  

They also utilize advanced analytics to determine and prioritize relevant performance metrics like decreased waiting time to quantify the changes and their financial impact on customer behavior. Once products are developed and ready, the agile teams scale the business, integrating into new technology platform, and test continuously to refine across geographies and segments.  

Another critical aspect of customer experience transformation programs is to have one central team combining ideation methods and tools. This team conducts both evaluative and generative customer research, and brings cross-functional experts together with the necessary expertise like scrum masters, designers, researchers, and omnichannel technology architects. The central team is responsible for maintaining the culture of technology-enabled innovative strategies that eventually become the distinct competitive asset.  

Foster transformation 

New capabilities lead the way to new experiences in customer support outsourcing. Leaders in customer experience transformation ensure successful implementation for customers to sustain changes. There are some critical factors that determine the success of CX transformation: 

• Customer-oriented goals: Regardless of the hierarchy, employees should be confident of the tools and skills they possess in order to deliver stellar customer experience. Leading organizations develop academics combining live workshops, digital courses, and ongoing changes supporting new capabilities. 

• Integrated tech stack: To deliver outstanding omnichannel experience to customers, companies need technology stack spanning the business. Digital platform including APIs and microservices offers various services with flexibility. For instance, an omnichannel call center platform with chat, call recognition, email management, and video chant, and one single system integrating all the platforms.  
• Agility: Agile operations and decision-making is the need of the hour. Innovation teams should be empowered with the autonomy of making quick decisions. Assign formal rights of decision-making to team leaders. This approach gives decision rights, which often requires internal negotiations. Eventually, this yields exceptional results.  
• Performance management: Big Data, Predictive Analytics, and Machine Learning are the common tools to overcome customer feedback challenges that leads to inaccurate and incomplete view of real customer experience. Companies demand management systems having advanced feedback mechanism to help employees understand which behaviors could deliver the best outcome. It would also guide teams and help them focus on targeted areas for maximum impact.  Using the best tools, companies can accurately predict the present situation and the future expenditure of each customer based on experience.  

How Can CX Transformation Help Your Business?

When you are planning to introduce customer experience transformation in to your business, focus on a common goal to see measurable results. Some of the common benefits of CX transformation include:  

• Better performance: When processes are streamlined, it improves customer experience as well as employee experience. This leads to an overall positive culture, which will only improve over time to transform into a productive environment.  
• Greater adaptability: Unarguably, customer preferences and needs are evolving constantly. Likewise, the market is also dynamic. Focusing on customer experience transformation prepares you to adapt to these sudden developments faster as you pivot productively.  
• Higher retention: Customer experience builds loyalty. When your customers are happy and satisfied with their interactions and experiences with the brand, they will be more loyal, which will lead to greater Customer Lifetime Value you want to build.  
• Improved efficiency: When you focus on building customer experience, you would also create efficient teams to assist one another to provide robust support when needed.  

Closing Thoughts

Any change is frightening, but the results are often worth the challenges. Implementing an organization-wide change spanning across multiple departments of the business might sound downright petrifying, but the right approach with a solid strategy can lead to victory.  

It is possible to achieve your customer experience transformation goals with easy and seamless business integrations, causing little to no distress. It’s time to rethink your customer experience transformation goals and deploy proven strategies to deliver only the best.

FAQs