Take a moment to step in your customer’s shoes for a day. Imagine you are a customer, who might be earning $100,000 a year, or managing the family finances. Whoever your ideal customer is, go about the next 24 hours as if you were them. Call up your company’s 800 number, place an order from the website. Chat online with a customer rep about your bill or make an in-person appointment for services.  

Your purpose of going undercover is to get a feel for what it is like for your customers to interact with your company. This is what we call the customer experience (CX). Customer Experience consulting involves understanding every interaction a customer has with your business.

You will gain significant insights from this experiment. However, to truly understand the customer experience, you need to go a step further to get a more holistic view. You must take a 360-degree approach and look at your customers from all angles, review the customer journey holistically and dive into the data to make sure you are providing the best experience for your customers.

Providing a prime experience can increase customer loyalty and satisfaction, while helping improve all your KPIs. Want proof? 84% of companies that work to enhance their customer experience report an increase in their revenue. Achieving this means making sure every stage of your customers’ journey is met with perfection.

Customer experience consulting is not some new trend that just popped up. It has been around for years. However, as organizations transition to a more customer-centric culture, customer experience has become a strategic focus.

Having a reasonable picture versus a strategic approach 

Consider this scenario: you are presented with two options for a morning beverage. Option #1 is a generic coffee blend, prepared without any knowledge of your taste preferences. Option #2 is a custom-crafted latte, carefully tailored to your preferred coffee strength, milk choice, and flavor preferences.

Which option would you choose? Most likely, it is Option #2. It is personalized to your specific tastes and preferences, ensuring a more enjoyable and satisfying experience.

This concept of personalization extends beyond coffee choices to the realm of customer experience. Just as you prefer customized coffee, your customers seek personalized interactions with your business, and a new way of thinking about customer experience. Understanding their preferences and providing tailored experiences at every touchpoint along their journey is essential for building lasting relationships and fostering loyalty.

By putting customer experience consulting at the center of the strategy, businesses are now enabled to have a unified view of all touchpoints, departments and channels, and how they are involved in customer relationships.

This shift in thinking is due to changing consumer demands. Customers are increasingly expecting personalized experiences and marketing tailored exclusively to them. They are not being high maintenance. They are just being more discerning since the acceleration of the digitization of products and services—AI, blockchain, big data, predictive analytics—plus growing competition.

And that digital footprint continues to expand as customers are interacting with companies through a growing number of channels, leaving behind a massive amount of data to be aggregated and analyzed.

Layer on top of that the increasing regulatory and compliance pressures such as CCPA and GDPR, and you have got businesses who are unsatisfied with the generic coffee blend.

Creating a strategic customer experience organization

Despite all these challenges, delivering an optimal customer experience is a solvable problem. Customer Experience consulting focuses on tailoring voice or chat virtual agents to improve the customer experience and the efficiency of your contact center organization. To give customers the positive experience they are craving, Kenway recommends following these five key steps:

1. Craft your Customer Service strategy, inclusive of the contact center goals
2. Define success based on the strategy – what are we measuring, what is acceptable, what do we consider a good customer experience?
3. Map out the complete customer journey, looking through all the channels and use cases
4. Use your data, review the customer journey and document recommendations, prioritize, and implement. 
5. Rinse and repeat. Customer Experience consulting is not a one-time activity. Customers will continue to evolve, and your services and products will as well. 

Why provide a unified customer experience for your customers? 

Kenway Consulting works with leading companies to deliver customer experience consulting. Our approach is based on a combination of people, process, and technology enabling organizations to craft a unique, tailored customer experience design for their customer service organizations. 

The people aspect derives from putting the customer first. Ensuring that every design, every interaction, and the overall customer experience strategy are part of an overarching understanding of how the customer wants to interact with our clients. 

Processes are all tied to how to accomplish those interactions. Customers contact organizations for many different reasons, and clearly mapping and understanding the processes allows for a personalized, smooth experience. 

Technology is all about finding solutions for those needs using the right tools. Generative AI has become critical in personalization and customer experience consulting. However, Gen AI needs a foundation of strong Data Governance, Data Management, and insightful data to make decisions on where to apply it to enhance the experience. We’ve seen firsthand how data and information can be leveraged to extract real-time insights to enable an outstanding customer experience. This holistic approach not only provides improved insights, but also more effective processes and better points of service for customers and employees. Employees can better serve customers when they have all the information readily available.

Here are some benefits of taking a 360-degree view of customers that have worked for Kenway’s clients:

• Increased revenue and pipeline: By predicting customer behavior and identifying opportunities for up- and cross-selling, companies can reduce their sales cycles and replenish pipelines more quickly. Kenway has helped with analyzing customer trends, detecting new markets, and understanding buying patterns to reduce time-to-market.
• Cost Savings: Provide customers with an easy-to-use experience for repeatable tasks like checking a balance, paying a bill, or getting order status. Creating these experiences helps reduce interactions to your centers, limiting the number of reps you need to staff. This also allows your agents to focus on the customer’s more complex needs.
• Reduced risk: Decrease the risk of regulatory penalties and reputational damage with a better understanding of your customers’ profiles such as the services they use or when and how they’ve interacted with the company. This alleviates misaligned or inconsistent messaging to customers and expands the overall effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
• Enhanced customer loyalty and value: Think about how you can offer personalized customer experiences and tailored products and services. Kenway has seen this facilitate deeper relationships and more impactful interactions, plus extend customer lifetime values.
• Improved customer data privacy: Protect customer data by making sure you understand the data you store, and that your customers and employees have the appropriate access and permissions. A strong understanding of your data lineage will ensure it complies with customers’ personal information rights and regulations.

Achieving success by putting insights into action 

In a study, 90% of CEOs said they believe the customer has the greatest impact on their business. Kenway Consulting’s CEO, Matt Kueker, agrees. “We use a combination of versatility and creative problem solving to help our clients identify the root causes of their customer experience issues. We then work with them to create, clarify and communicate a clear vision for how they can up-level to better serve their customers.”

By having a strong grasp of the 360-degree view of your customers, strategizing your customer service organization, and investing in customer experience consulting, you’ll be able to evolve your business to exceed your customers’ expectations in a modern world. You’ll have better insights, powered by properly governed and managed data, and an effective Business Intelligence and Analytics platform.

Soon you will not have to put yourself in your customer’s shoes, because you will already know customers’ perceptions of your business. However, you will never look at a morning beverage the same.

If you are interested in learning more about our experience and approach in this area, contact us at [email protected]. 

FAQs

• What is Customer Experience (CX)? 

Customer Experience (CX) refers to the overall impression a customer has from their interactions with a company throughout the entire customer journey. The customer journey encompasses every touchpoint and interaction, from initial reach-out, through the process, to post-process service and support. A strong CX Strategy results in higher customer satisfaction, increased loyalty, and better business performance. 

• When Should You Engage with CX Consulting Services?

Customer Experience Consulting services can be beneficial to your organization at different stages. If your organization is embarking on a digital transformation and you need to create a new customer journey, CX consulting will help to create a high-quality customer journey. CX Consulting Service can help if you are seeing customer churn, want to increase containment, or want to add a new channel, like chat or SMS. If you want to seek competitive advantage and differentiate yourself from your competitors by implementing great customer service, customer experience consulting will help you drive loyalty.