Managing customer experience

When we have positive interaction with a business we feel good about it and will probably tell friends or colleagues about the experience. So how do you go about managing customer experience in your business so clients are raving to their friends about you and your firm?

Let’s start with customer service. A customer’s first point of contact with a business is usually interaction with an employee (by visiting your office, speaking on the phone or online). This gives your business an opportunity to deliver excellent customer service. However, customer service is only one aspect of the overall customer experience.

If you were to book a holiday over the phone and the person you are speaking with is friendly and helpful, that’s good customer service. If your tickets arrive early, you get champagne on arrival and the hotel room is upgraded for free, then that is a good overall customer experience.

Managing customer experience within your firm starts with understanding your customers. If your business is going to truly understand the needs of its customers, then your people need to understand the issues that your customers face and how your products / services can help to solve them.

Some businesses create a customer experience vision, which defines a set of guiding principles to ensure that each customer has a consistently great experience with the firm. The customer experience vision might include things like turning things around quickly and embracing customer feedback in order to improve the service offering.

Your firm should take customer feedback seriously. The best businesses regularly survey clients and collate feedback to drive positive change across the firm to improve customer experience.  It can also be useful to gather employee feedback. For example, you may want to ask your team members for their views on whether the business has the ability to deliver exceptional service and if not, then why not?  The business can act on this feedback in order to improve the customer’s overall experience.