Be Your Own Customer!

One of my key pieces of advice to those searching for ways to get their CX programs unstuck or to anyone starting a new role as the head of CX is to Be Your Own Customer. Break your routine; get out of your office, location, website, or app; take your internal business blinders off, and put your customer glasses on. And when you are ready to do this, there are four key experiences you should experience and truly evaluate.

1. For digital experiences, go to the website and sign-up as a new user. Do the same on the app. Sign up for your loyalty program if your company has one. Read as much of the content as you can and hit every button. Ask yourself what could be simplified or how you could reduce the number of steps. TAKE LOTS OF NOTES.

2. The next of the four experiences may be the most time-consuming. Review ALL communications that your business sends to customers, whether electronic or physical correspondence. Start with the welcome note when you signed up on the website and work your way through the entire lifecycle of customer communications, including your invoices. Is each communication piece clear and concise? Or is it filled with legalese and internal language? Does it serve its intended purpose, or could it be reworked or even eliminated? Are they all consistent in delivering the brand message and customer experience that you intended? Again, TAKE LOTS OF NOTES.

3. Place a call to your call center. How easy is to get answers to questions? How easy is it to reach a live agent when you need to? How long did you have to wait? What was the message while you waited on hold? How was the overall experience?

Then reverse this process and listen in to customer calls into the customer service team. What are your customers struggling with? What emotion does that create for them? How well trained are your agents, or what issues or interactions do they struggle with?

It bears repeating, TAKE LOTS OF NOTES.

4. If you are a location-based business (hotel, restaurant, bank, retail store, etc.), ask yourself the following:

· Do the online directions to your business make it easy to find? Are they clear?

· Park where your customers park and walk in the front door.

o How does the parking lot look?

o How does the front of the building look?

o Are they clean? Are they safe? Does all of the lighting work?

o Use a variation of Jeanne Bliss’s excellent advice and ask yourself, how would you feel if your mother came to your business by herself? What if that visit was at night?

· What is your first impression when you walk in the door? Is it what you want to convey to customers?

· If appropriate, how does your inventory look?

If you are a multi-location business, switch locations with another location manager for a day or two. Their eyes will see your location differently because they don’t manage it every day, and you will learn something from the way they approach their location as well.

ONE LAST TIME: TAKE LOTS OF NOTES.

Going through these exercises will give you greater visibility into what your customers actually experience and help you evaluate that against the intended or stated customer experience. All those notes you took will also be helpful for individual departments to evaluate what changes they want to make to their own piece of the customer experience. They should also help you evaluate how well all these touchpoints and experiences work together to deliver the end-to-end customer experience that you desire.