Best Practices in Managing Customer Experience

When I first started my blog, which evolved into this Transformational CX newsletter, in my first two posts I offered suggestions for getting some quick wins when starting a new CX program, advising that you should start in the call center and be your own customer. This week, I begin a series of articles about my four best practices for managing an ongoing customer experience program.

We could probably build a list of 25 to 30 things a mature or best-in-class CX function should be doing, but you probably don’t have time or energy to read it anyway! So let me introduce my top four best practices here and do a deeper dive into each of these over the next few weeks:

1. Start with your employees

2. Understand the linkages—between your internal metrics, your customer feedback, and your business outcomes

3. Have robust closed-loop processes

This is non-negotiable for me. It is one of the best ways to resolve customer issues in real-time, learn how to improve your products, services, and experiences, and drive retention.

4. Governance—how you are organized to drive customer experience improvement and how you are managing the portfolio of improvement projects

Start with Your Employees

I’m a strong believer in the service profit chain that suggests better employee experience leads to better customer experience, which in turn delivers better business outcomes such as revenue and profitability growth. I also often talk about the inverse corollary, which is that you can’t have great customer experience (CX) without having good (or better) employee satisfaction. Richard Branson, founder of The Virgin Group, famously said, “If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”

So as a customer experience leader, you better be partnered with your human resources and leadership teams to ensure employee experience (EX) is also being worked in the organization. And just as there is an ROI of CX, there is also an ROI of EX; reduced employee attrition has significant ROI for the organization, as well as allows your company to maintain historical knowledge and higher skill levels due to more tenured employees.

The second aspect of starting with your employees is that the people who deal with your customers on a daily basis know what is working and what is not. They hear the customer complaints and suggestions; they deal with the restrictive or poor policies and procedures that inhibit their ability to better serve your customers.

Go talk to them! Learn what customers are saying; hear what they are struggling with or their ideas about how to improve the customer experience or how to change or improve the processes, procedures, and policies that prevent them from delivering a great customer experience.

I love Jeanne Bliss’ idea about starting a “kill a stupid rule” movement at your company. Rules and policies build up over time. And while they may have been necessary or served a purpose at the time, that is not always enduring. One of my biggest pet peeves is hearing “well, that’s the way we have always done it.” So periodically reviewing your policies and rules to remove outdated, ineffective, or inefficient ones makes good business sense and helps your employees feel heard and deliver a better customer experience.

By talking to your sales team, your customer service agents, your front-line service delivery associates, you learn directly what needs to improve. You can also improve the employee experience by making them feel listened to and that their ideas are heard and may be implemented. Not every idea needs to, or even should, come from the corporate team and the senior leadership team; that is a sign of an unhealthy culture.

Finally, in terms of starting with your employees, customers still expect and prefer a human experience. For all of the advancements being made in natural language processing and artificial intelligence and chatbots, customers still prefer to deal with a real person when they have an issue that they cannot solve themselves. According to Shep Hyken’s 2023 ACA Study: Achieving Customer Amazement, “when they need customer support or have a question, 69% of Americans in 2023 prefer to speak to a real person over a digital self-serve option.”

With the great strides AI has made this year with ChatGPT and its brethren, we are all seeing predictions of all the jobs that will be replaced by AI, many of them in the customer service arena. As customer experience leaders, we need to ensure that the financial team doesn’t win all of the arguments of replacing human labor with artificial intelligence options for cost-cutting purposes. The more we dehumanize customer experiences, the more risk you run of a competitor offering the same experience at a lower price, which absolutely leads to churn.

In conclusion, even though your title may say customer experience, you need to learn from and enable and empower your customer-facing employees, figure out how to blend human connections and self-service and AI capabilities into an experience that customers still value, and partner with your HR team to ensure the company is also working on delivering an effective employee experience.

Come back next week to learn about the next best practice: Understanding the Linkages.

This article was first published in my LinkedIn newsletter, Transformational CX.

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To discuss how I can help your company, please contact me at: eric.smuda@outlook.com