The document outlines five key tips for enhancing customer experience transformation, emphasizing the need to prioritize customer needs over technology. It suggests fostering a shared aspiration among employees, leveraging customer feedback, setting impactful priorities, digitizing experiences, and measuring employee performance. A case study on American Express illustrates the positive effects of focusing on customer satisfaction, which has led to increased retention and brand loyalty.

1. 5 Tips for Customer Experience Transformation
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology,
not the other way around.” - Steve Jobs
How can you make your customers want to come back to you? By promoting your products/
services aggressively? No! Remember, there are other competitors in the market who are sharing
the same space and they too can fulfill your customer’s need.
Of course! Promotions are one important way to let your customer know about your products
and services, but also your processes, policies, skills, and motivations have a lot to do in
prioritizing your customer’s needs and expectations. That’s when they want to come back to you.
Customer experience is not immobile, it’s a process that needs to be transformed with
innovation. You need to keep on innovating customer experience by developing new product
ideas, making processes and policies that are convenient for your users and creating new ways
for customers to access value. So, what you deliver to our customers is not just enough, it’s how
you deliver.
Here are the 5 tips which will help you gain momentum to reinvest in your
customer experience transformation.
1. Enhance your customer experience vision
We all are in the customer experience business. Whether it’s Amazon, the online retails giant, or
Uber, an American worldwide online transportation network company, every organization is
bound to this principle for their success as businesses. To build a unique customer experience,
every organization must deliver the conviction and should know their aspiration pivot on what
matters to their customers and how it can affect their business. A shared aspiration serves as a
guiding light for strategic decisions and execution. Every company should have a shared
aspiration, that can unify all interested employees to work together towards a common purpose
to have the desired outcome. To build a shared aspiration you need to engage frontline leaders
who can fully engage with the problems and are committed towards the goal of promoting
change in the organization.
2. Identify opportunities within customer feedback
To start with, an organization can gather and segment data, which is the typical way of
understanding customers. Sources like social media can be used to gather customer’s feedback.
This will help an organization identify opportunities to improve within functions, and also help
them to identify upstream and cross-functional issues and address the root cause of problems.
Collecting data is not enough though, it needs a human filter, which means, the collected data
needs to be analyzed. With the help of the analyzed data, the company can pull out who are their
audiences? What motivates them? What can they do to meet and exceed their expectations? The
benefits of this approach are that it emphasizes answers to all the questions and then the plan of
action can be implemented to embrace the company’s goals.
3. Set priorities for customer experience
Every action will have its impact, whether it’s high or low, so it’s important to set priorities first
when planning for your company’s future goals. Should you pick the low-hanging fruit first, which
may have less impact, or jump on high impact which may have revenue growth and reduce costs
immediately. Again, the impact can be measured in both short and long- term impact. For
example, when an organization abolishes some of their policies that might cut down the cost, but
it doesn’t really benefit their customers, likewise, when an organization takes pricing actions that
can have a quick impact, however, it will reduce the company’s revenue. Impacts are often
measured operationally, and other costs are measured through simplifying the business.
By having customer experience data from the customer’s feedback, companies might have to
change or eliminate their old policies to drive the long-term impact. This approach will help to
create more promoters for the brand. Find the existing problem and fix it! Appreciate each
customer for giving their valuable time. This will help you gain more customer experience and
exceed their expectations.
4. Digitize customer experience transformation
Advanced technologies and the digital channels have changed customer’s behavior. Digital has
transformed the traditional way of doing business along with the quality of the customer
experience. It has made products easier to commoditize, bringing in immediacy, personalization,
and convenience. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and give them a delightful experience.
For example, if you provide a banking service, then improve or minimize the process for your
customer and surprise them with some rewards to exceed their expectations.
For the established businesses, it requires following a new method to drive customer experience
transformation through digitization. They have to transform their digital customer profile and try
to achieve a quick digitization process using concurrent-design approaches. The company also
has to keep adding and refining elements in their cycle of testing and learning. This process will
result in the company to know what action will have what kind of impact. For example, Starbucks
has introduced an app where their customers can order coffee using the app. The objective is to
make the coffee-buying process a unique experience. They created a new set of processes that
integrated the company’s mobile loyalty program and point-of-sale applications. They re-
engineered the flow of line operations and they also built a fully functional mock store within the
company’s Seattle headquarters.
5. Measure employee’s performance
The collected data helps to determine what programs failed and where did they go wrong? Also,
with the help of the same data, they will be able to bring out a solution and motivate leaders to
take actions. Measuring the performance, as an organization, will engage their employees to
know their goals and encourage them to bring a change. To help employees realize their goals
and identify their strength areas, it’s important to understand and plan strategically important
capabilities. Based on which they can intervene, like leadership, role modeling, training and
career-development programs, etc.
It is vital for an organization to make each individual’s effort count in the process of achieving the
business goals. At the same time company must establish a customer experience transformation,
by aligning its functional and cross-functional initiatives with metrics.
Case Study
“You’ve got to develop relationships. You can’t do things just in a formal context.” -Kenneth Chenault,
the CEO of American Express.
American Express, the financial services brand, established in 1850, best known for its credit
card and traveler’s cheque businesses. The company that is roughly worth $15 billion and
acquired 22nd rank as the world’s most valuable brand in the BusinessWeek magazine, is
extremely focused on providing excellent experiences that enrich their customers’ lives and build
business success. They believe, with a heritage built on service and sustained by innovation, the
company ably lives up to its reputation, ranking at 16th place in the 2015 US customer
experience excellence rankings, with scores across The Six Pillars that are 16 percent higher than
the American average.
They changed their business practices and their contact center employees are now referred to as
Customer Care Professionals. The employees are specifically taught to adapt their interactions
depending on the personalities of the individuals and trying to resolve customer’s issues at first
contact. Employees are empowered to take necessary actions to ensure the customers are
satisfied.
The key part of American Express’s customer experience transformation is ‘service recovery
paradox’, which means, recognizing issues beforehand and finding a process that ensures the
swift resolution of customer issues. The company has learned how to harness the pillar of
resolution to build its business and reputation. It describes itself as one of the most “respected”
and “trusted” service brands in the world, laying down a list of Blue Box Values that remind
customers and employees of its core beliefs. These include:
A Customer Commitment – “We develop relationships that make a positive difference in our
customers’ lives.”
Integrity – “We uphold the highest standards of integrity in all of our actions.”
Respect for People – “We value our people, encourage their development and reward their
performance.”
Personal Accountability – “We are personally accountable for delivering on our commitments.”
For Tamsin Jenkins, head of Customer Experience Excellence, KPMG Norwood, the consequences
of the brand’s improvements are far-reaching. She says, “American Express’ switch from call
duration of engagement has benefited both customers and its business as a whole. The brand’s
emphasis on more authentic conversations has optimized customer loyalty, leading to a 400
percent increase in retention. In addition, the company’s stock price is now higher than it was
before the global financial crash and as such, demonstrating the impact of such customer
experience transformation.”
Source: engagecustomer.com
An organization requires to frequently transform their customer experience efforts to meet their
customer’s expectations. Keep redesigning the program, see what goes well, engage your
customers and minimize the inevitable resistance. The Customer Experience Transformation
program helps you to identify, design, and implement strategic solutions to the customer
management issues.
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