Customer Experience (CX) is often relegated to the bottom of the list for an organisations strategy. This can lead to some BIG problems such as:

• Products or services not 'hitting the mark' of what customers want.
  
• Not knowing what to create next for the customer. 
  
• Competitors stealing market share.
  
• Poor customer experience & increasing customer complaints.
  
• Not knowing the customer touch points that create either a detractor or fan of a product or service.

The critical implications of these CX problems include:

• Decreased sales and revenue
  
• Increased expenditure via marketing spend to compensate for sales decline 
• Decreasing customer loyalty
  
• Decreasing faith in brand and products/ services
  
• Loss of market share and market credibility
  

CX innovation includes:

1. Customer insight generation
2. CX touch point mapping
3. CX delight ideation
4. CX responsiveness 
5. CX transparency

Discovering customer insights makes commercial sense for a number of reasons including being able to engineer remarkable customer experience, creating clarity around touch-points and creating ideas for improving them and let's not forget increased referrals and increased sales.

Here's a list of critical areas to investigate to generate commercial customer insights:

• Customer needs - what the customer needs and expects
• Customer desires - what the customer would like to happen beyond their typical transaction experience and expectations
• Customer frustrations - what frustrates the customer and what they want to avoid at all costs
• Customer capabilities - what capabilities a customer has, be that technical, logistical, mental and emotional to deal with a problem
• Customer assumptions - what assumptions does a customer have about how a task should be done and comparing that with the design intentions (how your product or service designers intend a product or service to be used)
• Customer constraints - what constraints the customer faces, time, knowledge, accessibility etc.
  

If you're not designing the experience that you want your customer to have, by mapping out wish one of those touch points step by step then you can be guaranteed that there will be an ugly customer experience lurking in there.

Touch point mapping isn't rocket science, but it takes a bit of time and it reveals issues that need fixing which is why people avoid doing it.

Fail to map out the CX touch-points and you risk losing sales, losing customers, loyalty and increasing expenditure.

The simplest way to map out touch points is to do a story board. Here's 7 ways to storyboard anything in your business:

1. Print out a landscape format sheet with a number of rectangular blocks on it
2. Identify an interaction or experience that you want to improve
3. Start to draw or sketch the experience in each frame - for example someone opening the home page of your website
4. Write some points beneath the frame to explain what is happening
5. Continue onto the next frame
6. Review your story board, could the experience be any better? If yes, do you need to add any more frames?
7. Do you need to add anymore detail to the elements or flow? If so add another frame.

Customer expectations have changed dramatically. 

Customers want it instantly, and they want it seamlessly. 

When we get customer experience (CX) wrong, we have:
⦿ Decreased sales and revenue
⦿ Increased expenditure via marketing spend to compensate for sales
decline
⦿ Decreasing customer loyalty

If we deliver just what a customer expected (like any other provider), then we become forgettable. 

If we deliver an extra component to match a request, we will be remembered.

✅ When we can deliver a value add that is unexpected, that's when we become unforgettable to them and create a raving fan for life.

To engineer CX delight, run an ideation session with the following parameters.

💡 Generate ideas as to when and where we can provide an unexpected
value add or element of surprise. For example, after an invoice is paid, after a client has signed up, an anniversary date, etc.

💡 Generate ideas for low-cost ways of adding value, surprise, and
delight. E.g. a handwritten card, a customised experience, a unique recipe¦

💡 Make sure the ideas are relevant, fun, memorable, meaningful and
inexpensive.

When things go "pear shaped' you need a "ready to go' response plan that can be initiated immediately.

In your recovery plan you need to consider:

• Permissions - giving all staff the ability and permission to recover a situation
• Budgets - have permission for a recovery budget that allows individuals to use if necessary to solve or mediate a problem
• Visibility - let people know what's happening straight away and where they are at in the process
• Follow up - once a problem has been resolved, what's the "extra mile' that you'll be going to make up for the situation
• Revisit & redesign the touch point map - if something went wrong, the process is broken. Take the time to review your touch point map and improve it so that the issue doesn't happen again.
  

People hate it when people deny there's an issue or pretend it's not their fault. Fess up fast, and acknowledge that your organisation has made a mistake and clearly articulate what you'll be doing to rectify the existing problem and the steps you'll be taking to prevent it in the future.

We love innovative CX and we know the value if it. Get your CX right and you'll see the benefits and profits coming in the door.

We help organisations with teams just like yours who might be going round in circles trying to establish what a client really wants or needs from the next product service that will wow them and woo them to purchase more than ever. We also know how to eliminate those pain points.

We recently worked with a products team consisting of designers, marketers and sales people and increased the no. of commercial insights being generated by 280% in 12months resulting in a 105% increase in new products with commercial patents being granted.

If you'd like to improve your CX innovation we're here to help.

Cheers,
Nils

Nils Vesk - Ideas with Legs