STEP BY STEP GUIDE TO MAGICAL CX

Step 1: Before you Start
•    What is the appetite for a customer experience program in your company? Where is the main drive and initiative of this program coming from?
•    What is prompting the interest in customer experience in your company? To what extent is it prompted by a desire to win more loyal customers, beat the competition, or improve profitability?
•    How strong are the emotional links between your customers and your company? How have these emotional links developed? How consistent are you in developing them?

Step 2:     Determine the loyalty of your customers
•    Do you know the loyalty of your customers? 
•    To what degree is this loyalty rock solid in your favour rather than shifting from time to time to other suppliers?
•    Do you have a process for recovering lost customers? How effective is this?
•    How many of your customers split their business between you and your competitors? What is your share?
•    What would it take for you to have 100% of your customers’ wallet?
•    What is it that you do that satisfies your customers? What is it that you do that makes them loyal?
•    What are the moments of truth for your customers? How are you performing on these moments of truth?

Step 3: Figure our the profitability of your customers
•    Do you really know how your customers feel about your products and service? How can you be sure?
•    What do you do for your customers that leave them with positive memories?
•    How happy are your employees and the work that they do? How satisfied are your customers? What links can you see between the two?
•    What proportion of your customers are truly loyal – i.e. rating you 9 or 10 out of 10 on satisfaction and 9 or 10 out of 10 on likelihood to recommend?
•    Will your company only pursue a customer experience program if it knows the financial return? 
•    Are you caught in the complacency zone where you feel that more effort is required to raise or even maintain customer satisfaction?
 

Step 4: Where do you sit on the 6 pillars?
•    Do you have a vision of what you would like your customer experience to be?
•    Do the six pillars of customer experience fit your company (commitment, fulfilment, seamlessness, responsiveness, proactivity, evolution)? Which do you consider to be most important?
•    How would you rate your company’s performance on each of the six pillars?
•    Which is a priority for improvement?

Step 5: Measuring your customers' experiences
•    What internal measures are you using to measure your customer experience performance?
•    What use are you making of complaints? Are they seen as a pain or a gift?
•    What external measures are used to measure customer experience? 
•    Which external measures are most appropriate to meet your customer experience goals? 
•    Do you understand what is driving your customer satisfaction and customer experience scores? How can you get deeper insights into what customers think beyond the numeric scores?
•    Do you set targets for improving customer experience? What is the basis for setting these targets? Do you track your performance on these measures?
•    Where does total quality management fit into your customer experience program? How could it be used to improve customer experience?
 

Step 6: Measuring how you are doing
•    Which organisations is your company compared against when judging the customer experience you provide?
•    What is the gap between the customer experience your company delivers and that of the companies against which it competes? 
•    What is the gap between the customer experience your company delivers and the standard-bearers in other sectors against which you are compared?
•    How do customer experience metrics vary across different parts of your company? What are the reasons for this variability? In what way could you harmonise the measures of customer experience?
•    What does the variability of the scores across you company mean? Are they real differences or can they be explained by cultural factors?
 

Step 7: Figure out how emotions affect your CX
•    Do you know the factors that are driving your customers’ views on excellent customer experience?
•    What do you do to make things positively memorable for customers?
•    How good is your company at helping customers achieve their goals?
•    How good is your company in being easy to do business with?
•    What is the emotional intelligence of your company? 
•    To what extent does it understand and manage emotions in building good customer experience?
•    How far through your company does the emotional connection with customers exist?
 

Step 8: Using customer journey maps to understand CX
•    Who within your organisation will spearhead the customer journey mapping initiative? Is it supported at a high level?
•    For each segment that you serve, consider developing a customer journey map. How many customer journey maps do you need?
•    Do you have access to a moderator with the skills that can bring together different departments to develop the customer journey maps?
•    Consider using an external facilitator to run the customer journey mapping sessions.
•    Who will attend the CJM workshops? 
•    Who will carry out the validation of the customer journey maps with customers themselves? Can this work be carried out internally or will it require external help?
•    How will the customer journey maps be used when they are validated? How will they be shared around the company?
 

Step 9: Building a CX strategy
•    Do you have a plan for improving customer experience? Could you use the SOSTAC® framework to drive the plan forward?
•    How strong is the commitment to customer experience within your organisation? What can you do to ensure unwavering commitment amongst the leadership team?
•    How good is your organisation at delivering consistent customer experience? Is this a training issue or a culture issue?
•    To what extent is customer experience held back by silo mentality within your organisation? What can you do to break down the silos?
•    What sense of urgency exists within your organisation when dealing with customers’ requests? What can you do to improve responsiveness?
•    How proactive are you with customers? How well do you understand their needs so that you can suggest better ways of solving them? 
•    How is your customer experience program different today compared to last year or the year before? What can you do to keep it fresh?
•    Which of the pillars will you major on in your customer experience program?
 

Step 10: Getting buy-in for your CX program
•    How committed is the leadership team of your company to customer experience?
•    How siloed is your company? Which silos are the biggest barriers to improved customer experience?
•    Where within your company is a good starting point for the internal service culture?
•    What could make the leadership enthusiastic about an internal service culture?
•    What initiatives could break down the barriers between silos and build a service culture between departments?
 

Step 11: Bringing the sales team on board
•    How closely does the marketing and sales team work together in your company?
•    How can the marketing and sales team become more aligned to improve customer experience?
•    What success has your company had in developing a needs-based segmentation? What are the criteria that would make this possible?
 

Step 12: Creating an internal service culture
•    Culture trumps strategy. What is your company culture and is it suited to delivering excellent customer experience? How consistent is it throughout your company?
•    To what extent is your HR policy geared to customer service? Are you recruiting the right kind of people to provide excellent customer experience?
•    What training do people receive on delivering excellent customer experience? How far does this training extend throughout your organisation?
•    How good are your communication systems in providing people with the data that is necessary to deliver excellent customer expenses?
•    Do you have incentives in place that reward excellent customer experience? What incentives could work in your organisation?
 

Step 13: Use segmentation to improve CX
•    How up-to-date is your customer database? How comprehensive are the details you have on your customers?
•    How do you segment your customers at the present? What do you consider the strengths and weaknesses of this segmentation? How does it help you deliver a better experience to your customers?
•    What are the possibilities of segmenting your customers based on their behaviour or needs?
•    What additional data do you need from your customers to be able to carry out this analysis?
•    In what way do you think behavioural or needs based segmentation will help you serve your customers better?
•    What barriers, if any, are there in your company that could prevent you introducing a needs based segmentation? 
•    How readily will your company’s sales team accept a needs based segmentation and what will induce them to do so?
•    Do you do business with any companies in the European Union and, if so, are you organised to meet the needs of the General Data Protection Regulation?
 

Step 14: The role of your brand in CX
•    What influence do you believe your brand has on the decision to choose your company as a supplier?
•    What are the values of your brand that have most influence on the experiences enjoyed by your customers?
•    In what respect is your brand distinct and different from competitors?
•    What is the "why" of your brand? Do customers and potential customers know the reason for your company's existence?
•    To what extent are you building and developing your brand to deliver an enhanced customer experience?
•    To what extent are all the people in your company aligned with the values of your brand?
•    How consistent is the delivery of your brand? What inconsistencies need to be brought into line to strengthen the brand?
 

Step 15: The role of your product in building CX
•    Where do your company's products fit in the matrix of strategic importance versus spend?
•    What are the characteristics of the decision-making unit and their product needs?
•    What is it about the physical aspects of your product that people like? To what extent are these physical aspects unique?
•    How strong is your augmented product? What makes it strong? 
•    How do the service aspects and intangibles of your offer make your product more appealing?
•    How can you segment your customers in terms of their product needs? How could you use this segmentation to improve customer experience?
 

Step 16: The role of price in building CX
•    Where does your company and products fit on the value equivalence line? Are you to the left of the line and need to increase the perceived benefits of your offer? Are you to the right hand side of the line at a point where you can continue to win market share or where you can raise prices and increase profitability?
•    How transparent are your prices? How transparent are the prices of your competitors? How high are industry margins?
•    To what extent do your prices and margins make you vulnerable to a disruptor?
•    How do your customers understand value – what do they look for? 
•    What are the opportunities for improving customer perceptions of the value of your offer?
 

Step 17: The role of channel in building CX
•    Which channels do you use to reach the market at the present? Which channels are favoured by your customers? 
•    What do customers look for from the channels they use? To what extent do they get what they are looking for? 
•    What access do you have to these distribution channels? How could you change the emphasis on them should you need to do so?
•    What can you do for your distribution partners that will help them sell your products and give customers a better experience?
•    How do you segment your customers – is it on the basis of their size or their industry or can you recognise differences in their behaviour and needs?
•    How could a different approach to segmenting your customers improve customer experience?
•    What is your success at omnichannel marketing? How can you improve your digital offer?
 

Step 18: The role of promotion in building CX
•    Who are your target customers and what emotions drive their choice of suppliers? How does this differ throughout your customers and their customer journeys?
•    What promotions do you use to connect with target customers? What messages and emotions are communicated in these promotions?
•    In what way could you change your promotions to gain a greater emotional connection with customers?  What would excite your customers and potential customers?
•    In what way do you think this improved emotional connection would improve customer experience?
 

Step 19: The role of people in building CX
•    How strong are the relationships between your staff and your customers?
•    What is the contribution of your staff to the loyalty of your customers?
•    To what extent are the departments within your company integrated to provide seamless customer solutions?
•    When you hire people within your company (in any position) to what extent do you take into consideration their customer friendliness?
•    What training do customer-facing staff receive in delivering excellent customer experience?
•    What training does everyone in your company receive on service excellence?
•    How empowered are your employees?

Step 20: The role of technology in building CX

•    How integrated are the software platforms used by different departments in your company?

•    What would be the benefits to customers of improved software within your company in terms of ordering and communications? 

•    How do you engage the IT manager within your company into your customer experience programme? 

•    What is your success in omnichannel marketing? How can you improve your digital offer? 

•    How are you capturing the different characteristics of your customers and using them to recognise how you can better serve different segments?

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Step 21: Checking on the effectiveness of your CX
•    What metrics do you have access to that show whether or not your customer experience performance is improving?
•    How can you sense whether any new customer experience initiatives are working?
•    Which non-survey metrics (such as social media) can you use as a measure of your customer experience performance?
•    How would you judge the health of your CRM system? What is the quality of the data held on your CRM system?
•    What is the link between your CRM system and customer experience?
 

Step 22: Making constant improvements to CX
•    How good is your company at constantly improving processes and products to deliver customer experience that are cheaper, better and faster?
•    How good is your company at introducing new delights to customers?
•    To what extent do you use complaints to generate ideas for improving customer experience?
•    How good is your company at prioritising new ideas for improved customer experience?
•    How good is your company at implementing these new customer experience initiatives?
•    How inspiring is the reporting of customer experience performance to people at different levels within your company?