Creating A Good Customer Experience Framework

A recent survey by Adobe found that customer experience is the most exciting opportunity that businesses want to work on this year, especially during an uncertain economy. This is for good reason. Improving CX has been proven to increase customer loyalty, satisfaction, and also increase inquiries. But in most organizations, including many Fortune 500 businesses, CX is hit or miss and depends to a great extent on the earnestness of the employee serving your customer. 

Building a customer experience framework can help organizations set up processes that are employee-agnostic and easily replicable. Here are a few tips to build a top notch CX framework.

Start with CX Fail Scenarios

At a broad level, every business wants its customers to go home happy with their product or service. But this is not always possible. There are a number of things that can go wrong. The specific unit your customer bought may be faulty; They may feel misled on a marketing claim; The hold time for the customer support line may be too long, and so on.

These are various scenarios where a customer is likely to feel frustrated or even start disliking your product or company. A good CX framework will identify all the different things that can go wrong and establish protocols and processes that can not only set things straight but can also predict and potentially avoid things from escalating before they do.

Build automation use-cases

Once you identify the various scenarios, it is time to establish protocols to fix them. The first step in this process is to create SOPs that need to be followed in each of these cases. For example, how do you deal with a customer who is unhappy with their purchase? Do you readily refund them? Should you look at their purchase history to assess if they habitually request refunds? Creating SOPs at a granular level will help customer-facing executives execute their responsibilities in a seamless and expected manner. 

However, you must remember that SOPs are theoretical in nature. What happens in a real world transaction can often very well be different. It is hence important to create automated processes wherever possible. 

For example, you may integrate your order processing with email marketing so that you can automatically seek feedback from customers who have just received their orders. You can build on this email marketing automation further by connecting unhappy customers directly with a customer support rep who can talk to them and resolve issues. 

This way, customer concerns are addressed as soon as they occur and this improves CX significantly.

Build feedback loops

You don’t get things right in the very first attempt. A feedback loop is an important component of any organizational process since it tells you if the key objectives of any exercise are being met. This feedback can be acquired actively as well as passively. Metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) are all helpful in gathering active feedback from your customer.

You may also survey your customers to understand what they liked about the experience, what they would have changed, how your business compares to others in the industry, and so on. Doing this gives you a template to follow for future CX initiatives. 

In addition to this, you may also look at metrics like repeat purchase and churn rate to assess the impact of your current initiatives to see if they are working, and how you can fix experience to move these numbers up.

Creating a good CX framework is all about identifying the processes that make customers happy. Knowing what works, and what doesn’t allows you to give a structure to the exercise that can be replicated for all future transactions.