Below is part 4 of our 4-part series aimed at helping you kickstart your journey of creating a Customer Experience Excellence strategy for your business. To read part 3 of the series, click here.
Deliver the Customer Experience Plan.
If you have been following the series, you may remember discussing how to invest resources and energy to understand your customers’ needs, developed strategies, and map out the desired customer experience journey. Once all that is underway, it’s time to create a plan to deliver that experience and put those insights into action.
Your Customer Experience Transformation Plan should be well thought out and achievable, with clear, incremental goals that build upon the success of each step. Depending on the scope of the project, you may need to create a single plan or a program with multiple project plans. Remember to be realistic and only take on what you and your team can handle.
Consider the following in your plan to ensure a smooth and successful rollout.
- Evaluating and establishing a unified Customer Experience Strategy that aligns with your business goals and customer needs
- Developing a Change Management Plan to address the various impacts the changes will have on the organization.
- Creating a Communication Plan for internal and external stakeholders to keep everyone informed and engaged
- Providing training and documentation for employees, consultants, and contractors involved in the User Experience Lifecycle to ensure everyone is equipped to deliver the best possible customer experience
- Offering proper support to help employees adapt to any changes in technology, processes, or policies as part of adopting a new Customer User Experience
- Developing an implementation and rollout plan for new technologies and processes to ensure a smooth and seamless transition
- Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) and creating detailed plans for aligning with employee performance goals, job roles, and the organization’s overall performance to measure and track progress toward your customer experience goals.
Optimize processes and existing technology.
Instead of immediately replacing your technology stack, consider a phased approach that integrates and optimizes your existing technologies. This approach allows you to make incremental improvements and see what works best without introducing drastic changes that may cause customer or employee disruption and business downtime. By taking a more natural, organic approach to technology changes, you can achieve better results and maximize the benefits in the long run.
Our analysis has shown that this optimization approach can be a more effective and efficient way to address technology needs. We encourage our customers to consider it as an option.
Implement new technology where appropriate.
Rolling out new technology can be exciting. However, it’s essential to conduct a thorough analysis before purchasing the latest shiny new tool. There are so many options available in any market today that it can be overwhelming to consider or have full knowledge of them. Whether you plan to do the analysis internally or hire a consultant, take the time to assess your business needs and the overall landscape to ensure that you choose the technology that will most effectively support your organization’s needs.
It’s also important to consider timing. When you implement is just as important as what you implement. Some technologies may have features that don’t align with your needs or require significant overhead. Vendor solutions may not scale as easily as anticipated or require advanced technical expertise. By conducting a thorough analysis and planning your implementation carefully, you can make informed decisions and ensure that your new technology helps your business thrive.
Streamline and minimize complexity.
Sometimes, less is truly more. It’s common for organizations to accumulate various solutions over time due to upstream dependencies, but this can lead to complexity and technical debt that hinder rather than help the business.
A better approach is to start by optimizing your business processes first. This will help you determine if the technologies you use to add value to your business or simply get in the way. Prioritizing the reduction of complexity, technical debt, and overhead in your existing systems can be more effective in the long run than implementing new systems immediately.
Streamlining and optimizing your current systems and processes can create a more efficient and effective business better equipped to handle new challenges and opportunities.
Measure and Empower the results.
In improving your customer experience, it’s important to remember that incremental progress is often better than trying to do everything at once or not taking any action at all.
After creating a Customer Journey Map and identifying the business processes that can be optimized and the operational efficiencies that can be gained through new technology solutions, it’s crucial to identify key metrics to measure your progress. As you mature your operations and gain experience with the technologies, continuously improve and optimize based on these key metrics. As you reach your goals, set new ones, and refine your outlook for the next quarter or year, ensure to incorporate customer feedback and sentiment along the way.
It’s also important to be flexible and open to refining your approach as you learn more about what works and what doesn’t. By taking an iterative approach and continuously striving to improve, you can create a customer experience that meets your business’s and customers’ evolving needs.
How StrataNorth Can Help.
Looking to improve the customer experience for your business? Struggling to define a Customer Experience Excellence strategy and technology roadmap? Let StrataNorth help.
As an IT advisory consultancy, we specialize in helping businesses of all sizes adopt the right technology to support their growth, work more efficiently, and deliver the best possible customer experience. Our team of experienced consultants is cost-competitive and fiercely independent in our analysis, ensuring that you get unbiased recommendations and guidance.
If you’re ready to transform your business’s operational efficiency and are seeking expert guidance, our Customer Success Management consultants can help. With decades of experience, they can assist you in reaching Operational Efficiency nirvana and provide you with a roadmap for success. Contact us today for a no-cost, no-obligation consultation with one of our Customer Success Management experts.
