ANJUM KHANNA
Delivering exceptional customer experience has become a key differentiator for top organisations today.
In most cases, customers are making contact because of a failure somewhere in the system. Understanding the failure point becomes critical not only to improve the customer experience but also to look at opportunities to redesign services from the customer’s perspective rather than to suit business needs. These pain points can provide a strong basis on which to identify initiatives to improve.
Delivering exceptional customer experience has become a key differentiator for top organisations today.
In most cases, customers are making contact because of a failure somewhere in the system. Understanding the failure point becomes critical not only to improve the customer experience but also to look at opportunities to redesign services from the customer’s perspective rather than to suit business needs. These pain points can provide a strong basis on which to identify initiatives to improve.
Partnering to deliver customer services can help you manage increasing customer expectations by bringing new and innovative thinking, as well as expertise and experience in a low-risk and controlled environment.
When redesigning services, organisations are striving to forward plan as much as they possibly can. None of us have a crystal ball therefore trying to design a service that will work for the next 20 years is near on impossible. However, taking ideas and innovative solutions from other sectors and applying these to your own is a good starting point.
The digital revolution has been fundamental in shifting public thinking away from a sense of dependency to one of independence – people are now asking how can I do this myself? The key is to build on this willingness to change by equipping people with the right tools, training and techniques to enable them to do their jobs. This invites the opportunity to increase engagement, enable teams to keep pace with the constantly evolving technology landscape and create an organisation culture where it’s ok to try, test and learn.
Understanding where staff, customers and partners are on their journey, what works and what doesn’t and applying that learning can provide a rich picture of data and insight. Identifying when you need to bring in external capacity and experience to support successful transformation, which will offer independent challenge and problem-solving capability can be a real advantage.
Developing customer insights is a powerful way to drive innovation. But how do you know you're doing it right? Asking somebody what they want is one of the easiest ways to understand the drivers behind your service demand. You need to understand what the customer is doing and why they are doing it. The amount of insight you have will be dependent on the platforms you use, but you should also explore other sources, including engaging with your front-line staff, market research techniques or even conducting pilots to test new initiatives on specific customers.