The need for customer-centricity is more relevant today than ever, and also more difficult to achieve. It has become the new (old) battle, with a dramatically different battleground. Notwithstanding this, a recent white paper published by Phase 5 and TMG, The State of Customer Experience in Canada, shows that Canadian companies are only “somewhat aligned on the importance of CX focus”. While these results apply to one market, our experience with clients throughout North America tells us that it is a broader front. And, for companies that have adopted the mantra of customer-centricity, the market environment makes it a constant challenge to manage.
Let me just say that no company is perfect. We’ve all encountered bad products or experiences with companies that are otherwise really great. Notwithstanding the occasional flop by these good companies, the one thing that comes across in dealing with them is the consistency of the experience at every stage, whether it is in the products that they come out with, the interactions that you have with their digital channels, or the dealings through other channels. Their products seem to solve problems that needed to be solved. Their design is seamless and fits their brand. The in-person experience is what you would expect of them (which means their people feel it and live it). Overall, they seem to anticipate what you need and want at the right time and the right place. This concept seems simple enough, but in today’s world, it has become increasingly difficult to get it right.
At the heart of this overall experience is a commitment to put customers at the center of decisions, and to do so in a coordinated and consistent manner across the product, user and relationship lifecycle. This requires:
We recommend starting with an assessment of and guidance on these important elements to help companies achieve their ultimate goal of customer-centricity. Although projects can be siloed, customer views of companies are not necessarily shaped by a single experience, so it is critical to have an integrated view and leverage customer insights to drive decisions.
Whether you are developing products, designing the user experience for digital channels or shaping how you engage with customers across channels, having a vision and strategy for the overall experience they’ll have with your products and company provides an important framework for your efforts.
Beyond developing this overall framework, there are specific approaches and techniques to bring customers into the decision-making process across the innovation, user and customer experience design lifecycle that we’ll be discussing in subsequent blog posts.
Developing the framework and plan is just a starting point. To be truly customer-centric, companies need to ensure that their management approaches and processes put customers at the center of decisions and bring them to the table as important stakeholders.