Every CX leader wants to deliver the best possible customer experience, but that can be a daunting task. What is the ideal customer experience? How do you define it? And how can you ensure you’re delivering on it? This blog post will provide some insights into how to define and achieve your ideal customer experience.
The ideal customer experience won’t be defined in a boardroom. It’ll be defined by your customers.
What is the Ideal Customer Experience?
The Ideal Customer Experience (CX) is a combination of two things: what customers most desire and what is good for business. Happily, these are often the same thing. Delivering the ideal CX requires companies to meet baseline customer expectations at each point in the journey and also find new and meaningful ways to delight customers so they keep coming back again and again. As a rule of thumb, just remember that the ideal customer experience won’t be defined in a boardroom. It’ll be defined by your customers.
How Do You Achieve It?
Start with a Baseline of Expectations… and Desires!
The first step in defining the ideal customer experience is to establish what customers expect from their interactions with your brand. This baseline should include both fundamental and aspirational expectations. For example, customers may expect a seamless checkout process, but they may also aspire for more personalized experiences. And the emotional and rational drivers that inform their purchase decisions should also be identified and measured. Once these expectations are established, CX leaders can begin to build out their ideal customer experience from there.
Identify critical touch points & work to deliver them at no less than they are desired.
Once the baseline has been established, it’s time to identify all of the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand and develop strategies for appropriately optimizing them. It’s not about crushing every single one. It’s about delivering against each relative to its importance, and only swinging for the fences in the areas that your customers have identified are most critical to their enduring loyalty. This is where differentiation and delight happen in a way that’s actually practical for most organizations to execute.
Touchpoints can include anything from website design to product packaging and beyond. By analyzing each touchpoint individually, CX leaders can determine which ones need improvement and which ones are already providing a great customer experience. They can then use this information to create an overall strategy for improving their customers’ experiences across all touchpoints, on the customers’ terms.
Identify all of the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand and develop strategies for appropriately optimizing them.
Develop metrics & measure performance.
Finally, CX leaders must develop metrics that measure performance against their defined goals for the ideal customer experience. These metrics should reflect not only how well customers are interacting with specific touchpoints but also whether or not they are having positive experiences overall. By measuring performance regularly, CX leaders can hold themselves accountable for delivering on their promises and make sure they are always on track towards achieving the ideal customer experience.
Creating an ideal customer experience requires careful planning and strategy development by CX leaders. It starts with establishing a baseline of expectations; identifying critical touchpoints; and developing metrics that measure performance against those objectives—all while keeping in mind that every aspect of a company’s operations contributes directly or indirectly to its ability to deliver an outstanding customer experience. With this approach in hand, CX leaders have what they need to begin delivering against their customers’ desired version of the ideal customer experience!