In today's individualistic world personalization and customization are one of the major success factors with products and services. How can we succeed with a tailored Customer Experience personalized to the needs of our main clients? We need to solve the essentials and then discover product, communication and process personalization.
The essentials for a Tailored Customer Experience
Before starting to create or strive for better customer experiences with our products or services we need to check if we have 3 basics in our culture and organisation:
Culture of Care
Only if we truly care about every human in our organisation, we can convince our employees to care about customer. Do you really care about your employees, partners, suppliers etc. and their easiness to work or make business with you and do you further care about their well-being? Or do you care mainly about numbers or profits? It is essential to build a culture of care before starting customer or employee experience programs.
Experience the Customer
Ask yourself when was the last time you spoke or interacted with an end customer? If customers are just reports and data for you, you probably do not have the full understanding of success stories or issues of your customer. Make sure that even as a top manager or decision maker, you meet customer and front-end staff on a regular basis to get real customer stories and issues rather than just anonymized data reports. This also helps to build empathy with customers throughout the organisation if everybody has real customer interaction regularly.
Agile Project Management
Customer needs or issues often happen along the entire customer journey or in handovers between one department to another. Therefore it is paramount to have an agile project culture to be able to work across teams with focus on the customer issues rather than any hierarchical or process-oriented barriers in your organisation. Clients want fast and convenient solutions and often front-end staff has the best ideas based on their daily experience. Listen to them and make sure that you can enable project managers to drive customer experience innovation in your organisation.
Product Personalization
The most obvious personalization customers want is product related. A lot of businesses already master this process by giving customers design and customization access before the actual manufacturing process (e.g. Tesla cars) or by having a wide-range of product features or functions available (e.g. Samsung smartphones).
A further approach to product personalization is "building blocks"in which single products could be offered out of a product system or environment and consumers therefore can choose to buy more within the same environment (e.g. IOS or Android products).
Please keep in mind that at the end the customers decides how to use your product and it does not have to be your original idea. As shown below, pan can be used not only for cooking:
Communication Personalization
We need to be present with our company or customer service communication wherever the customers are naturally. This also encompasses the way and medium customers choose for daily communication.
During my time as VP Customer Experience / Customer Service at Lazada (Alibaba Group), we found out that especially internet-affin clients on Ecommerce prefers to chat for customer service or receive chat or social media updates for marketing. We launched a project to connect Lazada customer service agents to the main communication platforms in Vietnam which are Zalo (local Whatsapp clone) and Facebook Messenger. We achieved with this project a turnaround of Call to Chat Ratio in CS from 70 - 30 to 30 to 70%, resulting in 70% of the clients prefer chat and only 30% using the call hotlines.
Advantages for clients to use CS chat:
Client preferred these common chat systems for multiple reasons such as not to have to wait in an In-App Chat screen, no costs for common chat system opposite to call center hotlines and natural multi-tasking with friends and colleagues while chatting with agents.
Advantages for company to use CS chat:
Chat agents can handle 3-4 chats at the same time rather than just one call, which can decrease the agent headcount and therefore CS costs. Furthermore the slower timing of chatting usually increases the first call resolution as agents have time to gather background information. Being in customer's standard chat environments also eases the communication with clients as we are part of their friend and acquaintance list rather than a hostile call center.
Process Personalization
Most companies are using very difficult and complex process mapping to set-up the flow of products and services through the organisation. Unfortunately customers have to go often through the same processes to require a product or service or to solve any issue on the way.
Customer do not care or want to know about handovers between different departments and teams in your organisation as they want a consistent solution from the entire company. Often customer complaints occur when they fall into the famous "cracks"on processes between different teams (as they often work siloed it is very difficult to solve these issues).
Furthermore similar as products, customers are using processes to their advantages, e.g. in one of our university clients, students can be absent 20% of the course for emergencies. But often they use the 20% already at the beginning of a semester completely.
It is paramount that we not only personalize or customize products, but also look into communication and processes. It is a revolution in the car industry that Tesla can be reached online anytime and a lot of issues with Tesla EV can be solved online by updates rather than going to a physical dealer.
For more information or a workshop on how to build a personalized customer experience in your business please contact us: carsten@asiapmo.com or use our contact form
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