Experience Action

So Many Improvements! Where to Start?

• Jeannie Walters, CCXP • Episode 82

Share episode

How do you prioritize customer experience improvements in a way that truly makes an impact? Discover the answer as an insightful question from Allison Shapira (www.linkedin.com/in/allisonshapira/) sets the stage for an engaging exploration into aligning customer experience enhancements with your organization's core goals. By mapping out the customer journey, we uncover the pain points and opportunities that matter most, using a combination of customer feedback and operational data to guide our efforts. Hear how to define success with a customer experience mission statement and discover the power of thoughtful touchpoint improvements, such as more efficient invoicing processes.

I'm reaching out to you—our dedicated listeners—to share your thoughts and questions about enhancing customer experiences. Your contributions are invaluable to our mission of making the world a better place by creating fewer ruined days for our customers. Leave a voicemail at askjeannie.vip and join us next week as we continue transforming ideas into actionable strategies.

Resources Mentioned:
CX Mission Statement Workbook -- https://bit.ly/cx-mission-workbook
CX Success Statement Workbook -- https://bit.ly/cx-success-workbook
Customer Journey Mapping Workbook -- https://bit.ly/cjmworkbook
Experience Investigators Website -- experienceinvestigators.com

Want to ask a question? Visit askjeannie.vip to leave Jeannie a voicemail! (And don't forget to follow Jeannie on LinkedIn! www.linkedin.com/in/jeanniewalters/)

MC:

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready set action.

Jeannie Walters:

It's the Experience Action Podcast, where we not only talk about customer experience, but we take action so that we can see the results that this delivers as a winning business strategy. I got a great question from my friend, Allison Shapira.

Listener Question:

My name is Allison Shapira and I'm wondering how we prioritize where to start in improving our customer experience because, as I think about the customer experience for my keynote speeches and for my training company overall, there's so many places along the customer journey that I could improve, but I'm wondering how do I prioritize the most important places to look and most important places to start to improve the customer experience? Thank you so much.

Jeannie Walters:

For those of you who don't know Allison, she's an amazing leader in her own right. She helps you understand communication strategies, executive presentations and is an amazing follow on LinkedIn. So if you're not following Allison Shapira, I highly recommend you do. Now let's get to her question. I think this is something that a lot of people really are faced with. You know, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm running a business. I know exactly how many priorities there are, and guess what? There are always too many. We always have too many things to juggle. We are always worried about the next thing on our to-do list, and rightfully so. There's a lot to do. So what do we do when we know there are things we can do to improve the customer's journey, when we recognize that there are places that we could turn it up just a notch and make a big difference for our customers? Well, we need to take a step back and think about what we're really trying to do. Now I talk about customer experience as a winning business strategy, because it is so. What this means is Allison, I want you to step back and think about what and think about what is most important for your organization right now. You're leading this successful speaking and training business. So what are your goals around that? Do you have specific revenue goals, or maybe goals around how you want to expand your offer, or you know? Whatever you're dealing with as a business leader, you want to take that step back and think about what are the most important goals and objectives for the organization and start there. If you understand and have identified your goals as an organization, you want to take a look at those and think about what could we do that would have the biggest impact on these goals. That way, instead of doing something that maybe will have a slight impact on the customer journey, you're looking at places that maybe prevent customers from moving to that next step with you. Are you having trouble with converting prospects into sales? Are you having problems with customers who don't become repeat customers or don't continue on in the journey? That's where I would start. I would look for where those things that we know are stopping the customer from doing continued business with us.

Jeannie Walters:

Now, in order to do this really well, you might want to take another step and actually map out your customer's journey. Now, there are lots of resources on our site at experienceinvestigators. com, as well as several courses that I have on LinkedIn Learning, and if you don't know where to start for customer journey mapping, I would start where you can. It does not have to be high tech. It can be something that you really just focus on one part of the journey that you know is a problem, and what you want to do is really understand what is it that your customer is experiencing. So, instead of looking at the processes from within your organization, you really want to step outside of that and consider what are they experiencing? Where are those challenges and pain points that we can make a little bit better? Where can we actually improve the experience and help them feel valued and guided and empowered to take the next step with us? So that's a great place to start is really thinking about your strategy overall. Thinking about how have you defined success. If you don't have a customer experience mission statement and a customer experience success statement? Those are other tools that you can use to really define what your goals are if you haven't yet taken that step.

Jeannie Walters:

And then you want to map the customer journey to make sure you really understand what are they actually experiencing? Where are those touch points that maybe we aren't doing enough, maybe we're neglectful. The one I always bring up with small business is that sometimes we assume that whenever we send, the invoice is good and the invoice is just the invoice, we don't have to think about it. But that is a valuable touch point with our customers. We want to make sure that we are delivering when they expect us to deliver, in the way that they expect and in a way that makes it easy and, dare I say, delightful to do business with us. So really look at those types of touch points that matter most to your business and to the customer first.

Jeannie Walters:

Now you can also use whatever data you have access to here. Look at things like if you do collect customer feedback, what are they telling you is most important? How are they explaining that they want the experience to be improved? So if you have that feedback data, it's a great time to look at that too. You also might want to consider operational data. Our websites can give us a lot of information these days about where people find us, how they take the next step when they don't. So things like that can really guide you to where those important touch points are along the journey as well, and then, as you're going through this, it can still feel overwhelming. Because if we're looking at defining success for the first time and if we're mapping the customer journey and we're looking at our data, you might get a really, really long list of things that you want to improve, and that's great, that's a good thing, I promise. But you want to actually structure that in a way that you make progress.

Jeannie Walters:

I've seen a lot of customer journey mapping exercises that end with overwhelm, because we usually come up with a great list of improvements but then when we look to the leaders to make those changes, they say things like well, that's too much, I can't do that in addition to my job. But this is where we have to go back to why we're doing this. We're doing this to have more successful organizations. We're doing this because we know if we treat the customer better, if we make their life a little easier, if we help them move through the journey and achieve their goal, feel their emotions, feel good about the relationship with us, they will spend more money with us, they will move through the journey more quickly and they will actually buy from us in the future, and so we have to keep tying it back to, yes, this might feel like it's an addition to your job, but really isn't this our job to create winning business strategies and then execute on them. That's what this is.

Jeannie Walters:

So if you have that long list, if you have too much and it feels overwhelming, I would recommend you think about what are the quick wins and what are the long-term priorities, and so go through that list and start anything that you think you can solve within a week or a month and then prioritize that list. What can we actually execute on? And then you want to look at those longer term, maybe more complex things that you want to do for your customers and tie everything back to those original goals. What are we trying to do as an organization and what is the biggest impact we can have with our customer experience to achieve our goals? Because sometimes people talk about customer experience as if it's just nice to have or the right thing to do. But you know what? We need to have customers, don't we? We need to have customers who spend money with us, and not the competition. We need to make sure that our customers are happy enough with us so that they continue to be customers, they continue to show up and make purchases, they continue to refer us to other people, and so when we're looking at doing this as a business strategy, we have to keep coming back to those goals.

Jeannie Walters:

If you can, include leaders throughout your organization. CX is a team sport we need to have that cross-functional buy-in. And then we also want to pilot things. This is where we can experiment, we can iterate, we can try new things and see if it works. We can get feedback through beta programs or customer interviews and really find out what's working and what's not, and how can we move this forward. And then the last thing I want you to remember here: this is not easy work. I don't want to, you know, whitewash this and say that, no problem, this is easy. No, no, this is work. But when the efforts pay off, they really, really pay off.

Jeannie Walters:

And so if you know the objective that you have and the outcome you want to achieve, and you put in the right effort and you show up and have the discipline to really execute on these strategies, you will see both small and big wins, and what I want you to do is to celebrate every single one of those small wins and then really celebrate those big wins, right? So if your objective is to help more customers convert in your journey and let's say, you knew that there was a certain spot in the journey that just wasn't working, so that's where you put your effort. Well, that might not translate into conversions right away, but what it will translate into is more people moving further into your customer journey. That is a win. So make sure you're not overlooking those things that are leading indicators that tell you that customers are becoming more comfortable, they are moving through your journey and they are going to get to that point of conversion in ways that they hadn't in the past. So look for ways to celebrate. Look for ways to really make sure that the people who put in the effort are celebrated and that they recognize that all of these efforts are paying off.

Jeannie Walters:

So what a great question. Thank you so much for this. Thank you to everybody who shows up and watches us on YouTube or listens on your podcast app. We love helping you solve your issues through customer experience leadership. That's what we are all about.

Jeannie Walters:

So if you have questions about customer experience, we want to hear from you, and if you want to let us know who you are, like Allison did, or if you want to leave an anonymous question, we are open to all of those things. Just leave me a voicemail at askjeannie. vip. We're so happy you're here. We're so happy with the work that you do every day on behalf of your customers, and by being here, you are helping me live my mission, which is To Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers, because I really believe that makes a better world. So I'm glad you're in it. Thanks so much for being here, and I'll talk to you next week. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigators. com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Jeannie Walters, CCXP

Host