The Multiple Dimensions of Customer Experience
Written by: Lauren Engle
A customer experience is more than when the customer makes a purchase or closes a deal. The TM Forum article Journey to the Core of Customer Centricity, authored by Nancee Ruzicka1 and published in 2017, defines the customer experience as a ‘big picture” of a multidimensional journey.
In a digital world, every user is connected, and the resultant experience determines the value of a service – and affects revenue, costs, and reputation. Every customer journey is made up of a complex series of interactions with individuals, technology, and automation. Each of these episodes contributes to the overall customer experience and impacts the quality of service delivered by the communications service provider (CSP) and its brand.
>>Learn more at the webinar: Customer Centricity: Five Strategies for Everyday Leaders
During our quest to understand our customers’ experiences, we realized we need to dig deep into our organization’s culture and practices and understand the human needs of those we serve. Here are three steps to consider when starting such an initiative:
Step 1 – Benchmark
Now benchmarking is not new, but we decided to stretch our perspective and benchmark against industries that excelled in delighting their customers. This required us to research places that had little to do with our core mission but everything to do with understanding the needs of those that we serve.
Step 2 – Ask your Customer
We quickly realized that we had customers whose experiences we influenced in many ways and at several touch-points throughout their customer journey. After the process was mapped out, it became clear that customer centricity requires collaboration, dialogue, and trust.
Step 3 – Metrics that Matter
The third and most interesting step is to gain clarity of which customer experience metrics work best for your organization.
This is a crucial step in gaining momentum – obtain leadership buy-in and alignment with your team. Everyone’s role on the team is critical, but we often do not set time to discuss how individual work impacts the overall customer experience.
These three steps provide a more robust understanding of customer experience dimension and can lead to actionable insights.
Understanding customer experience requires analyzing data accumulated about a customer’s reaction to anything they are experiencing as the journey unfolds. The process can be overwhelming at times, but the results can shift your organization’s culture in the right direction and deepen connection with your customer.
Register for the webinar here.
