15 truths about customer experience

Customer Experience, even with all of the corporate and media attention its gotten the past decade, is still sort of a mystery. Many companies either bucket the discipline into some form of Customer Service or Marketing, thus limiting the group’s ability to reach across the organization.

Other companies allow Customer Experience to live in silos as part of functional teams and rely on the assumption that cross-functional alignment will happen as a result of projects requiring interaction. Others yet completely outsource this very critical piece of corporate strategy to agencies.

The reality is that a Customer Experience Management Program can thrive in a variety of implementations, so long as it meets a few core criteria:

1. Your program effectively represents, interprets, and reacts to its customers’ needs
2. Your program creates a network of Customer Evangelists throughout the organization that are a persistent driving force when it comes to maintaining a focus on customer-centricity in product and process design
3. A part of your program focuses on the development of the company culture
4. Your program uses some combination of quantitative and qualitative data to measure general satisfaction and improvements over time
5. Your program has Executive buy-in to drive change in the best interest of your Customer

So given all of these variances, how does one know where to start?

Let’s Start With 15 Truths About Customer Experience

I will be breaking each of these topics out into greater detail in a general series, which you can view in its entirety here.

1. No one is delivering a perfect Customer Experience 100% of the time.
2. Customer Experience cannot be successful as a siloed effort.
3. Customer Experience is not Customer Service.
4. Customer Experience is about the successful marriage of perception, emotion, and logic.
5. The Law of Diminishing Returns applies to some, but not all, Customer Experience initiatives.
6. Return on Customer Experience initiatives are often difficult to measure, but not impossible.
7. A big piece of Customer Experience is bringing the Brand and Brand Promise to life.
8. Oftentimes, the most impactful experiences for Customers are not what you think they are.
9. Data is critical to a successful program.
10. It is possible to create a globally consistent, yet culturally refined Customer Experience.
11. There is no single recipe for a successful Customer Experience Management Program.
12. In the world of Customer Experience, your employees are your Customers as well.
13. Even in a 100% online business model, there are still key “offline” experiences you need to address.
14. B2C and B2B Customer Experience Management Programs are very different, but still fundamentally the same.
15. You are never done with improving your Customer Experience.

Lastly, the mark of a well implemented Customer Experience Management Program is that your Customers believe your company offers a connected and engaging experience they didn’t know they needed and wouldn’t have asked for, but now cannot live without. Let this be the guiding tenet that we all collectively work towards.

This post is 1 of 16 in a Series on CXP Fundamentals.