The management blog Econsultancy recently hosted a series of round-tables where they discussed the key attributes for creating a great customer experience (CX). The outcome was to boil down the essence of CX strategy to six steps.

1. Understand the customer journey…

2. Show and tell others what the customer service team is doing…

3. Make digital the priority…

4. Use Net Promoter Score (NPS) as your basic metric…

5. Develop self-service…

6. Get ready for the bots…

This is a good list, although it naturally reduces a big subject to a few short bullet-points. However, I think the focus of this list should really be points 1, 2, 5, and 6.

The customer journey is changing dramatically and has completely shifted in the past decade – nobody was using the mobile Internet or social networks a few years back and this has now revolutionised how your customer relates to products.

Achieving change within your own organisation requires a strong level of support and the changing customer journey will change how your company looks and functions. Just think of the connection today between marketing and customer service – great customer service is now marketing. If you are not coordinating all the places that your company reaches out to customers then you cannot achieve a great CX.

Improving your self-service options and introducing automation, such as bots, will help to deflect calls and increasingly this is how customers want to be served – just look at the rise of messenger apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. These are the communication tools of first choice for many customers and brands need to support a CX within them.

I haven’t emphasised points 3 and 4 here because I think digital priorities all depend on your business and metrics vary from company to company.

In fact, in many ways I believe that the customer journey has changed so much that we cannot continue using the same metrics that regular call centres used. We need to think of new ways to measure customer behaviour so we can measure the behaviours that create great outcomes.

If you were thinking of the top 5 or 6 strategies that lead to a great CX, which would you list first?

You can read the original article here – https://econsultancy.com/blog/67867-six-must-do-s-for-a-successful-customer-experience-programme/