Across Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, there are many podcasts dedicated to customer experience.
At CX Today, one of our team’s favorites is the Inspiring Women in CX podcast, hosted by Women in CX Founder and CEO Clare Muscutt.
In this podcast, an amazing array of female CX practitioners, consultants, and thought-leaders voice their opinions on everything customer experience.
To celebrate International Women’s Day, we wanted to shine a light on the podcast and share five top tips that we’ve picked up from recent guests. Check them out below.
1. Bring Teams Together for CX Experimentation
One of the most effective strategies for uniting teams is through experimentation and simulating customer experiences.
By stepping into the customers’ shoes via simulation or customer journey testing, teams can gain valuable insights, build cohesion, and develop a deeper understanding of their objectives.
So, provide the space and time for teams from different departments to collaborate, agree on goals, and experiment collectively. That fosters teamwork and innovation.
An excellent goal is to address customer complaints or failed processes.
That may start with mapping out these scenarios so everyone grasps the reality of the situation and identifies underlying process inefficiencies.
Often, these inefficiencies stem from entrenched ways of working and overlooked company rituals.
Yet, whatever the case, the company can root out the issue, test alternative solutions, and drive innovation instead of pouring more resources into contact handling.
- Maria McCann, Co-Founder of Neos Wave
2. Think About: What Behaviors Do We Want to Drive from Our Customers?
In many organizations, frontline teams often equate customer experience with metrics like mystery shopper evaluations, net promoter scores, or customer surveys.
However, the fundamental question lies in understanding the desired customer behavior.
It’s not merely about securing good scores. Rather, it’s about encouraging behaviors that drive tangible business outcomes.
Whether it’s increased website revisits, longer browsing sessions, referrals, higher purchase rates, or longer customer retention, these behaviors directly impact financial metrics. That allows us to quantify their significance.
Merely reacting to scores without proactively identifying and measuring the behaviors that drive financial outcomes will not sustain our roles within the organization.
We must develop the acumen to articulate how our initiatives contribute to the company’s financial success.
After all, every department is also seeking funds from the CFO and presenting plans that outline how their investments will drive specific outcomes and add value to the organization.
- Diane Magers, Founder and Chief Experience Officer at Experience Catalysts
3. Acknowledge and Close the CX Perception Gap
Personalized experiences stem from a deliberate choice by businesses to understand their customers’ desires, needs, and behaviors.
It’s not about automation alone. Instead, it’s about strategically selecting what to automate and what not to.
For instance, in the context of a call center, having the option to quickly resolve certain issues through an intelligent bot can be beneficial. However, there are situations where human interaction is preferred and likely to remain indispensable.
The challenge lies in driving businesses to design experiences that align with customer expectations.
A common issue is perceptual alignment, where businesses believe they deliver a particular experience but fall short in reality.
Leveraging technology can bridge this gap by providing insights into the customer experience and enabling businesses to effectively enhance those moments.
By using technology to gather and analyze feedback, as well as to tailor experiences based on customer preferences and behaviors, businesses can ensure they deliver experiences that align with customer expectations and drive satisfaction.
- Samantha Conyers, Chief Experience Officer at First Retail Group
4. Expand Perspectives Beyond Scores and Touchpoints
It’s essential to help people transcend narrow-minded management perspectives, especially during challenging times when budgets are tight and uncertainties loom over the supply chain and operating costs.
In such circumstances, remind individuals that our customers are the lifeblood of the organization—the very hand that feeds us.
To do so, leverage customer experience insights and encourage people to expand their perspectives beyond mere scores or touchpoints.
That starts by adapting to the constant evolution of the marketplace and integrating customer, employee, and partner insights into the decision-making processes.
By broadening their perspectives beyond immediate concerns and focusing on the greater good, we can rally people around the shared goal of serving our customers effectively.
- Lynn Hunsaker, Chief Customer Officer at ClearAction Continuum
5. Embrace a Customer Needs System
With ICG, we’ve developed a Customer Needs System to gather customer insights.
Unlike traditional metrics such as Net Promoter Score or Customer Satisfaction, this system focuses solely on understanding what customers require from our company in their own words.
From there, it organizes these needs into a hierarchy, providing a practical framework for action.
For instance, if the system identifies communication as a key customer need, it doesn’t stop at that broad category. Instead, it drills down to pinpoint the top three to ten drivers within communication.
Such specificity enables us to take targeted actions to enhance customers’ perception of communication, aligning with our company’s objectives and strategies.
That alignment is crucial because any initiatives undertaken to improve customer experience must resonate with our business operations, objectives, brand identity, and overall strategy.
- Olga Potaptseva, Founding Director of the European Customer Consultancy
Enjoy the Women In CX Podcast? Then, you may also like CX TV, where we host all of our video interviews. Check it out here.
The Women in CX launched the world’s first membership community for women in customer experience and technology on International Women’s Day 2021.
If you’d like to find out more, visit: www.womenincx.community
