Customer Experience and Continuous Improvement Processes – Key Strategies and Measuring ROI

Here’s a customer experience strategy that can help organizations improve the customer experience. 

1. Gather Insights

   Many organizations assume they know what customers want without taking the time to ask. The best way to understand customers’ needs is to ask them. They’re the best information source available to any organization. Customers should be the first port of call when trying to figure out what to improve.

   To gather insights into customer needs, organizations should enact measures to collect feedback – both quantitative and qualitative. They should measure this feedback again at the end of the change project.

   The best way to gather insights is through surveys, focus groups, and questionnaires.

2. Set Goals

   After collecting customer feedback, it’s time to set goals for each potential change. Doing this helps organizations clarify what they need to change. It also enables management to assess how to measure the impact of any changes made.

3. Planning

   Once management has identified a specific area for improvement, it’s important to get all teams on the same page. Teams working on the agreed-upon solutions should have a clear idea of the overall direction of the change. This ensures that the change project meets the organization's goals and remains on budget and scope.

4. Implementation

   Once everyone in the organization buys into the rationale of the change project, implementation becomes easy. For this reason, organizations should onboard key stakeholders early and often. It’s OK to start small, go after the low hanging fruit, and use the initial quick wins for momentum as you tackle the larger initiatives.

   Have milestones throughout the delivery cycle that everyone is aware of and agrees with. Test the solutions so you know the limitations before deployment into the field.

5. Project Monitoring

   Customer service and continuous improvement processes are sometimes hard to fully scope out. Therefore, management must monitor the release of new projects to meet the customers' and the organization's needs. The way to ensure the projects are meeting the customers' needs is to continuously solicit feedback. Utilizing test groups is also a great way to get immediate actionable feedback on your innovations.

   To monitor projects effectively, leaders should understand both the initial and desired states to compare them. There should be regular assessments done between these two states since services can change based on various variables. These variables include holidays, time of year, sales volume, and others.

   It’s important to come up with clearly defined metrics at the start of the project. You should select these metrics with the customer in mind. The goal is to determine how the project improves CX and not measure the team's efficiencies and other internal statistics.

6. Control

   Organizations should not look at success in the here and now. They should also maintain any positive changes they make now well into the future. After all, they want to lock in all the positive gains made and continue to monitor improvements.

   There should be a plan to regularly revisit the project goals because employees tend to slip back into comfortable behavior. Often, this behavior is contrary to the goal of improving the customer experience.