Customer experience (CX) is a driving force in every organization and has opened a whole new career path. What’s driving this movement is that how people and companies purchase goods and services has changed dramatically in the past ten years.
The abundance and easy access to information, competitors, product reviews and customer feedback has fundamentally and forever changed how buyers do their purchase research and make decisions. In many cases, buyers can completely bypass a salesperson and purchase online.
For companies that sell products and services, it’s no longer about selling. They have to be where the buyer is at every point on the buyers’ purchase journey with the right information, in the right format offered in the right channel. Sellers have to enable buyers to achieve their target outcomes.
For organizations this change in buyer behavior and expectations is redefining marketing, salesvand customer service. The key to success is understanding what buyers are doing along their journey and what their expectations are of ‘winning’ brands. Those companies that can best –
and consistently – deliver the experience that customers expect will grow revenue, profitability and customer loyalty faster.
This course is an introduction to the multi-faceted discipline of customer experience and is focused on business-to-business (B2B). By the end of the course, you will be able to understand the major concepts, challenges and be able to discuss with your managers what your company is doing to be customer aligned.
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An Introduction to Customer Experience (CX)
The best place to start is by understanding some of the key terms and concepts that are frequently used when discussing customer experience. Twitter is a good resource; follow hashtags #CX #CEM #customerexperience #customersuccess From the concepts, we’ll move on to why customer experience is a challenge for companies to embrace. Hint: change is always hard and this requires a new mindset as well as new skills.
Now that you understand some of the terminologies, concepts and why companies struggle to be customer aligned, let’s understand a high-level framework of the journey that buyers go through. While many companies focus primarily on the ‘purchase’ part of the journey because it leads to closing a sale, market leaders recognize that understanding the entire journey – pre-, purchase and post-purchase – is the key to realizing the ROI of customer experience. We’re going to focus on the Sellers’ Compass® framework. It covers the entire relationship lifecycle and has been time tested to be valid across a number of industries, specifically manufacturing, distribution, high technology, education/higher education, SaaS software, fintech and professional services.
At this point, you understand the concepts and have a high-level framework along with some idea of what it takes to delight customers. You’ve heard many references to journey mapping which is the process by which you would uncover what buyers do and what their experience expectations are. Journey maps are the decoder ring of customer alignment. There are many ways to do journey mapping with varying levels of effectiveness. Let’s dive into an overview of how to develop a journey map and then how to use it to improve the effectiveness of marketing.
Journey maps for your organization’s top target markets and buyer/user roles equip you to move the needle for customers. What most companies need is someone in the organization to be the voice of the customer and show other team members the little (and big) changes they can make in their jobs that have a huge positive impact on customers. In this section, we’ll go deeper into how other companies have achieved results and some challenges that organizations need to overcome on their path to embracing customer experience. Use the information you’ll learn in this section as a foundation to ask questions of your peers and get others to start talking about customer experience.
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