No detail is too small in the customer journey
Forget the broad sales and marketing goals that were hammered into you at in this morning’s meeting. If you want a competitive advantage, your company needs to be identifying, anticipating and facilitating the subconscious desires of your customers. The best way to do that is through empathetic, personalised attention to the smallest details of your customer journey, even if they’re not overt enough for the customers themselves to see them as explicit pain points.
Anecdotes have impact
It’s easy to ignore a single tweet amongst thousands, but the truth is that closing the feedback loop on a seemingly innocuous customer suggestion will delight and surprise them. In a world with so much product standardisation across industries, offering refreshing customer experiences by way of small, unexpected nuances in your offerings can make all the difference. Imagine how shocked and delighted you’d be if the next time you renewed your car insurance you received a handwritten thank you note from your CEO; the impact would be substantial.
Fulfill unspoken needs
Fix problems before the customer even recognises them as such. Areas of improvement need to be anticipated and addressed so smoothly that customers recognise an enhancement but can’t necessarily attribute it to anything specific. The most efficient way to do this is to utilise modern Voice of the Customer technology to monitor customer sentiment and satisfaction and record the tiny aspects of their journey that are affecting their behaviours. Beyond identifying pain points, these systems can highlight opportunities for incremental improvements to things that are already working.
You can’t afford to rest on your laurels and assume customers that have been loyal will always stay that way. Constantly surprise them by reorienting their customer journey to focus on hyper-personalised experiences at every little touchpoint and they’ll evolve from participant to promoter.
Originally published on the Customer Experience Company Blog
