Continuous Improvement Fundamentals to Build a Customer-Centric Business

Today, all companies who want to get an edge over their competition must embrace customer experience continuous improvement as a strategy to ensure their customers receive great customer experiences.

Why? The customer experience is a key ingredient to getting new business and keeping customer loyalty. But delivering excellent customer experiences isn’t something that you can measure one time and not look to improve. The reason for this is that customer expectations are constantly rising – and what’s seen as exceptional service today, may not be the exceptional service of tomorrow. Businesses need to keep innovating and improving their service, or risk being left behind.

For all businesses then, it’s essential to set up a continuous improvement process that will constantly improve the customer experience, helping to keep your customers delighted with your service, and helping to boost loyalty.

To help you to do this, use a customer experience improvement strategy that can be adapted to all situations where improvement is required, and advocates for an established process for these situations:

• Plan your change
• Do the change
• Study, or check the results of the change
• Act to improve the change further

Here are steps you can use to build a management process that closes the loop and acts on customer feedback, all the while improving experiences for your customers.
 

Important Questions to Ask in Improving Customer Experience

Customer experience involves many sides including customers, employees, organizational culture and so forth. Before taking on any changes, you need to know where you stand. The best way is to ask important questions that will fall into three categories: customers, your market, and your product.

1. Customers

• Is it possible to spend more time with customers?
  Spending more time with them will help you to understand their needs better. Surveys, calls and personalized promotions can help you to achieve this. Data collected can be used to create new customer experience projects and improve your products or services.
• Can customers be involved in creating better CX?
  Involving customers in the development of customer experiences can help achieve better results. A good example is of Doritos, who asked their customers to come up with ideas for advertisements which were played during the Super Bowl.
• Can we turn data into insights for the project?
  Is the data collected useful and is it worth collecting? Make sure that you’re not just collecting data for the sake of it – that data should always be in service of actionable insights.

2. Market

• How can we assess the competition’s customer experience strategies?
  If the competition is treating their customers well, customers will expect a similar experience from your company. Other businesses can hugely affect your own customer experience – plan and prioritize so.
• Is there a way to maximize industry data?
  Watching how customers interact with the competition can help in understanding the market forces in play and can be used to your advantage. Companies like Gartner and Forrester can help with enabling you to better understand data within your industry.
• How can we reflect on our position against the competition?
  Periodic assessment of customer experience successes and failures, and what other companies are doing differently, helps you ensure that you can stay ahead of the competition. But as your competitors launch new strategies, you’ll need to ensure you can keep abreast of these as they occur.

3. Product

• Is it possible to be a part of product creation?
  The customer experience manager should ideally be involved in product creation. This supplies insight for aligning the customer experience to match your company’s capacity.
• Can we work more closely with product developers?
  Customer experience managers are the link between the customer and the company, so they should know what product developers can produce to better match customer expectations.
• How can customers be involved in developing the product?
  Both developers and customers can benefit from this. The former gets a new perspective and insight, while the latter appreciate the work going into the customer experience.