Which Comes First: Business Strategy or Customer Experience?

Photo by paul bica

Following up on yesterday's post, "Making Promises, Keeping Promises: Building Brand and Loyalty through Customer Experience," organizations must transform by aligning toward customer experiences to gain a competitive edge, as explained in "Customer Experience: Is it the Chicken or Egg?" by Christine Crandell.

During last month's Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit, brand strategists, innovation experts and other thought-leaders shared their insights and best practices for driving a customer-centric culture. Here are some highlights to help you design and deliver exceptional customer experiences:

• "Incorporating the Rational and Emotional in the Client Experience Journey"
• "How to Build an Experience Management Core Competency"
• "Innovating a Roadmap for Customer Experience"

 

Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.

Innovating a Roadmap for Customer Experience

Photo by paul bica

 

 

"There are no traffic jams along the extra mile." - Roger Staubach, former star NFL quarterback
 

Organizations that focus on improving the customer experience will strengthen their customer relationships and their overall business performance. Len Ferman knows this first-hand. Len is Managing Director of Ferman Innovation, specializing in generating and evaluating ideas to improve the customer experience.

Len is also a world juggling champion. During the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit (TCEL) earlier this month, he reinforced the three principles of new product innovation through his unique presentation. TCEL attendees learned how to juggle scarves while learning how to solve their customer experience challenges using this proven process:

 

3 Steps to Innovating for the Customer Experience:

1. Explore: Understand the customer journey. Identify the customer pain points and challenges. Identify themes for brainstorming.
2. Ideate: Brainstorm with a diverse group to generate a high quantity of possible solutions. Enable all employees to contribute ideas.
3. Evaluate: Evaluate, cultivate and prioritize the top ideas for implementation

Learning to juggle not only helped TCEL attendees improve their ability to multi-task, increase eye-hand coordination, sharpen their brains and impress their friends, but also provided these valuable insights related to the 3 Steps:

 

Explore:

• Break down complex processes into elementary steps
• Learn how to use the tools that are at your disposal
• Recognize the patterns and categories in your data
• Identify your customers' key problems
• Strive for accuracy in basic tasks
• Create intentional "wow" experiences

Ideate:

• Defer judgment - no idea is a bad idea
• Include all parts of your organization in idea generation
• Stray out of your comfort zone to generate ideas
• Balance different methods of brainstorming
• Go for quantity when generating ideas
• Great ideas are the result of collaboration and building on others' ideas

Evaluate:

• Filter out extraneous information and out of scope ideas
• Evaluate each idea using carefully designed criteria
• Include subject matter experts and customers in the evaluation
• Cultivate ideas until they resonate with customers
• Prioritize your actions to ensure you reach the goal
• Optimal solutions are the ones that match your core competencies

Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.