Strategy is inherently about calibrating the levers we can control to compel customers to act or think about our product, service, or brand in a certain way.
In this way, strategy at its heart should be human-centred, and it should spur a concurrent customer experience. Can someone please explain that to my bank?
Recently, I had a problem with my bank account that remains unresolved. Though my relationship manager has since apologised, citing ‘back office’ issues, I find two issues problematic with this response:
First, had the bank used the plentiful data they have about me, I shouldn’t have had the issue to begin with.
Second, when a problem arises in the back office, rather than just accepting the status quo, companies should use it as an opportunity to identify a leverage point in the system and put in place a process to rectify it so that it doesn’t happen to the next customer.
Instead, my credit card has been blocked for five days, meaning that all my automated payments are frozen and there are various other ramifications.
First-world problems, I know, but an inconvenience nonetheless.
The race to become omnichannel in our communications is meaningless if our internal processes and systems don’t speak to each other. The imperative to be ‘data-driven’ isn’t an end goal because being customer-focused is not just about collecting data to sell more stuff.
Rather, it is about fundamental behaviours, structures, and mindsets that put people at the heart of everything a business does. So how should an organisation go about this?
Ask radical questions
If we are serious about designing better customer experiences, we should begin by asking questions that help us understand what’s working and what’s not.
What are the most common daily frustrations our customers have? What motivates our customers and drives their decisions? How do we know our new website design is user-friendly?
We live in a world where customers no longer compare their experiences within categories but across categories. We expect outstanding customer service from our rental car company, just as we do from our hotel reception.
At the same time, we value our privacy. In the words of former Greek Finance Minister Dr Yanis Varoufakis, people don’t want to become “machine food,” and we don’t want to be bombarded with emails every other day from our technology company.
Understanding what type of experience our customers expect is important to help us frame our challenge.
Asking our customers the right questions and analysing metrics allows us to identify areas for improvement and modifications, ensuring our service aligns more effectively with customer expectations.
Shifting our mindset from exploitation to exploration
Economists like Adam Tooze have identified that we’re living in a period of interwoven and overlapping challenges—environmental, political, economic, and geopolitical. Added to this are technological acceleration and algorithms that take advantage of our innate human weaknesses.
It has become clear that the way to build a bright future for humanity is by developing a new definition of value that focuses on regeneration rather than exploitation.
For customer experience, this means designing customer exchanges that are at the service of more fulfilling or useful interactions with our organisation or product.
This could look like enhancing the onboarding experience for users or cutting down the wait time for repeat customer prescriptions.
Use technology to tell stories
One of the biggest challenges faced by any organisation today is how to turn information into knowledge. While investing in a customer engagement and experience stack is essential, what matters more is how we use that technology.
AI is a powerful tool that can help organise and visualise a deluge of data that we can then turn into actionable plans, but the ability to develop powerful narratives from our data, and the creativity and experience to deliver those stories as catalysts for actions, outcomes and connections is more important than ever.
When I think about customer experience, I think about it in its broad brand sense, which is how customers interact with and perceive a brand.
The latter includes the full customer journey, customer contact points, and customer insight and feedback. In this way, customer experience is not only the domain of a department, but it becomes part of the whole company’s scorecard.
From this viewpoint, customer experience can become the competitive strategy, rather than a component of it, or the focus of one department.
We have more tools than ever at our disposal to do this, but we also need to foster the right human-centred behaviour and mindset to allow us to be at the service of humanity.
By Brenda Kassir, Strategy Director at Cheil
