Ever have a sneaking suspicion something about your CX isn’t quite right, but don’t know how to fix it? Is that happening with your organization’s customer experience design for service delivery?
Lately, I’m seeing a lot of good intentions gone awry with customer experience, and a lot of leaders and followers defending their intentions of the design, instead of dealing with the reality of the situation.
Does your customer experience design need work?
Allow me to share a few recent examples of broken customer experience design from my consulting work – see if you recognize any red flags happening in your organization.
1. “But the approval for this process took 18 months! It would be so embarrassing if we had to change it.”
I call this one the “but we tried syndrome.” In this particular case, the process to streamline B2B customer billing had completely backfired:
- Customers suddenly received a one-page bill with cryptic acronyms, instead of the lengthy, detailed invoice they’d grown to expect.
- The invoicing team correctly identified the problem: customers had trouble understanding their complex bills.
- The invoicing team incorrectly deployed the solution: using acronyms to shorten the length of the bill didn’t solve the confusion.
- An internal team created these acronyms, and even field tested them a bit with customer groups.
- Focus groups and random survey results led to confidence in this solution.
It looked like all of the legwork was done to launch a new invoicing system, but once several thousand invoices were sent without enough communication, service calls increased and frustration grew.
It’s time to regroup and find another solution to the identified problem. What makes sense internally might not make sense to your customers actually using the product. If they say it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.
2. “Our customers used to love us, so we’re banking on them loving us through this challenging time.”
I call this one the “love the one you’re with myth.”
Once upon a time, your customers DID love you. They loved your innovation. They loved your disruptor status. And they even loved your scrappy approach to business.
But ten years later? It’s not so cute anymore because there are other disruptive innovators wooing these customers away. It’s time to stop living in the past.
This is a dangerous myth to believe. Sure, it was easy when your customers would advocate for you at every turn. It was so easy to feel like the underdog was winning, but loyalty today doesn’t look like loyalty yesterday. You can lose a customer in the click of a mouse today, and you must consider that reality.
Show your customers that you care about them using thoughtful and intuitive customer experience design – don’t just bank on eternal loyalty from them.
3. “Let’s optimize our customer experience design for our ideal customer.”
Something I often say to my clients – you must think of your WORST customer on their WORST day, and design your customer experience around those considerations.
Designing for only the ideal experience is something I call “the Pollyanna Problem.” When a great customer has tons of trust and loyalty built up with you, their experience is totally different than when a customer has a bad experience after a bad day.
To build the best customer experience possible, you must prepare for worst case scenarios, not just happy, idealistic ones. This is when you’ll really discover how to be ready for the hiccups that are bound to happen, even with your best customer.
If your organization is guilty of one (or more!) of these, you can’t keep saying you’re doing your best to provide an outstanding CX for customers.
Deliver the experiences that build customer trust. Download our Gold Guide today!
This post first appeared on LinkedIn, and is syndicated here with permission.
