Customer Experience (CX) is generally described as the interaction of an organization and a customer. This interaction includes a customer’s awareness, attraction, cultivation, discovery, customer advocacy, purchase, and use of a service.
Building a CX team requires seeking out individuals with different skill sets and experiences to fully realize and assist customers whilst in the midst of product development.
During the growth of a company, departments scale such as marketing, sales, service, and product owning. The fear is that somewhere along these lines, the customer becomes a concept rather than an actual human being.
There are a few things you can do to prevent this phenomenon.
Define the culture
Your culture needs to celebrate learning and allow for failures as well as accepts change. There has to be a focus on cultivating an environment where that will thrive.
Ask the hard questions:
- Are there company values?
- Are people asking questions?
- Are questions answered?
- Do employees have fun with each other?
- Do employees help each other succeed?
- Does everyone understand the vision?
Building a strong, healthy, fearless culture is the hardest step, but it makes everything else so much easier.
Variety
Your team ought not be made up of CX designers. In fact, I would go as far as saying that there shouldn’t be a CX designer in the company.
The team you create should be cross functional and design the customer experience together.
Have your team be comprised of marketers, UX designers, a product owner, and customer support. Make sure they’re led by someone knowledgeable in the business. The product owner may be the clear choice in this situation.
Create a definitive CX vision
The goal of the team is to create a cohesive and consistent experience for customers by improving the existing product or service by introducing innovative ideas and opening up dialogue with users.
There’s two main parts regarding the cohesiveness and consistency: The style of messaging, brand, and tone, as well as the consolidation of documentation, processes, and systems.
This means picking the right customer advocacy tool, the mediums to do the work on, and integrate the workflows accordingly.
Every change needs to go through marketing, then development, and then training so that everyone knows what they’re launching, developing, and supporting accordingly.
Making sure everyone is on the same page with feature and product feature prioritization and deployment makes team alignment all the more important.
The cycle of a cross functional team
The product is at the center, feeding marketing and support with necessary information on how they should position or support users.
Marketing and support then feed the product team on how the product is perceived, what market or domain changes are coming by providing both subjective and objective feedback on user pain-points.
This cycle ought to go on indefinitely.
Conclusion
The customer needs to be unified within a company, the same person that first talks to a sales person will one day engage with support or follow social media channels.
More often than not, each division starts treating a customer as brand new and exclusive to the product.
The experience ought to match the company’s values.
To surmise, creating a customer focused culture is required before building ac ross functional team that focuses on the customer journey. Make sure to initiate the two way conversation with a customer. And lastly, create constant iteration loops to validate and improve continuously.
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