Yes, less is more! I am not talking about minimalism here, but reducing things instead of adding extra in your CX to refine and improve it.
Leaders and management often seek ways to enhance their customer experience strategy in today's competitive market. The common belief is that improvement constantly adds new features, functionalities, and operations. However, what if I told you that sometimes subtracting certain elements can enhance the overall customer experience? Yes, that's right – a subtractive approach is just as important.
Consider the factors that affect the external experience customers have with your brand. There could be elements that need to be removed to streamline the process and make it more efficient.
Take Google, for instance. The search engine giant's homepage eliminates almost everything except the search bar in the middle. This minimalist design ensures that customers can easily find what they want without distractions.
But Why are Many Organizations so Uncomfortable With the Idea of Subtraction?
The fear of risk and the discomfort associated with eliminating certain elements often hold them back. However, it can positively impact their organization once they truly understand and identify the benefits of a subtractive approach. Taking a systematic approach like the additive method is crucial to ensure success here.
To implement a subtractive approach effectively, it is essential to deeply understand the customer journey. You need to comprehend how each of your operations connects with their experience. By identifying unnecessary steps and elements, you can eliminate them, optimizing the customer experience. This process requires careful analysis and evaluation, but the benefits are worth it.
While the additive approach receives all the attention, leaders and management must recognize the value of subtraction. Removing elements that improve the customer experience, the customer retention rate, and customer lifetime value, both externally and internally, can significantly impact your brand's success.
There are many things you might need to eliminate externally, that is, the elements connected to the experience your customers receive from you, as Google did. And, some things you might need to stop internally in your organization that result in a poor experience for end customers.
For example, the front-line customer service rep doesn't have access to specific systems, which leaves customers to wait a long time to get a solution. Here, the front-line employee needs to connect with the senior person and then pass the issue to get resolved. Removing this step and allowing the system access to the front liner will reduce customer churn rate and wait time and enhance satisfaction.
Why You Should Subtract Things from Your Customer Experience?
Sometimes, in our efforts to provide the best service possible, we overwhelm our customers with too much. So, it's time to take a step back and subtract from our customer experience because we're adding too much.
To begin this subtractive approach, gather leaders from various departments actively or passively connected to customer experience. This diverse group of participants will bring different perspectives and ideas. Before the brainstorming session, distribute relevant data and insights about the area you want to focus on. For instance, provide feedback, cx metrics data, or customer experience insights data to give attendees a clear idea of what needs to be improved.
During the brainstorming session, divide it into two phases: idea expansion and idea contraction.
In the first phase, encourage participants to think outside the box and come up with as many ideas as possible for things to subtract. To maximize creativity, discourage any evaluation or critique of the ideas at this stage. The goal is to generate many ideas that can later be filtered.
Once you have a long list of subtraction ideas, it's time to move on to the idea contraction phase. This is where evaluation and critique come into play. The large volume of ideas should be reduced to a shortlist of the most promising ones. Encourage participants to debate and discuss the ideas, focusing on their feasibility and potential impact on the customer experience.
To help trigger creativity and generate subtraction ideas, ask specific questions. Ask a single "big" question that challenges participants to consider what can be subtracted from the current customer experience strategy to improve it. By framing the brainstorming with this question, you prompt participants to think critically about what elements may be overwhelming or unnecessary.
Remember, the goal is not to strip everything away from the customer experience but to find the right balance. It's about identifying elements that may be excessive or do not add value to the client or customer journey. By subtracting these elements, you're streamlining the experience and making it more enjoyable for your existing customers.
So, step back, evaluate, and find the perfect sense of balance for your satisfied customers.
Are You Adding Too Much to CX? It's Time to Step Back and Take Action
As we already learned, it requires thorough brainstorming with all leaders connected with customer experience. And, there are certain areas and elements in CX you should consider cutting the excess. Also, there are a lot of things to consider before cutting the extra. Let's check that in this section.
1. Identify What Needs to be Subtracted From Customer Journeys:
To truly measure, scale, and understand the customer experience, it is essential to identify gaps between customers' expectations and perceptions at each journey step. By pinpointing these gaps, businesses can focus on subtracting unnecessary elements that do not align with customer desires and preferences.
Here, analyze the entire customer journey thoroughly and identify factors to remove or build a new customer journey if required.
For example, if a customer logs into your website to purchase a product, is bombarded with many questions and fields to fill out, and then asks for multiple verifications, there is a high chance they will drop off. So, keeping it simple, add relevant questions and fields to fill up and reduce the verification to just one. That will relieve the friction at that point of the customer journey.
Here, we are making the journey simple by removing unnecessary tiresome steps the customer has to go through.
As Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
Yes, making it simple, like offering a one-click login without verification and questions, is not practical for most companies, but they can make it simple.
This ensures customers receive a streamlined and effortless experience of services that meets their needs.
2. Come up with the Right Questions:
Businesses must ask the right questions to effectively subtract from the customer experience. This involves looking at external factors, such as removing unnecessary steps or obstacles faced by customers, and internal factors, such as eliminating processes that cause friction within the organization in delivering a smooth experience.
Check the sample questions to be asked about internal and external subtraction:
Internal: How do we reduce the number of times the customer needs to connect with us to resolve an issue?
External: At which point does a prospect decide not to continue with the purchase? How can we eliminate it?
These are just samples. Depending on your business's nature, domain, and size, you can frame more relevant questions to figure out the areas that need to be eliminated.
3. Use Subtraction to Help Customers to Focus:
In some cases, excessive information or choices can overwhelm customers and hinder decision-making. Businesses can reduce distractions and streamline the customer journey by carefully considering where to subtract. For example, simplifying product options or minimizing irrelevant information can enable customers to make quicker and more satisfying choices.
For instance, if you ask customers to fill up an online form to proceed with a purchase, remove fields irrelevant to the particular customer's purchase, and avoid unnecessary advertisements on the web pages, which will distract customers.
4. Remove Elements that Leads to Long Customer Wait Times:
Customers today value their time more than ever. By reducing wait times, businesses can significantly enhance the customer experience. Whether through optimizing online processes, implementing self-service options, or improving response times, businesses should subtract from customer wait times to show respect for their customers' valuable time.
For example, if you are a company in the banking industry and provide loans, and it requires a long waiting time for new customers to get approval, remove a step or add the fastest solution to reduce customer waiting time. Adding an automation system to customer details verification will speed up many manual processes, and the approval can be processed quickly.
5. Helping Customers with Curated Choices:
While having various options can be appealing, it can lead to decision paralysis. This may result in an increased customer churn rate and customer effort score. As the number of choices increases, customers may need help to make a decision, resulting in a negative experience. Businesses can simplify decision-making and improve overall customer satisfaction by strategically subtracting options and defaulting to a few well-curated choices.
That is, if you are selling t-shirts and offer 15 different colors, which leaves customers in so much confusion and delays their decision-making, shortlist the number of colors based on the sales data, customer experience metrics score like net promoter score, and customer feedback for identifying which colors are mostly liked and preferred by customers and which sells more. So you can cut the other not demanding colors and make customer purchases more seamless.
6. Subtract to Reduce Complexity:
Sometimes, improving the customer support experience involves subtracting complexity behind the scenes.
For instance, consolidating multiple systems into a single platform for customer service representatives can reduce their efforts and improve their ability to assist customers effectively.
By simplifying internal processes, businesses indirectly enhance the customer experience.
7. Prepare a Stop Doing/Limit Doing List:
Creating a "stop doing" list is a powerful exercise in prioritization and focus. If you feel it challenging to make a "stop doing list," at least start with a "limit doing list." It involves identifying activities or initiatives within the customer experience strategy that are no longer beneficial or aligned with customer needs. By subtracting these elements, businesses can allocate more resources to initiatives that drive greater customer satisfaction.
8. Remove Your Excess Promises:
While it is essential to deliver on promises made to customers, there may be instances where modifying or removing a promise is necessary. This should be done with caution and consideration for customer trust, but it ensures businesses are not overcommitting and under delivering. By managing customer expectations appropriately, companies can build stronger relationships based on trust and reliability.
For example, instead of promising "2 days delivery" that you sometimes fail to do, remove it and promise "fastest delivery."
So, Embrace the Concept of Subtracting!
To improve the customer experience, businesses should carefully consider subtracting. Companies can create a focused and streamlined customer journey by identifying gaps, simplifying choices, reducing wait times, and eliminating unnecessary elements. Also, constantly measure customer experience to check how it works. Striking the right balance between adding and subtracting ensures that businesses provide a superior customer experience that truly meets their customers' needs and expectations and improves overall satisfaction.
Read more: 6 Biggest Threats to Customer Experience Initiatives