What is a Customer Experience Framework?
The customer experience framework is a structural scheme that ensures the flawless combination of customer-centric tools, strategies, techniques, and processes. The skeleton assists brands in making motivated CX decisions that work best in generating impeccable customer-related outputs.
With this framework, a company can simplify the processes involved in enhancing the customer journey that depicts what a customer can potentially expect from the brand service. The CX framework prepares a template for customer care activities improving the customer-facing proceedings at every touchpoint and enabling a better customer experience.
Why is a Customer Experience Framework Important?
The absence of a defined CX structure impairs the CX initiatives of a brand. The brand can experience heavy disorientation in the procedures retained in the business to enrich customer experience. The customer experience framework is the most suitable solution for addressing such problems.
A 2018 Customer Service Expectations Survey by Hubspot found that 68% of respondents would pay more for products and services from a company with a strong record of good customer service.
The CX framework increases the potential to serve efficiently and be relevant to the customers, allowing the brand to earn their trust and make them happy. A satisfied customer brings monetary returns and more consumers through word of mouth and loyalty toward the brand.
Here are a few key points that illustrate why a customer experience framework is utterly crucial to implement in an organization -
1) It lets a brand create an impactful marketing strategy that aligns with the CX objectives set by CX executives.
2) It keeps a close check on the quality of customer experience operations.
3) It enforces a customer-first culture in the whole organization that positively influences the customer and brand relationship.
4) It aids a brand in determining the underperformed CX areas that create a negative impression on consumers, hurting brand image.
5) It guarantees consistent restoration of the CX vision with necessary modifications in CX exercises that the current consumer market demands.
The customer experience framework supports the CX goals and lets a brand witness a significant increase in the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score. Eventually, the framework backs its applicability in an organization by delivering the desired customer results.
5 Pillars of Customer Experience Framework
There are 5 pillars of the customer experience framework that intensely hold the framework together to offer the best-in-class CX -
1) Technology
Most of the CX operations no more need manual work due to digitization. And the companies that keep moving forward by upgrading and equipping the firm with the latest technology never fail to please their customers.
An insight from Oracle’s Global Survey revealed that 90% of companies utilizing two or more emerging technologies for CX meet or exceed customer retention goals.
Technology as part of the CX framework supplies the ease in execution of customer-driven workings that escalates customer acquisition and retention rates. Today companies are remarkably leveraging technical solutions to communicate effectively with customers on multiple channels. A company can comfort its customers by allowing them to interact with the brand in real-time by deploying chatbots, automated email responses, and AI-enabled voice assistance.
The customer service team gets the privilege to stay in touch with the customers throughout, even after they make a purchase. Upselling and cross-selling become effortless comparatively due to these technological solutions. Additionally, technology entitles a brand to construct a responsive website, making it multiple device-friendly for users, encompassing optimization of the website for mobile users.
Comprehensively, the tech solutions fulfill the objectives of inducing the framework in the CX system and maintaining its stability.
2) Strategy
Strategy from the CX framework viewpoint supports a brand in administrating its CX decisions. It promotes customer-centricity and draws a clear roadmap to modifications necessary to improve internal operations.
In 2016 Avast acquired AVG, which acquired HMA (a VPN service) in 2015. HMA had retail performance issues, as it was more technology-focused than customer-focused. The sales and marketing team performed a gap analysis to figure out the difference between the current and future state. And they tailored an end-to-end customer experience strategy to improve customer-based activities, helping them prioritize actions that delivered benefits to customers and the brand.
The tactics defined based on a customer experience strategy refines the business model and generate high ROI. Furthermore, these CX framework techniques provide assistance to the CX team in fixating a detailed delivery plan, allowing the brand to outperform its competitors. On top of that, customer-focused strategies enable a brand to widen its customer base through planning various creative and customized offers.
The CX strategies characterize every aspect of functions that encircles and encourages customer orientation. Apart from that, it motivates the CX managers and decision-makers to uphold congruity in CX decisions and CX actions.
3) People
The determinations and actions of stakeholders impact the outcomes of the newly-adopted CX advancements that the CX team set considering the CX framework. The CX improvement processes require efforts from employees and leaders to optimize the ideas and implementations that draw the attention of the targeted audience toward product offerings.
An organization can implement a Voice of the Employee (VoE) program as getting appropriate input from the customer-serving team becomes painless. C-suite also gets involved through VoE as it is crucial to spread awareness of the brand's CX ambitions. Like VoE execution, the employment of the Voice of the Customer (VoC) program serves the intent of the CX framework setup.
Analyzing and working on billions of customer feedback using AL and ML technologies strengthen the CX framework. The customer insights generated from processing customer data point out what a customer desires from the product. The brand can then re-strategize and implement tasks backed by insights outcomes to convert potential visitors into customers.
To illustrate, Clootrack, in its Customer Experience in Energy Drinks Industry insight report, mentions the top five category drivers that influence customer decisions while purchasing an energy drink.
The Top Category Drivers of Energy Drinks are as follows -
1) Taste & Flavor
2) Price
3) Sugar Content
4) Usage
5) Energy Boost
The insights generated from customer reviews can decide the course of CX actions a brand must take in order to supply a smooth customer experience, simultaneously influencing the framing of the CX framework.
4) Customer Service
Salesforce conducted a State of the Connected Customer survey with 15000+ customers and business buyers globally and found that 78% of them are willing to forgive a company for its mistake after receiving excellent service.
The success of a business depends on the current status of customer service furnished by the brand. Customers expect a top-notch customer experience to get trouble-free deals from a brand, and for that, the arrangement of efficient customer care service is vital. Besides, proper structuring of the CX framework depends on customer service as the customer response toward the brand becomes more transparent.
The ultimate goal of customer service is to install a give-and-take relationship between the brand and the customer. The company must serve the most satisfactory solution, addressing customers' pain points. After delivering the fix for the issue, a brand must immediately follow up to receive honest feedback.
One of the most common ways to capture customers' emotions regarding customer service is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Scrutinizing the NPS data lend a helping hand in polishing the enhancements iterations in the CX cycle and building a better customer service system which, in return, assembles a compelling customer experience framework.
5) Operations
A famous American automobile executive, Lee Iacocca, once said, "You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere."
Crafting precise CX strategies and ideas alone is not enough to fetch the preferred results. United actions on those CX conclusions are what bring customers down into the sales funnel. A brand must ensure that all the business units collaborate well to reach the chosen CX goal of the organization.
The customer experience directors can assure if or not the sequence of customer-based operations is progressive enough to reinforce the CX approaches. In addition, they can compare the CX operations output against the selected objectives and the industry standards to tweak the strategies and perform skillfully to gain more customers and retain old ones.
The practical CX operations deal with what consumers might experience during edge-to-edge interactions through various mediums. A brand becomes capable of setting the seal on making the customers happy and holding an emphatic association with them when they are delighted with the brand. The negative consequence of an operation alerts the company to avoid a particular approach that harms the business.
Operations set out the expectations of all outcomes preparing the brand for better business-growth attempts in the future. In the end, specifying the role of the CX framework pillars and allocating the responsibilities to every section empower companies to accomplish customer goals.
Implementation of Customer Experience Framework
Follow these 7 steps to implement the customer experience framework -
1) Analyze Customer Wants
Research by Deloitte and Touche suggests that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that are not focused on customers.
Customer-centric attitude glorifies focus on customer wants. And for building a customer experience framework that generates profit, a customer-oriented mindset and processes of analyzing consumer requirements need to be instated in the organization. A brand can prepare for entire customer-facing procedures by researching customer needs.
2) Recognize Suitable Interaction Channels
A company does not need to use the channels present across the world to interact with its customers. The platforms an organization should use depend on the kind of business the organization does in the market.
Likewise, a brand should recognize and target the channels where it can get the right set of audiences. Subsequently, supervisors can allocate funds for selected channels to support the customer journey in omnichannel configuration and depict the purpose of the CX structure.
3) Plan Customer Journey
A customer journey map is a blueprint for a path that customers walk on during engaging with a brand. While creating a customer journey plan, businesses can jot down the challenges they experience when interacting with customers. Simultaneously, solutions are brought about with the journey arrangements to ease customer routes to product purchasing.
Customer journey mapping ensures that a company never misses an interaction opportunity with a consumer. With this, a quality customer experience structure is developed with better visualization of predicted customer actions.
4) Define Right KPIs
Settling with the right set of performance measurement metrics gives rise to the customer experience framework that operates in the best interest of the business. Clarity with the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) institutes the mechanism that assists in scrutinizing the CX undertakings.
With established KPIs, a brand can fix sound and feasible monthly targets. It controls performance management and does not allow staff members to deviate from the specified business goal.
5) Collect Customer Data
A brand can gather customer data from several channels chosen for customer interaction. The possible data sources include social media, surveys, subscriptions, customer interviews, market analysis reports, and many more.
The compiled data is used for forming customer personas that further help in customer segmentation to target characterized set of audiences, increasing the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns and adding to the relevance of the CX framework.
6) Generate Customer Insights
The collected data is processed to obtain customer insights that hold up with the CX movements of an organization. Many businesses now prefer AI-driven customer insight-generating platforms to delegate CX-related work. These platforms provide complete CX analysis in real-time and mold an operative CX structure.
Insights also entitle a brand to work and maintain its position in the consumer market as it allows examining brand health. Additionally, customer insights provide in-depth knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors, which a brand can use to get ahead of them.
7) Refine the Process
A resilient customer experience framework is a result of continuous refining of CX processes. The catch is to look for flaws after each CX cycle completes and then operate on the issues by removing them before the next one starts.
The improvement in the customer experience cycle is endless as with the rise of contemporary methods and techniques every decade, a brand needs to keep up with every trend. Customers respond faster to the latest movements in demand. So, the foremost priority is to provide an excellent customer experience that brings customers closer to the brand.
5 Tips for Creating Powerful Customer Experience Framework
Here are 5 tips that can assist a brand in creating a powerful customer experience framework -
1) Promote Customer-First Culture
Customers are a major source of revenue generation for an enterprise. Serving their demands must be the priority of the business as it ensures the undertaking of the customer-first culture. Giving preference to the buyers bring the customer churn rate down and makes a customer a priceless member of an organization for a more prolonged period.
Customer-first culture shapes the CX framework in a manner that benefits all processes that nourish customers with valuable deliverables. A purposeful structure approved by customer-based culture brings quick results with high revenue generation capabilities.
2) Encourage Agility in Processes
Agile methodology is the most preferred in several industries today as it increases team productivity and allows flexibility in the CX undertakings. It stimulates the loop of enhancements in the CX framework as the processes and strategies are frequently updated. The CX structure cultivates a well-defined feature promoting the high-quality development process of the product or service offered.
The innovation and modernized changes in the product due to agility bring favorable financial impact. Teams can focus on more creative solutions and enrich the CX processes.
3) Use Customer Data to Fullest
Customer data is fuel to the CX framework, without which handling the CX operations is nearly impossible. Aligning CX operations with the data creates an optimal customer-handling system for an enterprise. Drafting dynamic action plans to get desired customer experience output becomes an elementary activity to perform.
Brands can identify the difficulties of their customers easily and provide solutions accordingly. Using customer data, they can create personalized offers for every customer and increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Personalization of customer solutions calibrates the customer loyalty program that boosts product sales.
4) Feedback From Every Touchpoint
Getting consumer judgments from every touchpoint toughens the CX framing as it acts as a worthy intake for the CX system. Customer feedback from all the customer interaction platforms can fetch so many business ideas as consumer voluntarily share their perspective on the brands' offers.
A brand can identify the customer's taste and devise techniques to make customers feel more privileged. Processing customer feedback approves the enforcement of strategic CX visions, making it uncomplicated for the marketing team to experiment with new marketing strategies that consumers might adore.
5) Assess Capabilities and Demands
Although the process of execution of the customer experience framework remains the same for every industry, the CX framework itself can vary, considering the capabilities and requirements of the business. To possess a robust CX structure, an organization should never compare its framework with competitors and at no time try to imitate the competition's CX skeleton into the organization's system.
The framework construction based only on the availability of company resources and demands makes the system capable of handling all CX drivers and escort speedy results.
To Conclude
The customer experience framework is the foundation of CX exercises carried out in an organization. It assists in pursuing the right approaches and strategies that use advanced technology solutions and initiating customer experience improvement projects.
The framework speaks for customers' wants fulfillment and encourages different departments to deliver the best customer experience through the service that customers expect.
The CX skeleton streamlines all customer-related entities and makes it easy for the CX teams to track and measure outcomes and work on them to improve metric numbers. Implementing an ideal CX structure brings a lot of advantages, such as reducing churn rate and increasing CSAT score and ROI. Finally, sticking to a suitable customer experience framework is profitable to the business and the customers, bringing success in a short period of time.