Every successful company recognizes that it is in the business of customer experience.

It is no longer enough to compete on products and services. How a company delivers its products to its customers is as important as what it delivers. Products can be copied but one cannot copy or duplicate a service culture.

The customer experience an organization wants to provide can vary widely. For some companies, this transformed experience represents a step change. For others, the aspiration may, at least in the short term, require only more modest changes. Either way, the aspiration will translate into an overall mission and, ultimately, into guiding principles for frontline behaviour. Understanding the fundamental wants and needs of customers must be a step in determining what a great experience for them should look like. This should be the starting point for mapping a customer service strategy.

Customers not only dictate the rules but also expect high levels of satisfaction from the savviest practitioners and the sleepiest industry participants alike. Technology has destroyed barriers to entry in many industries. It is no longer about how deep your pockets are. It is now about how technically savvy you are and your ability to offer products and services most conveniently and affordably to your target audience. Understanding and addressing customer needs more effectively is a key reason successful start ups disrupt industries in today’s more customer centric marketplace.

Companies that work to master this dynamic become superior competitors. Any effective customer centric strategy should be able to deliver benefits to customers, employees, and the bottom line. It is very important to ensure that all your employees are on board and you have buy in. Human Resources department has an obligation to ensure that the company polices and benefits are well structured to motivate your employees. The way you treat your staff is the way they will treat your customers. It is therefore very important to make sure that your employees are on board.

Once you have your internal systems and processes well geared to serve the customer, you then have to find out how best you can meet the expectations of these customers.

So what do customers want? Technology has handed customers unprecedented control over the experience of purchasing goods and services. It is sad to note in our country that there are still some companies that are still living in the “stone age” as far as technology is concerned. If you are still using manual systems and processes, the probability for your organization to survive in this digital economy is very remote. There is no way through which you can offer great service and satisfy your customers when you are still living in dark ages with regards to technology.

More and more customers expect the levels of satisfaction they receive from leaders such as Amazon, Apple and Google and they expect this from even the sleepiest corners of markets across all industries. Your local customers have exposure to some of these international companies and they are using their products and services every day. On the other hand it is also encouraging to see how some of our businesses are differentiating themselves through technology in Zimbabwe.

 Advanced analytics is giving them rapid customer insights so they are able to move with unprecedented speed and agility.

Customers do not only expect providers of services and products to do business on digital platforms but also insist on a social experience. However other companies, for many reasons, fail to deliver a compelling customer experience.

 A lot of managers think about it in very narrow terms, focusing only on individual topics and forgetting about the overall system for delivering value. It has to be approached holistically and be part of the overall strategy of the business. Some excel at specific kinds of interactions with customers but ignore the fuller experience, both before and after the purchase. Others concentrate on fixing their operations but forget to look at them through the eyes of the customer. And most organizations still tend to underestimate the importance of the internal cultural changes needed to achieve and sustain a new approach to the customer experience.

Central to building a customer centric business is a focus on identifying, understanding, and mastering the customer journey: the complete end-to-end experience customers have with a company from their perspective. That journey has a clearly defined beginning and end spanning the progression of touch points.

There are six hallmarks that define the customer service journey according to some service culture experts. The first hallmark is defining a clear customer experience aspiration and common purpose. This depends on a deeply rooted collective sense of conviction and purpose to serve the customer’s true needs. It is not just a casual approach to customer service.

This basic fact must become clear to every employee through a simple, crisp statement of intent: a shared vision and aspiration that’s consistent with a company’s brand value proposition. The statement of intent should not just be a motherhood statement like we want to offer the best service. What is the best service?

The statement of purpose or intent should then be translated into a set of simple principles or standards to guide behaviour all the way down to the front line. Customer journeys are the framework that allows a company to organize itself and mobilize employees to deliver value to customers consistently, in line with its purpose.

When most organizations focus on the customer experience, they think about touch points, the individual interactions through which customers engage with parts of the business and its offerings. However this siloed focus misses the bigger— and more important—picture: the end-to-end experience of customers. Only by looking at it through their eyes, along the journeys they take, can companies begin to understand how to improve the customer experience in a meaningful way. One should never just impose service standards without first confirming their relevance to the customer.

The next hallmark is developing a deep understanding of what matters to customers not just guessing. Customers on their journeys hold companies to high standards—the best products, which never break or require upgrades and are immediately available, purchased with the help of high-caliber employees, at rock-bottom prices. How can companies determine which of these factors are the most critical to the customer segments they serve? Which generate the highest economic value?

Understanding the most important journeys, customer segment by customer segment, helps a business maintain focus and have the greatest impact on the satisfaction of its customers and its own bottom-line performance.

Fortunately, the advent of big data and advanced analytics has helped organizations parse the factors that drive not only what customers say about the things that satisfy them but also the actual customer behaviour that creates economic value. Similarly, multiple sources         reflecting the voice of the customer—including surveys, social media, and the real-time chronicling of the shopping experience—can illuminate the current performance of companies in managing their customers’ journeys. Once they have identified the most important journeys and defined their strengths and weaknesses, the process of redesigning and prototyping can begin.

The third hallmark is using behavioural psychology to manage customer expectations.

Leading customer-experience players understand that deftly shaping perceptions of underlying operational improvements in the delivery of products or services can generate significant additional value.

One tool such organizations find increasingly effective is behavioural psychology, used as a layer in the design process. For example, they can design the sequence of interactions with customers to end on a positive note. They can merge different stages of interactions to diminish their perceived duration and engender a feeling of progress. And they can provide simple options that give customers a feeling of control and choice.

The next hallmark is reinventing customer journeys using digital technologies. Customers accustomed to the immediacy, personalization, and convenience that define digital natives such as Amazon and Google now expect the same kind of service from established players.

Customer-experience leaders can become even better by digitizing the processes behind the most important customer journeys. In these quick efforts, multi-disciplinary teams jointly design, test, and iterate high-impact processes and journeys in the field, continually refining and rereleasing them after input from customers.

The fifth hallmark is using customer journeys to empower the front line.

Every leading customer-experience company has motivated employees who embody the customer and brand promise in their interactions with consumers and are empowered to do the right thing. Companies centred on customers engage them at every level of the organization; employees work directly with them in retail settings, take calls, and get out into

the field.

There are four simple rules that can be used to build a sense of engagement on the front line. The first one is listening to the employees and establishing mechanisms to address their issues and needs. Next, hire for attitude not aptitude. If you want to provide friendly service, hire friendly people.

Then, give your people a purpose, not rules, so that the company sets clear expectations

and lets employees know that it trusts them to do their jobs. Finally, tap into the creativity of your front- line employees by giving them the autonomy to do whatever they can to improve the customer experience and fix problems themselves.

The final hallmark is improving constantly, establishing metrics and a governance system.

The key to satisfying customers is not just to measure what happens but also to use the data to drive action throughout the organization. Leading practitioners start at the top, with a metric to measure the customer experience, and then cascade downward into their key customer journeys and performance indicators. To move from knowledge to action, companies need proper governance and leadership. Best-in-class organizations have governance structures that include a sponsor, a chief customer officer and an executive champion for each major kind of cross-functional customer journey.

To foster understanding and conviction, leaders at all levels must role model the behaviour they expect from these teams, constantly communicating the changes needed. Formal reinforcement mechanisms and skill-building activities at multiple levels of the organization support the transformation, as well.

Mastering the concept and execution of an exceptionally good customer experience is a daunting challenge, but an essential one in today’s rapidly changing business environment.