Is it appropriate to say customer expectations are changing? May not be. Because the customer always expected highest value and better results. What has actually changed is the customer experience. With multiple platforms and options, customers are able to make informed choices, thereby testing the competitiveness of businesses.
A great customer experience need not always be the one that delights them, but the one that earns their loyalty.
In that perspective, McKinsey in a recent report listed 7 points which will enable businesses to create a distinctive customer experiences. There is a need for incumbent businesses too to upgrade or evolve its customer strategies.
Everything you should know about customers
With Big data providing insights into customer behaviour, it is the discretion of the companies to use that data for driving their business agendas.
The McKinsey report underlines the need to understand customer journeys: ethnographic observation and shop-alongs, where researchers watch or accompany customers in stores; get customer feedback; and continual live testing and design iteration with customers after launch.
“Top-performing companies also develop a clear vision of the entire customer ecosystem, understanding relevant interactions that extend beyond the core journey the company controls,” wrote Xavier Lhuer, Tunde Olanrewaju, and Hyo Yeon in the report.
Design thinking
Not just the design of products, but for any B2C company, it is essential to keep tab on customer behaviour, recording every interaction customers have with a company. “To design a compelling customer journey, companies must enlist everyone who has an impact on any part of a customer’s journey, not just people with the word “design” in their title—in particular, operational and IT groups should be involved, says the report.
Identify core customer journeys
Improving current customer journeys results in cost reductions and quality enhancements. But, McKinsey says, such an approach may also cause companies to narrow their horizons and blind them to better overall solutions.
“True reinvention requires taking a hard look at journeys from the customer’s perspective to find the pivotal insight around which a new journey should revolve,’’ it says.
Rewrite the rules
With adoption of new technologies, the standards evolve with implementations. However ofren, customer journeys are hindered by regulations. For that, McKinsey says the “best companies focus on the underlying purpose of the rules, engaging regulators and lawyers to show how technological advances can make things better for customers while improving risk outcomes.”
Building an agile organization
It is a false perception that adopting agile technologies makes a company agile. Metrics and incentives also need to be adjusted to focus on end-to-end, rather than functional, objectives. That means creating responsive and adaptive customer experiences requires the entire organization to be agile. Making that change begins with putting in place new governance standards and ways of working, reports McKinsey.
Click here to read the full story