Customer experience (also known as CX) is defined as the interactions and experiences your customer has with your company throughout the customer journey, from first contact to becoming a happy and loyal customer.

CX is an important component of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) because a customer who has a positive experience with a business is more likely to become a repeat and loyal customer.

According to a global CX study conducted by Oracle, 74% of senior executives believe that customer experience influences a customer’s willingness to be a loyal advocate. If you want to keep your customers, you must invest in their experience!

Everyone talks about “walking in your customers’ shoes” to see what kind of experience we provide to them. This is always a good idea… but there are other ways to find out if your experience is up to par.

The key to providing an exceptional and memorable customer experience is to ensure that it is consistent and repeatable by ALL of your employees EVERY DAY! Unfortunately, most businesses deliver “random acts of excellence and chaos” throughout the organization. This creates confusion and uncertainty in your customer’s eyes, which leads to defection… the customer leaving and going somewhere else. So, how do you keep this from happening in your company? See more

Allow me to share 4 Creative and simple ways you can quickly assess the type of experience your customers are having with your organization and how you can use this information to improve your overall customer experience. These are not your typical methods for gathering customer feedback, such as conducting a survey, calling the customer, interviewing your sales team, or a variety of other more common techniques. While all of these have their place and can provide some valuable insight, I’d like to stretch your thinking in a few different directions… bend your mind a little on some other creative ways to see what your CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE is all about.

1. Mystery Shoppers with a Difference… We all understand what a mystery shopper is: someone goes into one of your establishments and shops as if they were regular customers, then writes notes about their experience. This is a fantastic practice, particularly for B2C retail and customer service businesses, but it can also work well for B2B businesses. Here’s the twist: choose 10 to 25 friends you trust and believe would provide you with honest and direct feedback if they were mystery shoppers. If you work in retail, you will need more friends to help you than if you work in B2B.
Here’s why you need friends: you can give them a detailed plan of what you want to test out, and they will provide you with more detailed information on the back end. They are fantastic because you trust them and they genuinely want to help you improve. They will execute with far more zeal and enthusiasm than a traditional mystery shopper. You can give them specifics about what might happen and how to respond to various scenarios. This provides you with much more specific information in areas you may want to test out in greater depth within your organization.

You can also ask them questions that go beyond what a mystery shopper would ask. For example, you can assist in scripting them to go “deeper” in the discussion to see how your employees will handle it, as well as offering up specific objections/concerns that you want to ensure your employees can handle appropriately. This is an opportunity to obtain “richer and more specific” information than a traditional mystery shopper would provide.

2. Call if you have an unusual request… Another great way to test how well your employees handle a situation is to have someone you know (similar to the friend idea above) call them with an unusual request. The request must be something you would handle in your business, but it must be unusual enough that the employee must think further and seek additional input from others. You don’t want your employees to say “NO,” you want them to offer to find a solution and then observe the process.

This tests how they treat your customers throughout the experience when things get a little off track. It’s one thing for an employee to always deliver a great experience when everything falls neatly into place, but it’s quite another when they’re stumped. What you’re looking for isn’t so much the solution to the problem (which could be a process issue, a product issue, or a delivery issue, for example), but how they handled the customer during the process of determining the best solution.

3. An executive’s family member… This is one of my favorite tests. This is where the family members of some “key executives” interact with your employees across your organization. The key is to make sure your employees understand they are related to executives and leaders. This is what makes this test so effective for you… they must understand how important they are.

The purpose of this exercise is to compare how they are treated to the rest of your ideal Customer Personas. What you’re looking for is whether they’re treated any differently than your best customers. They, of course, should not be treated differently. If you provide an awesome customer experience, everyone should have an awesome experience… no matter who they are. This is why you create the Customer Journey: to provide a remarkable and memorable experience.

Identifying “different” areas of the Customer Journey can be extremely insightful in better understanding the areas that could be improved in your overall customer experience. Write down the key aspects of the experience and compare them to what you see and hear from your regular customers. This “gap analysis” will be extremely beneficial in terms of improving your overall customer experience.

First, by involving them in the process, the customer sees how much you care about them and their experience; second, they see how important they are individually because they were chosen to assist you in gathering this information. This is a simple way to conduct an assessment and stay involved with your customers throughout the process.

4. Stump the worker… This is a fantastic exercise to do both with the customer and internally. The goal of this exercise is to find some unusual or unusual situations that “stump the employee” to the point where they don’t know how to solve the problem. The goal is to assist your employees in “learning a process” for resolving any question or issue… not to know everything about everything. The goal of this activity is to know where to look for answers and their thought process.

CAUTION: Take special care not to make this a negative experience for the employee by demonstrating that they don’t know everything or how to solve the problem. This is a situation where it is critical to encourage employees… rather than having all the answers, give them different ways to think about a solution. This is about process training to help them find the answers while providing an excellent customer experience. When done this way, you get innovative problem solvers rather than robots who try to know everything.

Hopefully, this has “extended your thinking” about how you can further test and assess the strength of your own Customer Experience within your organization. When done correctly, these can be entertaining, team-building, and extremely informative about what is going on in your company and with your customers. The key is to make this a “positive exercise” that emphasizes learning and improvement rather than reprimanding or pointing out “negatives.” When approached in this manner, they can become a long-term part of your customer experience program.

And, as always, if you need help or clarification on any of these, please give us a call or send us an email with your question. Always eager to assist in making your company even better than it is today and improving the customer experience.

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