Last week, I offered up my two cents on how Customer Xperience, or CX for short, trumps client-centricity. You can read it here.

The biggest problem with client-centricity is that it largely goes undefined. While it might come across as something inarguably good, like motherhood or apple pie, when you get to the reality of it, it falls short of providing clear directions to teams and staff.

As a result, businesses tend to spend all their resources on trying to satisfy every need of every customer instead of focusing on the process to create a great CX while focusing on those sharp edges of what it is you do.

That’s where CX differs.

I mentioned previously that, according to research done by The Walker Group, the most important thing to customers is experience. After all, we have always paid for experience which is why dinner at the three-star Michelin restaurant costs more than the local eat-all-you-want buffet.

The graph below shows compares the important of CX with product and price:

CX is a lot more defined than client centricity. It allows a business to focus and mobilise teams better, which is why INN8 has chosen CX over client-centricity.

It’s a rather simple equation: Experience – Expectation = Delight / Frustration

We want every member of our team to be driven towards offering our clients a great experience, whether or not they are directly involved with them, and this is how we set out to achieve it:

1. Start with a reason for being

Our reason for being is our staff, the wealth manager and their clients.

2. Build a unique culture and vision

Our vision is to change the way investments are done. Don’t be afraid to take bold steps, invest for the future and ruthlessly drive the change you need. All too often it’s easier to slip back into the old ways when the bulk of your business carries a hangover.

3. Recruit in line with your vision

It’s very important that your job descriptions, service promise and organisational structure are all aligned to your customer’s journey. Sure, great skills are important, but culture is better! Remember that leading starts at the top, so structure purposefully in both business and department and look for people who want what the organisation wants.

4. Involve everybody

Making the decision to become a customer experience business can be a seismic change for most organisations and is not something you can do alone. In fact, it is usually not something you can do without everybody doing their bit.

5. Be scientific

It’s very easy to go with a gut feeling. After all, you’ve been in this business long enough to see what’s going on. But to truly be smart, you have to uncover information you didn’t already know – data and insight are your friends but remember to watch out for confirmation bias.

6. Lastly, remember to look in the mirror regularly

• Choose customer segments: Focus on measuring demographics that are the most important to your individual business and chosen market – we focus on the wealth manager and their clients.
• Select which experiences you want to measure: Whether it’s the navigation system on your website or friendliness and responsiveness of your service teams, pick specific experiences to ask your customers about.
• Pick CX metrics for each experience: Decide how you will evaluate each experience you focus on and measure it!
• Design a data collection strategy: Decide how will you keep track of the feedback coming in from different channels, and how you will knowingly use this on your business to drive the change towards better and better CX.
• Set targets for each CX metric: Evaluating where you are and where you want to be to keep everyone motivated to improve your CX.
• Identify and act on CX issues: Pinpoint what’s going wrong and create a plan for how you will address each issue.
• Share insights gained from CX measurement: In order to be successful in your CX measurement program, you must be transparent. Make your CX feedback available across your organization so everyone can improve.

Shifting your team’s overall thinking to focus on customer intent, journey and outcome will, in turn, 1) influence the culture and the actions of those that interact with customers; 2) produce enabling processes and technology; and 3) create training and support as well as environments that are conducive to meeting customers’ needs.

It might sound like a massive project – and it is! But at the end of the day, the evolution will be an invaluable transition in your business.