How To Build A Customer Experience Vision
Reading Time: 7 minutes
Do you want to outshine your competitors when it comes to prioritizing the end-user? If yes, then you need a successful customer experience vision. A vision stands for an aspirational statement that defines how a company has decided to serve its customers.
Generally, a customer experience vision gives a standard that all employees should strive for and the banner that the organization should look to whenever making decisions that involve customers. As a result, you should focus on building a clearly communicated and well-established vision that will inspire action at organization levels.
Note that building a customer experience vision is a critical step to take if you want to improve your customer experience.
Also, keep in mind that the vision must remain specific to make it easy to understand the common goal with less hassle. A simple/short vision is the most recommended because it enhances buy-in and understanding from leadership. Besides possessing executive sponsorship, the best vision is also linked with clear milestone roadmaps, specific objectives, and specific goals.
So, how can you build a customer experience vision? Let’s see!
Step 1: Define it
The best customer experience vision must have an emotional connection between the employees and customers. This should be done during the employee onboarding process so that everyone is aware of your company goals. You can quickly achieve this emotional connection if you build a vision that’s easy to understand. Also, to achieve this emotional connection, consider creating a vision that provides the customer with a compelling value, demonstrating your company’s commitment to them.
Build a vision that motivates your employees to provide your customers with a consistent experience on your behalf. The way your employees interact with your customers helps in building brand engagement/loyalty.
Therefore, building a vision is the right path to follow if you want to retain and attract customers. However, to build this emotional connection, all the company members must work hand-in-hand to put the vision into practice across the organization.
Also, note that you should start implementing the vision from the top. Another point to note is that management plays a critical role in building a vision.
After defining your customer experience vision, the next step involves putting into practice a framework, educating, and empowering your employees to promote your brand. By doing this, you’ll create a working environment where all employees work towards a common goal.
Step 2: Focus on a common Customer Experience Vision
Building a customer experience vision may need a fundamental change in the organization, and shift isn’t easy. Various researches show that most development programs never attain their goals because of a lack of employee involvement or management support.
To fully implement your vision, you need to change the employee’s daily work aspects. As a result, the management needs to ensure smooth transitions by providing the necessary support and ample training. Educating the employees about the potential impact and value of the transition will make the shifts easier to accept and more meaningful.
Besides benefiting customers, better customer services also serve the employees. Your employees will be more engaged and invest more in your brand if you connect them emotionally to their roles.
Research shows that if employees become engaged with your brand, they’re likely to enhance their customer relationships, attracting and retaining more customers.
Step 3: Bring it to life
After creating a vision, you must ensure that your employees can understand it internally. Remember, communication comes with several benefits.
The vision will become your employee’s common objective if they can link it with personal feelings and real-life examples. To achieve this:
Create a believable and honest customer experience vision
Use stories to communicate the vision and ensure it has an employee connection.
Remember, people become passionate about the things that affect their lives, and this passion will make your employees take extra steps to exceed your customers’ expectations.
Paint the journey picture
Make the reason clear why your partners and employees need to start the journey and the expected destination. Ensure your customers have a clear understanding of this journey and destination.
Find the Champions
Select the individuals who will ‘walk the talk’ and remain passionate about the customer experience vision. Note that it’s not only the leaders who manage a specific program.
Even employees can do it. Besides being role models, employees also have a strong influence on customer service teams.
Make the impact, purpose, and value clear
Write an informative message telling your partners, employees, and customers the value proposition that differentiates your organization from the competitors.
Send an internal and external message highlighting how far you’re with implementing the vision. Also, ensure this communication highlights the vision’s impact on the customers.
Form active communities
Forming active practice communities will help synthesize employees’ views on customer experience and tell the company management about it. These communities must access the senior leaders directly to make it easy to develop the feedback loop.
Step 4: Put your Customer Experience Vision into practice across departments
The different functions in the organization must work hand-in-hand to create the best vision. Therefore, collaboration plays a critical role in creating a customer experience vision. With this vision, all organization team members will work towards a common objective.
The company’s top management plays a pivotal role in creating a customer experience vision. But, the organization needs to involve all team members when creating this vision.
If you involve only one party to create the customer experience vision, this vision will favor only one individual instead of benefiting all the company members. You won’t capture the entire customer life cycle if you don’t involve representatives from all departments.
Step 5: Ensure it relies on customer-obsessed agenda
Note that the benefits of involving a holistic view when creating a customer experience vision exceeds those of using quick-fix solutions. Therefore, you should ensure that your operations, metrics, and leadership team match the customer-obsessed agenda.
Note that your employees and customers know more. Their aim is to see the type of information you put out concerning your organization’s goals right from its start.
Always consider this point because customers now buy something that offers them value, and they choose brands that meet their needs and requirements.
Ensure you train all your employees using a customer-first mentality. Also, you should align your business to support this mentality because customer service involves more things besides the employees who handle customer issues.
Treat each employee as a public ambassador of your company. Also, that your business always prioritizes the customer experience. Therefore, you should create a top-notch customer experience vision to win your employees and customers.
Step 6: Align the vision with your brand promise
As a business owner, you should create a mobilizing, inspiring, and authentic customer experience vision. Besides this, the best customer experience vision must break down your brand promise into various attributes and picture these attributes.
Consider defining your brand promise and the best way to attain it if you want to create a customer experience vision that provides value to business leaders, employees, and customers.
Don’t use ill-defined means if you want your company to become the most trusted or most loved. To attain this, you must articulate the space you’ll own or things that can evoke trust. Also, tell the attributes you’ll implement to achieve that promise. Remember to define the primary roles you’ll play to satisfy the customers.
Benchmark performance in these roles and then check the potential customer experience impact. Through this, you can quickly highlight why you need to create a customer experience vision by highlighting the benefits it will bring.
Step 7: Concentrate on your customers
As a business leader, you’re likely to find it hard to provide a compelling/coherent customer experience vision for your company.
However, you can achieve this by focusing first on your customers. Here, you need to create a consumer journey roadmap.
By doing this, you’ll create a path that will assist your team members in attaining an excellent customer experience vision. Also, this will help you in creating a more enthralling customer experience vision.
Remember, you’ll always find it hard to create a customer experience vision if you don’t know the direction to follow. With a consumer journey roadmap, you’ll get a blueprint that will help assess the nature of your customer experience vision.
Ensure that this blueprint includes the type of your consumers, the stages in that journey, the tools required, and an action plan.
Defining the type of your consumers is the right step to take if you want to run a successful business. Learn more about your market so that you can tell the things that motivate their purchases.
Step 8: Promote the Customer Experience Vision
Ensure your employees know the primary values of the customer experience vision. Don’t forget to highlight how the customer experience vision will impact your business and customers.
Communicate it through all your internal channels. Intranet, communication apps, email, etc. The idea is that it be visible everywhere. It can even be added to signatures via an email management tool during internal communications.
Through this, your employees will understand the critical role the customer experience vision will play towards your company’s success.
Create and pass out a powerful and clear message telling the customers the steps you have taken to ensure they receive top-notch experiences. Also, this message should highlight how you will provide this experience and why they should help you achieve this goal.
Final thoughts
Generally, don’t grade customer experience vision as a static vision. As technology keeps growing, from IoT to artificial intelligence, your employee and customer need also continue evolving the same way.
As a result, it’s crucial to evaluate your customer experience vision and revise it where necessary. Note that a well-defined and robust customer experience vision determines your ability to offer the services needed by your customers.
Further reading
