What Does the Customer Want?

By Michael Tessler, Managing Partner

In our advisory, we have decided to focus on technologies that can improve the customer experience. We believe that this will continue to be a key competitive advantage for brands and therefore will drive innovation and growth.

So how do you improve the customer experience? I think the first thing to do is determine what it is that the customer wants to accomplish, what are their goals and expectations. This is boiling all the customer interactions down to a set of well-defined intents. Customer intents can be simple like; I want to pay my bill, I want to change my address, I need to reset my password. They can be slightly more difficult; I need to report some fraud, I would like to file an insurance claim, I need help with the product. And of course, they can become quite complex; are wind storms covered, does my insurance cover floods and water damage, have I exceeded my coverage limits.

Using all of the customer interaction data, software platforms can help you determine and extract the intents from your mountain of voice, messages and emails interactions. I believe that understanding the customers’ intents and these demographics is critical for establishing a customer experience strategy. 

Once you understand what your customers want to do, then you can start to develop strategies for how best to serve particular customers for a specific intent. That requires the development of some customer profile personas. 

Let me explore with a simple example. You are looking to help customers reset their passwords. You might have a very simple customer profile; non-technical and technical. For the non-technical customer, you might offer a call center agent and for your technical customers some automated messaging interface. Of course, this is a simple example, but a solid CX strategy would be to have a breakdown of each intent against your customer profile, this becomes your CX Strategy matrix. On one simple slide, you could simply show how you will handle each intent for different customers.

When coming up with a strategy for each intent/customer pair, you should consider how to make the experience have the least friction for the customer. I believe that customers want an experience that is both personal and convenient. This often starts with understanding what data is needed to handle the interaction and how best to acquire it. Many of us have experiences where we are asked the same information over and over. CX designers need to make sure that the relevant customer and company data is available to either the agent or the automation. 

For each intent/customer pair, you will need to define the best way to serve the customer. CX designers will have a range of options including; live agents, messaging bots, webchat, etc. It is very important to decide what the goal is and how you will measure success. For some  intent/customer pairs, speed and simplicity will be the goal. For others, it will be ensuring the customer has their request fully completed. We want to reduce the number of return engagements by the customer to complete a given intent.

Share your experience with building CX strategies and your feedback on this approach.

One area that I will like to explore on my next blog is the idea of how we can use voice communications and ultimately video to create an intimate experience for some intents.