Insights from the Community: Enhancing Customer and Business Outcomes through Effective CX Design
Customer experience design is vital in shaping customer satisfaction and business success. When our members were asked for examples of where effective CX design drove better customer and business outcomes, they gave us a range of examples and insights. We can always trust the WiCX community to generously share their experiences, all in the spirit of learning from each other.
In this collaborative article, we're excited to share some key takeaways and stories from our community members.
Making Assumptions
In a quest to expand engagement and affinity communities, Community and CX Strategist Sara Schumann initiated surveys, interviews, and focus groups. This revealed a demand for more programming around health and wellness. Having previously been a yoga instructor, Sara was quick to assume people wanted more yoga in their lives. “When I shared some of the findings with my team, everyone had a different definition of health and wellness,” she explains.
“The experience highlighted the assumptions we lean on every day.”
“The experience highlighted the assumptions we lean on every day. It caused us to pause and consider what other assumptions we'd been working under.” The experience prompted a deeper exploration through customer interviews and surveys, resulting in a 26% increase in engagement and the identification of eight new markets.
Remembering the Next of Kin
“When working with a domiciliary care provider, they assumed their audience was just the direct customer who needed their services in a home environment,” says Nora Law, Founder & Director of Chrysalis CX. This assumption highlights a common oversight in marketing strategies where the focus remains primarily on the end-user. However, Nora’s example reveals a crucial aspect often neglected—the influence and decision-making power of the next of kin. With a demographic of 80 plus, Nora’s client did a traditional door drop every three months with diminishing returns.
“Adopting a customer listening programme to listen to contact centre calls, review complaints and online sentiment, I realised that there was a key audience in the next of kin that was not at all being marketed to.” Running an in-depth brand tracker targeting both audiences found that the decision makers were the users' children and grandchildren. “There has been a shift in content and social media to target this key audience,” Nora explains.
Infusing Customer-Centricity into ERP Implementation
Carolyne Gathuru, Strategy Consultant, Corporate Trainer and Public Speaking Coach at LifeSkills Consulting, explains how during a leadership project she participated in at a Microfinance Institution in the financial services sector, specifically in the credit lending space, one of the major goals was to implement a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
One of the main milestones in achieving this was the signing off of the Functional Requirements Documents (FRDs) for each of the major process holders. This marked a significant step towards progressing to software development and customisation of processes with the development team from the vendor.
Carolyne explains that “to have the step of being customer-focused and customer-centric that we were embodying as an institution come to life, it required that each of these FRDs and their inherent processes be audited and assessed for the customer experience in the journey at each step in each of the processes, and to determine the skew either towards delivering excellent experiences or delivering excellent internal efficiencies.”
Going back, making these process flow design reviews and reworking them to be CX-oriented proved to be quite a tall order. Although project timelines were slowing down, people understood the just cause and desired business impact. “The final documents were signed off with the customer's voice and experience at the centre of the process designs.”
Carolyne explains how this, of course, was a great win for the internal teams involved in the process, the ICT team and the vendor, but most importantly, it was a win for “the customers whose experience of the new ERP system has been quite a delightful turnaround.”
Improvising in a Siloed Environment
In her role overseeing international student recruitment, Lara Khouri, Founder & Cultivator of Contentment at There is No Spoon, identified a critical piece of information missing from the customer journey, contributing to confusion among potential students. “Interestingly (and frustratingly), I discovered that this piece of information was being shared with another stakeholder group. For various reasons related to silo working and corporate politics, it wasn't possible to formally include this information in the student journey,” she explains.
After discussing with her student recruitment colleagues, the team determined two things: “[Firstly], we'd have the information on our smartphones during student recruitment fairs/drives, and [secondly], we would share the public link with students as part of our locally-developed information packs.”
A year after implementing this change, there was a noticeable increase in potential students continuing their recruitment journey, as well as an improved understanding of how to successfully join as a student. “We could see this most clearly in the quality of questions we were being asked by potential students as well as the number of potential students who were getting further along in the recruitment journey with us.”
Redesigning Customer Feedback
Jenna Pellegrino, Voice of the Customer & Customer Experience Strategy at Autodesk, explains that while aiming to listen and act on product feedback actively, her team faced a challenge in lacking the necessary structure and governance to effectively hear, act upon, and provide the required transparency.
“This disconnect hindered our communication and clarity on how our product developments are in alignment with customer needs, especially in an industry that's always changing. Recognising this, we knew we needed to keep a close pulse on our customers not just to meet their current needs but also to drive industry progress together.”
“We knew we needed to keep a close pulse on our customers not just to meet their current needs but also to drive industry progress.”
To tackle this challenge, the team implemented a revamped program to gather and evaluate direct customer feedback on product features and enhancements. The redesigned program collects high-quality, prioritised feedback, closes the loop, and ensures transparency. “We formed cross-organisation partnerships to drive its success, emphasising a data-driven approach to align feedback with our roadmap,” Jenna explains.
“When it came to product delivery, our focus was on improving their world, not merely replicating it. Instead of just digitising existing paper processes as requested by some customers, we translated their needs into innovative solutions that improved their workflows and processes.”
According to Jenna, this deep understanding, coupled with business context and impact, led to data-driven product development and an improved CX, leading to stronger relationships and partnerships.
Streamlining Client Onboarding
“Whilst working with a client, she couldn't see why everything was taking so long in the onboarding process of new clients into her business,” says Hannah Cornaby, Customer Experience Consultant at Simmons CX. “It was leading to constant chasing by new clients and a few walking away, things being forgotten and missed completely, and it was giving a very broken service.”
When going through her processes and customer journey, Hannah realised that her client had no mapping or procedures in place and that the client herself was a stopping point at times.
“I therefore created a solid customer journey map, automated procedures that could be automated, and standard operating procedures (SOPs). This has now led to a smooth onboarding process, where her workload has been reduced. It has also reduced errors, increased satisfaction, and increased income as there is now no longer a long time period before starting work with the client.”
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