In today’s world of demanding customers, Kathy van de Laar writes, customer experience is more important than ever. The right customer experience takes five things into consideration.

Your Brand
Your brand is who you say you are. It’s imperative that the overall experience that your customers receive in customer contacts across all channels delivers on your brand’s promise. Customers need to feel your brand values in practice.

The first step is knowing what your brand values are. Then you can mobilize your organization to proactively translate them into your daily activities. The right customer experience delivers on your brand promise.

Your Customers
It’s important to think like your customer. Not the one-size-fits-all customer, but different types of customers. As customers, we are the interplay of a number of things:

  • Who we are (work, education, experience)
  • How we behave (impatient, shy, self-directed)
  • What drives and influences us (money, love, family)

Because we are different, we have different expectations and needs in terms of what for us is the right customer experience. The right customer experience is dynamic based on who the customer is.

The Customer Need
One of the dangers of focusing upon executing internal processes is that we forget what the customer need is behind this process. The key to keeping the customer need front and center is to think like the customer. In this case the “I’s” have it. Customers’ state their need from the “I” perspective:

  • “I want information about…”
  • “I need advice…”
  • “I have a complaint…”

Take the time to translate your internal processes back to the customer perspective. The right customer experience recognizes the need from the customer’s perspective starting from the very first word…”I.”

The Channel Strengths
Channels are different and have their own characteristics. Customers don’t have a channel preference but have different preferences depending on their needs and their circumstances. They will choose the channel they want to use based partly on the characteristics of the channel. The right customer experience recognizes and leverages the channel strengths.

The Context
Context is extremely important in understanding how to interact with the customer. For example, a customer who prefers to do everything themselves via internet is unable to access the channel because there is a service disruption. What will they do instead? Call. But they may not be happy about it. The right customer experience takes the customer’s context into consideration. The right customer experience is a balance between the best interests of the customer and the best interests of the company. By using the five keys, companies can achieve this balance and deliver the right customer experience and drive business performance.