Strengthen the Reliability of Key Customer Touchpoints

Proactive experience reliability & innovation (Competency 4) builds out your “Revenue Erosion Early Warning System.”

It enables leaders to know before customers tell you – if your operation is reliable (or unreliable) at key customer touchpoints.

To drive customer asset growth, leaders need to care about and require reliable operational performance in key customer intersection points.   These intersection points along your customer journey impact customers’ evaluation of value delivered.

Manage Key Customer Touchpoints

When you establish a competency for managing the processes of key customer touchpoints that make or break your relationship with customers, you can start taking actions before customer relationships have eroded and caused customers to depart. Over time, the skills developed in experience reliability will enable you to increase value through experience innovation.

Build a Customer Experience Development (CXD) Process

For example, in the automotive business, the test drive experience is pivotal to the car buying decision. But most automakers only measure the end result – number of units sold. They do not put rigor into building a reliable process for test drives no matter where or when they are requested. Many are not measuring actual operational performance at the dealership in delivering test-drive experience reliability or at the corporate level in supporting it.

Yet the ability or inability for a customer to test-drive correlates directly to sales. Many manufacturers don’t track or manage the execution and reliability of processes that impact the customer test-drive experience.

When I begin working through the customer experience development process of competency four (proactive experience reliability) with my clients, I ask “Do you focus on process?” The answer is often a groan. The discipline required to build and improve customer experiences feels like work layered on the ‘real work’ of the business.

Measure the Reliability of Processes that Impact Customer Touchpoints

When you are successful in building out this competency, leaders have actual operational performance metrics that proactively measure reliability of the processes that impact priority customer touchpoints. The multiple sources in your customer listening path combined with the journey framework enable informed and balanced decision-making.

Leaders must understand the impact of unreliable experiences:

• value erosion
• customer departure
• negative word of mouth

The goal is to get executive mindshare to focus on disappointments or interruptions in customer experiences that lead to the departure or a diminished customer asset. Leaders will require experience reliability because they understand the impact of lack of reliability.

Experience reliability can shift leadership attitude to work that enables the achievement of (more profitable) customer acquisition and customer asset growth. You will build leadership demand for management of these moments with as much rigor and passion as they track sales goals and revenue.

Conclusion

If you find you need to sell this work, sell it as your “Revenue Erosion Early Warning System.”  The operational performance metrics from competency 4 give leaders early warning indicators to know when customer asset growth is at risk. Competency 4 gets you ahead of customer suffering and survey results so you can proactively solve the issues eroding growth and strengthen the reliability of customer touchpoints.