It's all about customer experience

Consistently optimising each customer's experience with your organisation is  no small undertaking. There are several critical aspects of your organisation that impact the customer's experience. The customer experience cycle above provides an overview of what is involved.

Customer Understanding
The customer experience begins with the customer. Assessing the customer experience must begin with the understanding of unique customer groups and their related characteristics and behaviours. A customer's experience with you and their perceptions of your organisation, and your ability to implement CRM strategies, will vary depending on who those customers are. Therefore, ongoing data collection efforts should be pursued as a means of populating and maintaining key customer information. Needless to say, this initial customer understanding is the basis for evaluating the customer experience with your organisation.

Customer Purchase Cycle
Once unique customer segments are established and the profiles of each segment are understood, we then come to defining unique purchase cycle.

• The stages of purchase cycle: awareness, decision making, purchase, and consumption
• The length of each cycle: this may vary significantly by customer segment
• The related complexity of each stage: the time taken for decision making varies with the involvement of products
• The indicators of when a customer enters a stage: it's the combination of behaviours and questions asked
• The frequency at which a customer repeats the cycle: it depends on products and services
• The level of resources directed at each stage: the focus and direction of your organisation

Understanding on these purchase cycles is critical in defining and then acting on relevant experiences.

Customer Needs
Each customer has unique needs at each stage of purchase cycle. These needs may relate to information, convenience, efficiency, price, reputation, and many more other issues. It is critical to understand how these needs vary by customer segment, and how these needs change as a customer progresses through purchase cycle. Understanding both organisational and individual needs is critical to furthering a purchase process.

Customer Interaction Opportunities
Finally, all the above needs now is the wide range of customer interaction opportunities. These opportunities are:

• Tied to specific stages of the purchase cycle: your opportunity is to communicate product features and benefits to a customer, providing personalisation and customised service to your customer helps to improve relationship with your customer
• Inbound and outbound: Interactions includes; phone calls, emails, websites, roadshows and events
• Cross-channel and cross-media: Indirectly interactions through information serving environment
• Situation-driven or driven by deeper understanding of customer needs and behaviour: The types or ways customers want promotions to be send to them via.  

The sum total of these interactions- those supported as well as those not supported today- form the customer's experience with your organisation. You may find that this experience is very positive for some of your customer segments, but less positive for others. This could be based on their needs, behaviours, and preferences. Once you realise the extent to which you support and enhance a customer's experience, you can put a game plan in place to adjust your efforts accordingly. Customer satisfaction can foster loyalty; in turn a customer's loyalty forms the basis of a valuable relationship with your organisation.