Customer Experience Engineering

It’s a fairly simple proposition, customer experience engineering; rather than developing something you think (or know) is incredible, and then putting effort (and money) into trying to explain why your customers need and want it, you start with what your customers need and want and reverse engineer your products, services, communications and even your behaviour, to suit.

Sounds like a pain in the proverbial? Well, I won’t use the old ‘easy as 1, 2, 3’ cop-out slogan, and if anything it’s closer to ‘STOP, LOOK and LISTEN’ but… read on.

Step 1 – who are we, really?

You need to understand (and agree upon) who you are and what you have that’s desirable. You need to understand how to think, behave and respond to the people you work for… your customers. You need to say, at the outset; ‘this is us, this is why we’re good at this, and this is the value we deliver’ – we use BrandPrint to help identify a complete business strategy so that your entire business, from Finance, HR, NPD and Marketing understand how people, products and processes can be focused to deliver a better customer experience and improve the bottom line.

Step 2 – are we understood?

You need to understand your customer experience – we use a TouchPoints system to identify every possible place your business ‘touches’ a customer, and how they’re likely to feel about what the experience at this point. From your logo and web presence to the way you answer the phone and the tools you use to process sales, it all has an affect on how you are perceived.

Step 3 – how well do we listen?

You need to understand your customers – you need to engage with them and ask them to become involved with your brand, to feel ownership for what you do and what you make or do for them. A customer involved and valued in this way can very easily become an ambassador for you, sharing good experiences with peers and defending you in times of trouble. We have seen how a good Social & Digital Strategy can rapidly build a database, and drive product development and sales the right way.

Idealogy have been doing these things for our customers, because they’ve asked us to, for years. It’s scalable too; we’ve done it for businesses of 12 people, and we’ve done it for businesses of 7,000 people. If you’d like us to talk you through it, how it works, what you need to commit (money included) and what you’ll get out of it, please let us know… we’ll be there.

Posted by Idealogy