Improving the customer experience is almost never just about "digitizing" services for your customers – it's important to improve digital self-service within a broader operational context. Join us for some lessons learned and approaches that have helped us improve customer service, retention, and loyalty for some of today's most notable brands.
Urgency can often drive importance in most organizations (including our own). Things need to happen today. This is what we stress about, what makes our days crazy, and how our success is measured. But in our pursuit of putting out the fires every day, it becomes easy to lose sight of the big picture—the big things that move our businesses forward.
In the world of marketing, creating a healthy NPS should be integral to our long-term success, but our responsibilities in short-term growth and acquisition goals can get in the way at a moment's notice. It's important to talk about this because measures like NPS are our best indicators of customer satisfaction and, in the long run, have a tremendous impact on growth and the acquisition of new customers (thanks to earned media).
If you find yourself tasked with improving NPS (or just believe it's the right thing to focus on), it can be daunting to figure out where to start. We've been here many times before for some of today's most notable brands, so here's what we learned...
A Service Delivery Network (or service chain) is all the parts and processes that make up a service – from operations to systems. They can be complex, so identifying the right marketing opportunities can be rather intimidating unless you have a clear view of the current state. Welcome to Service Blueprinting. Service Blueprinting is how we create a singular, clear view of the service landscape so we can have a more confident perspective on what needs to change. They can serve as a foundational part of getting started.
Customer Journeys should be a familiar baseline for most marketers. Even if you've never created one before, the concept is pretty straightforward – understand the steps your customer takes when engaging with your brand. Along the way you should absolutely capture needs, pain points, and opportunities, but that extra information doesn't necessarily make its way into the Service Blueprint – we just need the steps.
Starting with the customer journey also sets the tone for the work we're doing and ensures we're customer-centered from the start. Since urgency does drive importance for most organizations, the Operations and IT teams (which are traditionally responsible for digital services) often overlook the marketing opportunity and customer needs that these services are intended to solve for. Building the business case around true customer-centricity gives marketing stakeholders permission to lean in and facilitate differentiated value creation where we otherwise wouldn't have it.
This is where marketers start to move out of their comfort zone. The next step in Service Blueprinting is to work with operational and IT leads to understand what happens to bring those customer steps (as defined by the journey) to life and document them.
As an example, we can look at our work with Panera Delivery. A customer might place an order for delivery, but between that moment and the moment they get their sandwich, a lot of things need to happen. The kitchen needs to receive the order, someone prepares it, a driver is dispatched, etc.. Documenting those invisible-to-the-customer operational steps helps us understand the systemic causes that impact the customer's experience. What happens if Panera is out of lettuce? ...or the delivery driver is taking longer than expected? These are moments that – if left unaccounted for – would likely have a negactive impact on the customer experience and NPS, but if we can get ahead of them, we turn them into brand moments.
And this is just one example to articulate a point. We've encountered these types on challenges and opportunities in almost every client we work with – from patient services at Biogen to financial advisory services with Commonwealth Financial. Connecting the customer experience to internal processes is essential in customer-led transformation.
This overarching, singular view (and the process we used to uncover it) can now provide marketing teams with a confident view of the service network. At this level, we can now have productive discussions around bottlenecks, unnecessary steps, opportunities for digital, system gaps, and new ways for working.
Seeing the opportunities can be difficult if we don't know what we're looking for. To help, we listed some of the common opportunities we've seen across our clients in commerce, B2B, healthcare, and financial services.
This is the world that operations and service teams live in. When they do their jobs right, the company grows, and as the company grows – it becomes increasingly burdensome to deliver these same service teams. Unless teams can find new opportunities to scale indespensable service, they find themselves in a place where the level of service erodes, along with customer satisfaction and NPS.
This was the story for a financial services client. Currently, they're America's largest independent broker-dealer and they got there by delivering indispensable service to their customers. Whatever their clients (in this case, financial advisors) needed, the relationship leads would almost always say yes and find a way to make it happen. This commitment to tailored services and responsiveness led to a dramatic growth curve, but it put such a burden on their service teams that it became financially unsustainable.
This financial powerhouse wasn't alone in these challenges. Many of our clients – from Biogen to Keurig – turn to us to help find new opportunities to scale their services through digital. Along the way, here's what we learned...
We were working with large B2B benefits provider to simplify their onboarding experience, and in a call of about 5-6 service leads, we were taken off guard. The discussion quickly moved from "business as usual" to an emotionally open conversation. When we introduced questions about their peak season (open enrollment), the service leads began opening up about how the peak season impacted their personal lives. Sleepless nights, panic attacks, the impact on their families – all because, during the peak season, they didn't have the staff needed to support the spike in customer needs.
For us, this was an important lesson. Operations teams (and any team for that matter) aren't just a series of boxes and arrows needed to build a process. They're people. And it might be a surprise to the Accentures and McKinseys of the world, but people have emotions...and bad emotions lead to bad customer experiences and stagnant growth. Making sure we understand the rational and emotional needs of all stakeholders (customers, employees, vendors, etc) can be a powerful tool when designing exceptional services that customers feel.
For the service team mentioned above, we helped them "find the balance" with better capacity forecasting, customer self-service tools, and job design to help take the edge off of seasonal spikes and improve the lives of the people responsible for delivering on the brand promise. Everyone wins.
If the goal is to reduce the operational burden of great service, the simplest approach is to better understand which calls and requests are consistent and easy to answer – then develop content (like FAQs or chat scripts) to put on the website ahead of the contact information. What you'll find is the most people don't want to call, they would much rather find the answer on their own, so just make it easier to do that and you'll see a reduction in calls.
We have also found that most service reps are capable of managing three concurrent chat conversations over a single call. Better chat experiences give users the ability to interact on their own time and service reps the ability to service requests more efficiently.
This is just as true for sales as it is for servicing: people prefer to do things on their own time and own terms. If we've developed a service blueprint it becomes much easier to look at existing operational processes to identify the non-value-add activities, then digitize them so employees are spending less time on repetitive tasks and more time on adding value for customers. You would be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) how many operational processes there are for paper invoices, calling to update addresses, faxing information to other departments, etc.. Simply fixing foundational activities that are clearly out-of-date can have an immediate impact on creating better service and NPS.
Data is the big enabler – as well as the big challenge. It's not uncommon to walk into organizations with siloed data that ultimately translates into fragmented customer experiences ("I already told you that, why are you asking me again?!"). Ensuring there's a central data strategy should be one of the first, foundational steps in organizational transformation. It will set you up to deliver digital and service experiences that feel seamless, make the jobs of service teams easier, and add value through personalization efforts in the future.
Let's face it: people don't trust marketing or sales claims...they'll say anything to make a buck right? The moments that happen right after we give businesses our money might not be the first impression, but it is the most important. If you get it wrong, customers may frame all future business interactions with skepticism and distrust. If you get it right, customers may overlook small mistakes moving forward. How we shape onboarding experiences can have a formative effect how our customers perceive us (and ultimately NPS) more than almost any other moment in the customer journey.
There's almost always a natural tension between sales and service. Sales teams aim for the highest price tag and are incentivized to over-promise, while service teams are responsible for delivering on the inflated expectations that they're not equipped to deliver. All of this is reflected in a customer experience that leaves a lot to be desired.
Digital can help raise the bar for a service experience by providing customers with visibility, self-service, and brand moments. It can also be just as effective internally by supporting better communication, collaboration, and resolution across teams.
The Domino's Pizza Tracker has become the ubiquitous frame of reference for any business (from deep IT systems to retail investing) that wants to let customers know the progress of an internal process. Providing customers with on-demand status updates can make even the longest processes feel shorter. In contrast, creating a black box with no end in sight is the easiest way to create a nervous customer.
Adding alerts, auto-responding emails, feedback prompts, and other digital touchpoints can be a low-effort way to let your customers know that you're on top of it and they've been heard.
Your brand is special and unique. It's why your customer purchased your service or product. With all the things that come along with delivering an exceptional experience, it's easy to lose sight of the special-ness of what you do...especially if it's an operations-led effort that tends to prioritize boxes and arrows over differentiation. As a steward of the brand, it's our responsibility to define what's special about our brand and dial it up to eleven for both the communications and customer experience.
The Expectation Matrix has proven to be a really helpful activity in understanding a lot of the things we're talking about. It helps document how teams see the roles of other teams and what they need to be successful. It can uncover tensions, misunderstandings, and superpowers while fostering open collaboration across teams that never talk to each other. The final output is a series of opportunities that alleviate pain points and pressures across the entire service.
Creating the right customer portal is one of the most underserved opportunities for digital customer experiences. Traditionally, they're seen as purely utilitarian so they're handed off to IT teams...and IT teams oftentimes take a tech-centric approach at the expense of customer and marketing needs. One of the more common challenges we'll walk into is getting ahead of the requirements-gathering process to ensure we're leading with consumer needs (that ultimately should shape the technology we use). Getting that part of the process right opens up a world of value for customers and the business that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
Useful means we should build a customer portal that customers actually want. A lot of this can be solved with upfront research (ethnography is the most effective) and demand testing with early prototyping.
Usable is largely dependant on ensuring UX design is part of the process. Because customer portals are usually considered to be so utilitarian, IT teams may take a "we got this" approach, which, ten out of ten times, ends up becoming a complex mess that gets in the way more than it helps (I'm looking at you, Oracle).
Noteworthy is our ability to create marketable features that draw prospects in. There is value in developing features that might not be as useful as others but capture the attention in the sales process...and that's OK.
In many cases, we have a destination (owned media) where customers could be coming to you several times a week instead of you going to them (paying for media). This can be a cheaper and more effective path to growth since we can personalize communications to a captive audience that's more likely to buy additional products and services from you.
Prioritizing customer portal features and real estate to reinforce campaign messaging or product upsells gives marketing teams a new opportunity that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
The users of your customer portal are a known customer that's continuously engaged in browsing, purchasing, and using your products and services. The opportunity to use that data to shape personalized sales experiences is the thing marketing dreams are made of.
As an example in our work with Keurig Commercial, we were able to capture the consumption habits of office buildings and campus locations to power sales dashboards. What was once a passive sales process where Keurig was reacting to consumer requests, was transformed into a proactive sales experience that made the lives of customers and sales associates that much simpler.
We talked about a lot and the rationale behind it all may feel complex at times, but there's a bigger message for marketers here. To create lasting, meaningful brands, we have to focus on – not just communicating a compelling brand promise – but also making sure we can deliver on the brand promise through better products and services. Digital can be an amazing tool to unlock new opportunities that others can't.
Remember, modern brands run deep.
Ryan leads up CeCo’s experience design practice and has led engagements for some of the biggest brands in food and beverage – including brands like Keurig, Dunkin’, Toast, Panera, Bai Beverages, and more.
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