Without a well-established customer experience, your business can be at a disadvantage in upholding a good reputation and creating customer loyalty. Countless experts have generously shared their ideas and tips on how to utilize a good customer service. This blog builds upon 4 Tips from Top CX Industry Experts Part 1, to add 4 more tips from industry experts.

Tip 5: Get CX Buy-in from the Top

Blake Morgan is a highly recognized customer experience futurist, author, and speaker. One major tip Morgan highlights is getting customer experience support from the CFO as a strong resource for your support team. Morgan explains here:

“Get the CFO involved in your customer experience. Creating a more customer-centric company can require long-term ‘skin in the game’ investments. You need your CFO to show up for CX meetings. It will make a tangible difference.”

Tip 6: Find the Right Tools

With a good CX analytics tool, it will be easier to analyze metrics like customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, customer churn, return purchases and many more. Understanding these metrics allows your company to create a more personal and efficient customer relationship.

In a recent article, What is customer experience analytics? business intelligence analyst and consultant Troy McNall explains what customer experience tools should provide:

“This tool should provide our team with useful data and abilities such as:

  • Real-time and historical reporting across multiple channels of business
  • Predictive analysis and data capabilities
  • Seamless transitions across various methods of contact
  • A consistent personalized experience
  • Insights into a customer’s journey and behavior”

Tip 7: “Don’t Segment Your Customers”

James Dodkins is a top CX influencer, host of Amazon Prime’s ‘This week in CX’ and founder of Rockstar CX. Dodkins expresses his belief in creating personalization and categorizing rather than segmenting customers.

According to Dodkins, we need to move away from process standardization and towards experience personalization. To do that we need to understand our customers’ needs and not pigeonhole them by circumstance (industry, company name/size, past requirements, etc.). Each customer opportunity should be treated as a new situation. It is important to not underestimate the need to spend time with the customer, ask the right questions, compare them to past success stories, show how you have been successful solving similar problems in the past and most of all, listen to what your customer is saying each time.

Dodkins provides 5 simple steps to help you achieve this:

“Work to understand your customer’s true needs, make different categories based on who your customers are as people and what their needs are, build your customer experience strategy around the delivery of these needs, market to and attract the types of people who will be the best fit for your needs-based products and services, and lastly make sure to ask the right questions to help you accurately categorize them to make sure you are delivering the products and services they really need in a way that is personalized for them.”

Tip 8: Data is Not Perfect

Gregory Yankelovich is a technologist who is religious about customer experience. In his article, Why Your Investment in Analytics is Likely to be a Complete Waste of Money, Yankelovich shares what he has learned with his deep experience with customer data.

“Those who believe that bigger data possess unreasonable effectiveness will invariably be disappointed. Many believe the more data you have, the more unexpected insights will arise from it, and the more previously unseen patterns will emerge. This is the religion of big data that promises to defy the gravity of management science. While I do believe in miracles, I am very skeptical about being able to buy them from third parties.”

Gregory knows how helpful data can be in providing customer insights, but he also realizes data has limitations. Yankelovich explains how the role of analytics is to “provide support for building predictive models”, expressing his opinion that it is more about the quality of the data and less about the quantity.

Including my earlier blog, part one on this topic, these 8 customer experience tips emphasized by 8 different industry leaders provide helpful insights to improve the success of your organization’s customer service team and give you a competitive advantage.