What Are Customer Experience Best Practices? A Study by Miller Heiman Group

A study by researchers from Miller Heiman Group suggests that in today's market competition, growth strategies based on product innovations and low pricing are not sufficient for a lasting effect. Customer loyalty is what plays a role in higher customer retention rates.

Using this study, they uncovered four key ways that helped leading organizations differentiate themselves through their customer experience strategy:

Executives Walk the Talk:

The senior executives in both leading and stagnant organizations believed customer loyalty is a key to success. However, there was a difference in how they backed up those beliefs. Leading organization's executives were willing to invest money resources twice that of stagnant organizations into their customer experience initiatives.

Customer Experience Practices Translate Strategy Into Action:

Neither does the knowledge of merely improving an organization's customer service experience work nor does the plan of providing the best service or effortless experience help. The knowledge needs to be converted into specific actions. The following 5 practices that contributed to customer experience improvement are:

1. Linking the investment in customer experience to business outcomes.
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3. Defining and communicating a vision for the desired customer experience rather than fixing broken customer experiences.
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5. Ensuring that the customer experience stands up to the brand promise of the organization.
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7. Capturing the voice of the customer (VoC) data to monitor the customer experience delivery.
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9. Driving continuous improvement using this VoC data that shows the possibility to close the gap between customer feedback and organizational action.
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Use Journey Maps to Eliminate Organizational Silos

The main difference between leading organizations and stagnant organizations in this regard comes down to the silos existing between marketing, sales, and customer service. The study also identified 3 customer experience practices that help leading organizations beat the stagnant ones:

1. Creating a customer journey map to link interactions with customer expectations and emotions. These customer journey maps are an important tool in breaking siloed communication. They help in diagnosing problems that can arise in the path of the customer via the organization; for example, a sales team might promise services that a product can’t deliver, leading to problems that customer service can’t address.
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3. Data is available on the positive and negative elements of the customer experiences.
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5. Best practices are collected and shared across sales and service organizations to be able to address these roadblocks in a better way.
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Hire and Develop the Right Talent

It is quite essential for an organization to manage its people efficiently. Most of the organizations excel throughout the talent lifecycle, right from hiring, assessing performance, and implementing improvement plans to terminating poor performers. Following are the best practices followed by these leading organizations:

1. Recognizing service personnel for performance.
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3. Developing the knowledge and skills of service personnel.
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5. Building teams across the service organization.
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7. Setting standards for the service organization.
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9. Empowering frontline employees to take action.
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Timely training for service reps that includes instruction for product and service expertise improvement and for teaching soft skills is necessary. Teams should also receive meaningful feedback and coaching to reinforce this training.

The Customer Experience Best Practices Study by Miller Heiman Group is full of insights that can help you start building a customer experience strategy to differentiate your organization and build brand loyalty.