Getting customer experience right is about knowing where to effectively deploy top notch ‘24 carat’ customer service - the aim is to maximise revenue opportunities. 

In the midst of the economic downturn many industries have cut costs by reducing service hours and resources, thus having a negative impact on customer access, availability and quality. For these companies, efficiency has eroded customer experience.

Those companies emerging from the recession in the best health took the opposite approach, they continued to innovate, talked to their customers and invested in their brands and people. Unlike customer demand, customer experience is not boom or bust. It is an organisational constant and once delivered can never be taken back.

Customer experience is delivered in at various interaction points ‘moments of truth’ (MOTs) where customers and organisations interact. Companies that do this well know who their top customers are, develop a value proposition that can be delivered consistently to them and have mechanisms that enable on-going dialogue with them.

All customers deserve a good service, but some customers – what we refer to as 'very important customers' (VICs) – buy more than others. It makes sense to understand the needs, preferences, habits, attitudes and changing priorities of VICs because they will inevitably deliver a major portion of profits. Furthermore, by taking care of VICs to investment and reap the rewards of long-term loyalty.

One method of identifying VICs is to undertake detailed customer segmentation, which is achieved through analytics (Business Intelligence, or BI) that provides a complete picture of customers. Customer information is, however, often distributed throughout an organisation, making it extremely difficult to get to a single customer view. The key is to find a unified system that drives all customer information, using a managed approach enabling sharing, tracking and coordination.

The winners in customer experience do BI incredibly well. Retail and consumer companies are leading the way in this field, with a plethora of specialist providers in the market; these specialists take troves of data and turn it into the basis of customer interaction.

But BI is not the whole answer. Organisations need to validate that what they are doing is achieving the desired result - to deliver to, delight and ultimately retain customers.

Customer experience needs to be continually improved as part of an organisation’s culture. Competitors will always copy value adding services and what is innovative one day is the norm the next.

Companies that do it well must be aware of becoming victims of their own success. Take Apple for example: rightly held up as a standard setter in the first article in this series, they have fantastic products that attract customers of all age groups, with a running theme built on style, functionality and leading technology.

However, it has recently become difficult to buy and get the advice needed in Apple stores, largely because stores are full of Apple ‘tourists’ soaking up the atmosphere and destroying the experience for many purchasers.

If Apple does not continue its focus on customer experience, it will in the future serve as a cautionary tale, not a shining example.

Within this series of articles “Customer Experience Goldmine or Graveyard”, we set out to provide definitions of customer experience concepts; provide insights on organizing structurally for the right customer experience based on strategies culture, processes and technology; and we have provided views on how to deliver customer experience, such as which customers to focus on, how to deliver value to customers and measuring the revenue impact.

Ultimately, the leaders in the field of customer experience all have this in common: they place value on customer experience, they put in place the right structure and incentives to deliver it, they never stop innovating and they never stop putting the customer first.

If companies do this, they will always find new and innovative ways to delight and retain their customers. The payoff will be customer loyalty, deep love of brand, and, ultimately, greater profits.

On June 14th 2011, the London Business School Human Capital Network and Molten Group - www.molten-group.com - will host the fifth conference of its Organisational Development Speaker Series – Customer Experience: Either a Goldmine or a Graveyard. Organisational Development and Customer Experience Directors from customer-centric industries - Retail & Consumer, Retail Banking and Telecommunications - will share their insights into how to best align organisations with market demands, not only to win over customers, but to sustain their loyalty in the long term. Please, register for this event on http://humancapitalnetwork.blogspot.com

In the run-up to the event, Molten Group - www.molten-group.com – will present you with a series of articles on organising for customer experience.

The Human Capital Network - http://humancapitalnetwork.blogspot.com - is a discussion forum run by London Business School alumni that promotes debate on the latest issues in strategic change, organisational effectiveness and talent management. It has created the Organisational Development Speaker Series in order to facilitate discussion between HR practitioners and line managers. Some example topics addressed by previous events include Employee Engagement Strategies, Change-Ready Cultures and the Future of Work, and have featured speakers like Lynda Gratton (Professor of Management Practice at London Business School), Chris Bones (Dean of Henley Business School) and Paul Farley (Head of People and Organisational Effectiveness at British Airways). If you have queries about the event, please contact Oxana Popkova on opopkova.mba2006@london.edu.

Molten Group -  www.molten-group.com – is the sponsor of the London Business School Human Capital Network. Molten Group provides transformation advisory to the Energy, Financial Services, Retail & Consumer, and Hightech & IT sectors, especially in the areas of change management, organisational & leadership effectiveness, as well as programme & project management.