Customer experience is created by optimizing overall customer journey.
Great customer experiences produce great business results. In fact, a well designed customer experience may be the primary business growth engine.
Business leaders such as Apple, Zappos, Amazon have one thing in common: large groups of customer advocates earned by delivering a distinctive and consistent customer experience.
We believe that true customer relationships are created through a positive, emotionally-connected experience in the overall customer journey. When a customer has a specific need, multiple channels are often employed — sometimes satisfying, often frustrating for the customer.
A positive, emotionally-connected experience comes from creating emotional associations such as trust and pride, creating perceptions that they are getting value or treated fairly, designing a functional delivery system that makes their lives easier and better, and ensuring consistency of getting things right.
Customer experience leaders move beyond getting the basics right. They seek to deliver an experience “wow”.
Leaders deeply know their customers, have a consistent track record of doing the right thing, and create memorably great moments that their customers perceive as being relevant and of real value.
Kinship Consulting can help you on your journey to customer experience excellence and customer “wow”.
Our Services
Setting your customer experience roadmap
Let’s be frank. Committing your business to be customer-focused and delivering an outstanding customer experience isn’t easy — particularly for those companies that are in the early stages of maturity. Customer experience isn’t a destination — it’s an ongoing journey and the transformation timeline to leadership may be a multi-year effort.
Critical to this journey is to clearly articulate the desired results and have the endgame in mind:
What do you want to achieve?
What does success look like?
Kinship Consulting works with its clients to design complete and integrated customer experience strategies, customer journeys, and the right operational capabilities for future growth.
Our customer experience strategy projects generally possess the following key components:
- Customer Experience Strategy: We help our clients define the program objectives, set performance goals for each key metric, and estimate the level of economic impact achieved from their Customer Experience program.
- Customer Experience Vision and Blueprint: Customer experiences should be fundamentally aligned to customer needs and expectations. They should create an emotional state that leaves a positive memory — particularly at the customer moments of value. We create the overall desired experience at each customer touchpoint.
- Effective Customer Feedback and Listening Program: An effective customer feedback and listening program must be able to provide fast and reliable feedback at every customer interaction point.
- Customer Feedback Insight and Analytics Processes — We work with our clients to develop the necessary reporting, analytics, organization teams and routines requires for insight collaboration and root cause diagnostics.
- Customer Experience Capability Development: We help our clients turn insight into action by developing the appropriate change initiatives, governance structures, employee accountability, and organizational structures. Our goal is to create the organizational “will and skill” to undertake the required change journey.
To optimize customer satisfaction and loyalty, focus must be placed on the end-to-end customer journey.
Many companies seek to optimize key touchpoints — those areas where the customer interacts with certain business functions or products. But, to enhance performance and relationships, focus must be placed on the overall customer journey to meet a specific customer need.
This journey is becoming increasing complex when you consider the multiple types of influencers, sources and channels the customer must go through to achieve their need.
Making customer journey mapping effective requires taking an “Outside-In” view, or becoming the customer.
Customer journey mapping is an effective tool to document the current experience and emotional feelings that a customer faces when interacting with your company.
Kinship Consulting works with its clients to develop detailed customer touchpoint maps, journey maps, and interaction models based on the key stages of the customer experience journey and moments of truth. Building a journey map involves:
1. Become the customer:
- Define personas of typical customer groups
- Bring customer to life: e.g., what they like to do in spare time; trusted brands, key associations, level of technical sophistication
2. Map process from customer’s perspective
- For specific need, identify the key processes, decision points, and pain points
- Identify moments of truth or value
- Identify the emotional states that customer experiences
- Understand customer preferences – channel preferences, level of support required
3. Identify areas of opportunity or change
- Identify industry best practices
- Braninstorm and evaluate opportunities to close gaps
- Set roadmap and timetable for change
Project Examples and Case Studies
Launching Corporate Change Initiatives
The Kinship Consulting team has been directly involved in numerous customer experience change initiatives resulting in enhancements to customer communication, employee accountability, VOC capabilities, rewards and recognitions, frontline coaching and development. We will provide details upon request.
