The most significant differences between the highest performing organisations and the rest, are the perceptions and experiences by customers of the quality of the service delivered.  

Only by developing an intelligent customer service strategy, can an organisation ensure their customers’ needs are met and customer satisfaction is increased through a seamless experience. However, a clear CX vision can also give businesses a deeper understanding of their customer base, allowing them to outperform competitors, drive value, and loyalty.

Enhancing customer experience 

No matter the industry or location of your brand, when contemplating your customer experience (CX) strategy, one of the most important questions to ask is: ‘is being a CX champion worth it?’ 

This question gets to the heart of every customer value and how you are perceived, as much as how you deliver your customer service. It also ensures that you understand the commercial motives when developing a customer experience strategy and aiming for a CX champion status. 

In developing your CX vision, do you know how this will improve competitiveness and differentiation as well as exchange value that you can derive from your customer engagement and service positioning?

What is a ‘CX vision’? 

A CX vision describes the aspirational future state for your customer service strategy. It focuses on where we want to be in the future. It aligns the business and its employees to the customer experience; creating a north star to guide and drive performance. 

Distinct from mission statement or brand promise, it’s usually supported by service pillars or principles across areas like CX, operations, people, IT/tech that uphold the vision across the entire business. 

A service vision is key for businesses enacting strategic change, it can be used as a guiding truth to translate the strategy ensuring that while revenue and profitability is achieved – it is not at the expense of the customer experience. 

A well-designed CX vision is key in delivering a differentiated service – while also improving efficiency and reducing cost to serve. 

A CX vision resonates with people and provides direction around decision making, behaviours and ways of working. A strong, well embedded service vision will typically translate into positive frontline behaviours, performance, and customer experience.

Consumer power is only increasing 

Netflix were infamous for claiming their only competition was sleep. Despite successfully developing a frictionless and personalised experience, they’ve recently seen a dramatic downturn in subscriptions, with the likes of Disney+ launching with some unrivalled content (that’s if you are a parent, Marvel, or Star Wars fan at least).   

In today’s increasingly commoditised market, organisations must work harder to achieve growth and increase earnings. Attracting and maintaining relationships with customers is the core challenge – with a differentiating factor increasingly being the effectiveness of the customer value proposition. 

• Consumers now have easy access to more information, choice and peer reviews. Aggregators have ‘uncoupled’ the research component of the customer value chain. 
• Changing consumer demographics: for some the phone will always be there, for younger generations it’s the point of last resort. 
• Customer service expectations are of the basics done brilliantly, continue to rise and are set by wider retail experiences. Internet based platforms are commoditising the marketplace.  
• New digital technologies and business models enable new consumption patterns e.g., pay as you go, rental models. 
• Best in class / market disruptors pursue ‘effectiveness’ business strategies and understand what matters to customers. 
• New entrants are differentiating through focusing on frictionless experience.

 5 top tips for designing a CX Vision

1) Understand your current CX maturity

To know where you want to go, you need to know where you have started. We use a tried and tested methodology to map your current maturity to help you visualise the future for your service.

2) Know your cost to serve

Understanding this can support any business case requirements for change and help you identify what is best and realistic for your service ambition

3) Engage your team

Creating the CX vision works best as a collaborative process, especially those within your operation who know your customers best, not only will you produce the best output, but by taking them on the journey the vision has greater chance of success.

4) Perform value/irritant analysis

Create insight which allows you to prioritise efforts into interactions that both the business and the customer value most then simplify or automate the lower value interactions creating a low-effort customer experience.

5) Be ambitious

The aim of the CX vision is to be forward thinking and aspirational – don’t get too bogged down in today’s challenges.

Does your organisation have a compelling CX vision? 

At the heart of a great CX vision there should be a customer service strategy that is highly adaptable and customer centric. We help organisations embed successful digital transformations by developing their strategy, skills and CX vision. 

If you would like to find out more, please get in touch with Senior Consultant Aimie Jago at aimie.jago@davies-group.com.