Developing a customer experience strategy
On starting her customer service career in Asia-Pacific’s insurance industry and spending several years learning the details of call centre and retail branch operations, Gabrielle Dracopoulos, head of customer success and experience at fintech Intuit Quickbooks, says she was continually challenged with the excessively reactive nature of how companies conducted business with their customers.
“I wanted to understand more about customer behaviour and the development of products and services, so I switched paths into research and development in banking and finance,” says Dracopoulos. “This gave me a greater appreciation for how products and services were developed, but it didn’t answer the question of why services were so reactive and why products didn’t meet customer needs.”
Conscious of the need to drive meaningful value for consumers, Dracopoulos injected the voice of the customer into the product development and service design process while she was at tech company VMware. She says that an awareness of customer needs and meeting those needs in a timeframe and channel that suits the customer forms the backbone of building great products and services.
“I spent a number of years shifting teams and companies to an Agile product and service development approach which brought the customer to the centre of decision making and earlier into the development process,” Dracopoulos explains. “We developed and tested some really cool products and disrupted traditional banking.”
Dracopoulos warns, however, that brands big and small need to beware of the dangers of complacency.
“Working at a company that has a global-leading product is great, but when there is no competition brands can become stale and bad practices can set in,” she cautions. “Your perception of customer loyalty really gets tested when the market opens-up and you suddenly have new competition.”
Building trust into your customer experience strategy
Reflecting on the key lesson that she has learned throughout career, Dracopoulos notes that brand experiences must work to build trust and deliver on the promises made to customers.
“Trust is an element that is built into your experience, but it can be broken in an instant,” she explains. For instance, in insurance and banking Dracopoulos says that customers want to be treated fairly and they crave clear communication with reliable and useful technology to support them.
“Creating a customer experience that builds trust involves defining the moments that matter and delivering on your brand promise at these key moments,” she adds.
- Know what you stand for: Define an outside-in, customer-centered vision for your brand, which has a set of principles that will guide the development of your end-to-end customer experience.
- Know your customers and the experience you are delivering: Develop your customer personas. Then map their current experience to uncover the moments that matter most to them and your employees. This is where trust can be broken or earned.
- Re-design the moments that matter: Focus on the areas where customers have the greatest opportunity to accomplish their goals and the measure effort needed for them to do so. Work in cross-functional teams to remove points of friction and design the ideal experience for these moments. Customer input is critical here to achieve the right outcome.
- Create an employee movement: You can invest in amazing technology and customer-centered processes but your employees are the ultimate custodians of the customer experience. Build customer obsession into your culture by developing an outside in approach to everything you do.
- Measure success and keep innovating: Customer experience is not something that is defined and executed once, it’s a continuous focus of innovation. Build a cycle of continuous learning, feedback and experimentation to ensure you consistently evolve and push the envelope when it comes to your customer experience.
Sign up to the upcoming CXN Live: APAC Online event to hear more customer experience insights from Intuit Quickbooks’ Gabrielle Dracopoulos.