Passion, persistence and perseverance for customer journey

Ahead of her session at CXN Live: CX APAC Online 2021, Cynthia Tang, senior manager of customer experience at retail brand Sunway Malls, who manages seven malls across Malaysia, shares the story of her customer experience (CX) career so far and sheds light on the greatest lessons she has learned.

Effective CX requires passion, persistence and perseverance

Tang remarks that the early stages of her CX career, when CX was still a fairly new concept in Malaysia and she needed to educate and attain buy-in for CX across all departments, she learned one of the greatest lessons her career has taught her.

“It took me over a year to actually educate everyone,” explains Tang. “When I told different departments what we needed to fix in the customer journey, they didn’t understand at first, it takes a lot of grit to lay down the foundation.”

In her quest to lay the foundations of an optimized and robust CX strategy, Tang learned that championing CX requires passion, persistence and perseverance, which she dubs as ‘the three P’s’.

“I have passion for what I’m doing, because I enjoy problem solving and dealing with customers, Tang remarks. “But it was the persistence and perseverance to enhance our CX that actually led us to where we are right now.”

How to apply the three Ps for winning CX initiatives?

One particular project that required the three Ps was a particular ‘smart parking’ initiative Tang delivered to enhance the experience of Sunway Malls’ local customers.

Sunway Malls set out to overhaul a long-winded and outdated parking system that utilized paper tickets, to transition to an online, paperless system that not only offered more convenience but would also improve safety for customers during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Prior to the ‘smart parking’ initiative, when you entered our car park, you needed to pull the ticket, pay at the auto-pay machine and, before you exited, put the ticket back,” Tang explains. “We were the first in Malaysia to introduce a fully unified smart parking system with multi cashless payment options, which is the largest of its kind in the country, and there were a lot of customers who were not familiar with it, which meant there were a lot of complaints.”

According to Tang, this necessitated significant grit and determination in applying the three P’s, to educate customers that this is something that enhances not only a convenience for them but also safety. Overcoming this challenge and working to reduce the number of complaints represented a significant challenge for the brand, one that Tang was now working to overcome.

“We needed to walk through the customer journey as, despite a large number of complaints, we had to roll out the system anyway,” notes Tang. “We had to just bite the bullet, as all this feedback was actually very important because we needed to know where the pain points were and how to resolve them.”

After plotting out the customer journey, from the moment the customer drives in, to the point where they need to provide payment and exit, Sunway Malls began to remove points of friction. This ranged from packing the website with helpful FAQs to analyzing customers’ line of sight to determine how easy it was to find information on how to pay.

“Then we started to see exponential growth of people using cashless payments, from 20 percent all the way up to 80 percent,” remarks Tang. “Thankfully, after a few months of rollout, and getting our staff to actually go down and educate the customers, numbers of complaints, or so-called feedback, have gone down tremendously.”

Sign up to the upcoming CXN Live: CX APAC Online 2021 to access the full range of insights from Tang on how to apply a hybrid approach to alleviate the customer journey.