Customer Experience specialist Ian Golding, author of Customer What: The Honest and Practical Guide to Customer Experience, writes for Customer Experience Magazine offering expert insight to help businesses improve their CX offering.
To ask Ian a question on how to boost the Customer Experience provided by YOUR business, please email your question to editor@cxm.world. The best questions will be featured in future instalments.
Ian also leads the CX Professional Masterclass. Click here for details of upcoming Masterclass dates.
I believe my business is running smoothly, and I have had no complaints so far, but how can I test my touchpoints to identify potential problems before a customer does?
This is a great question!
The only way to determine if your perception of your business is a reflection of reality is to ‘put yourself in your customers shoes’!
Whilst it is perfectly feasible that you are delivering a consistently good experience that is meeting the needs and expectations of customers, it is important to understand that very often, when things are going wrong, customers will not tell you about it! The only time you will realise there is a problem, is when it is too late.
So to ‘test’ the touchpoints in the customer journey, you must experience them for yourself in exactly the same way the customer does. This is an activity/exercise that should be done on a regular basis – and not just by you!
Everyone in your organisation should be experiencing the customer journey on a regular basis and reporting back observations (both positive and negative). Even if you are in a ‘business-to-business’ relationship, it is still vital to see what your customer sees’.
Too many organisations are not genuinely putting themselves in their customers shoes on a continuous basis. Doing so will enable the proactive management of the customer journey.