It’s not enough to offer a high-quality product or service. If that’s all you bring to the table, buyers don’t have a clear reason to choose your business over the competition.
So if you’ve put a lot of time into development and marketing, but you’re struggling to attract and/or retain customers, your focus might be too narrow. Standing out and carving a place for your brand requires providing a strong customer experience at every touchpoint.
That’s a tall order, so it’s easiest to accomplish with a few dedicated team members on the case. Your customer experience team functions as a bridge between departments or areas of work. By focusing on the big picture, they can proactively implement changes that benefit your company and customers.
Of course, as a small business, your ‘team’ probably won’t be a distinct entity. Instead, it’s likely to be a collaboration between employees who have other primary roles that provide insights into various CX elements.
That’s why the focus of this guide isn’t on how to plan and hire a complete customer experience team from scratch (which is expensive and often unnecessary). Instead, we’ll talk about how to build a functional team within your business’ existing structure.
What’s the Difference Between Customer Experience and Customer Service?
Is providing a strong customer experience (CX) the same as ensuring quality customer service? Yes and no.
Customer experience encompasses every way that buyers (current and potential) interact with your business. It’s the impression they get from the sum total of all touchpoints along the customer journey.
Those touchpoints include (but are definitely not limited to):
- Marketing materials and advertisements
- Content and conversations on social media
- Your website and landing pages
- The checkout and post-purchase onboarding processes
- Customer support, both via self-service options and direct interactions
- Outreach and ongoing education to existing customers (for example, via your mailing list)
- Loyalty and referral programs, dedicated forums, and other avenues for relationship and community building
For the most part, providing good customer service is reactive. It involves direct communication with a customer centered around their individual concerns. It’s vital, but it’s also just one component of an overarching CX strategy.
In contrast, optimizing the customer experience is largely proactive. You’ll need to assess the current experience you’re providing, and gather insights from data sources and direct feedback. Then you can apply what you’ve learned to optimize touchpoints and address potential problems before customers have to reach out to your support team.
How To Build a Customer Experience Team for Your Small Business (A 5-Step Process)
Marketing, sales, product development, IT… it’s all hands on deck. Everyone is involved in shaping the customer experience.
At the same time, someone needs to take the lead. If each team member or department approaches CX in its own way, you lose transparency and consistency. Plus, you’ll struggle to apply lessons learned in one area to other workflows.
So without further ado, here’s how to put together your own customer experience team, and start them on the path to success.
Step #1: Identify Your CX Goals
What does your company want to achieve when it comes to CX?
Your goals can be short-term or long-term. But they should align with your company’s overall mission. And although ‘customer experience’ is a nebulous idea, your objectives should should be as specific and concrete as possible.
Start by considering your broad objectives, such as:
- Revenue growth (expanding your customer base through targeted ad campaigns or PPC)
- Customer retention (driving loyalty and advocacy to improve CAC to LTV ratio)
- Customer acquisition (expanding your customer base)
- Product development (creating a better product by identifying and implementing customer feedback)
Then identify the CX metrics that affect your key goals. For example, high customer satisfaction scores predict better retention, while net promoter score reflects loyalty and growth via word of mouth.
This is the time to ask big-picture, probing questions about what may or may not be working. “How can we implement a landing page that speaks to target buyers? Is our high churn more likely caused by product issues or subpar technical support?”
Step #2: Create a Plan for Assessing CX in Context
You may have a general sense of how well your business is currently meeting (or failing to meet) your CX goals. However, the more concrete information you can gather, the better. Not only will it give your customer experience team a vital baseline, it will guide their efforts and track their progress over time.
It’s also best to avoid tracking and reviewing metrics in isolation, or choosing ones that simply ‘seem important’. Instead, put a clear game plan in place for how the overall CX and your progress towards goals will be assessed. Here are a few ways to do that.
The Balanced Scorecard Approach
The balanced scorecard focuses on gathering information from four perspectives, and putting them in context with one another. Those perspectives are:
- Customer Perspective: How buyers view and think about your business.
- Internal Perspective: What your business is doing or needs to do in order to provide a strong CX.
- Learning Perspective: How your business can learn and grow to provide better CX and overall value.
- Financial Perspective: How your business is performing, both in short-term and long-term measures.
Taken together, these provide a comprehensive overview of where your CX is at and where it can improve – both internally and externally. It’s also useful for prioritization, since it helps you assess the most crucial measures your business needs to take to achieve its goals.
OKRs
OKR or “objectives and key results” is another popular management strategy that defines objectives and tracks results. Introduced and popularized in the 1970s at Intel, it’s a good way to engage employees in the development process.
- Objectives. Qualitative descriptions of what you would like the business to achieve. Objectives should be direct, clear, and concise, and should motivate your CX team. Examples include scaling performance, improving customer satisfaction, and increasing revenue.
- Key results. A set of metrics that measure progress towards the objective. For each objective, you’ll want two to three key results.
The objective should be concise and engaging, so your team can easily remember it. As for the metrics, they should be something you can measure accurately and regularly.
This approach encourages you to translate general principles into actionable measures that reflect what really matters to customers. For example, a starting goal of ‘faster response times’ can be translated into a specific measurement, such as first response rate.
Once your team knows what KPIs to track in relation to the overall goal, they can work towards improving it. Team members are more engaged and productive when they have a clear sense of what the company is trying to achieve and can actively contribute towards that goal.
Step #3: Use Data To Map the Customer Journey
Detailed customer journey maps are essential for understanding (and guiding) how buyers interact with your business. We’ve already covered the basics of developing a map and tracking it in real-time, so we won’t retread that ground here.
When it comes to CX, however, it’s important to remember that your maps shouldn’t be linear or stagnant. For the most complete picture, you’ll want to develop both current state and future state journey maps.
‘Current state’ mapping should align with the expectations and experiences of your existing customers. What you want the customer experience to be might probably doesn’t reflect what it looks like right now. So this process helps you see where your business is failing to meet those expectations.
‘Future state’ mapping outlines the ideal experience, which then becomes a blueprint for implementation. When done right, this kind of map shows you what the customer will be thinking, feeling, and doing along your proposed journey’s touchpoints.
When put together, the process looks like this:
- Develop or refine your current and future state maps.
- Assess the differences between those maps, and identify all changes that would have to be made to transform the current state into the future state.
- Analyze those changes in context with other information you’ve gathered, in order to identify which should be prioritized (based on projected benefits vs. cost/time to implement).
- If possible, bring customers in on the decision-making process, using surveys to get their feedback on what changes would best improve their experience.
- Make sure the necessary tracking is in place to determine whether your changes result in real improvements to CX.
- Begin implementing changes one at a time, adjusting your maps and prioritization as you go.
Step #4: Structure Your CX Team
Building a strong customer experience team requires pulling in expertise from all levels. Key members from all departments overseeing direct customer touchpoints should be involved, from product development and IT to marketing and support.
You’ll also want to define some clear roles. This is especially important when the members of your CX team have various other responsibilities. To avoid confusion, each member should know how they fit in, and how the ongoing process of CX oversight will fit into their daily routines.
You’ll need members with experience in market research, UX, project management, and digital analytics. Exactly how you distribute responsibilities will depend heavily on your business’ team size and current structure. At a minimum, though, make sure the following roles are in place and clearly defined:
- Customer Experience Manager (Customer Service Department). A leadership role. Responsible for overseeing the team, setting up processes and goals, and establishing an interconnected relationship with the rest of the organization. They’ll ideally have experience in both people management and project management.
- Voice of Customer / Customer Insights Manager (Marketing or Technical Departments). The most analytical role, requiring someone skilled at digging into data, metrics, CX analytics, conversational analytics, and customer feedback. They’ll need to analyze that data, build reports, and recommend actions.
- User Experience (UX) Specialist (Web Design and Development). In charge of improving the customer experience through human-focused, design-forward methodologies. Throughout all touch points, the User Experience (UX) Specialist is responsible for creating a seamless and intuitive customer experience.
If certain necessary roles/skills aren’t present on the current team, there are a few options. You can make new hires, of course, but you can also invest in training current team members in new skill sets. You might also seek out tools to handle some of the necessary groundwork, such as by tracking the customer journey without the need for an IT department.
Step #5: Put a Clear Process in Place for Operation and Communication
Finally, there should be a clear process that guides how your CX team will operate, and how it will interface with the rest of the business on an ongoing basis. These plans can (and should) be flexible, but it’s vital to have a starting point so your new team can hit the ground running.
Once again, the specifics should be dictated by your business’ goals, preferred approach, and team composition. But here are the general categories to address:
- Feedback & data collection. Processes must be in place to gather and test both qualitative customer feedback and quantitative data. Consider implementing regular social media polls and surveys, A/B testing, review analysis, and metric reporting.
- Data analysis and reporting. For your customer experience team to derive insights from data, that data needs to be clearly recorded, well organized, and contextualized. The easier it is to understand, the better – visual reports can be very helpful here.
- Prioritization and decision making. CX is broad, and it’s easy for an inexperienced team to try and tackle too many changes at once. There should be a process for assessing what changes are both achievable and likely to result in real returns, and for prioritizing and planning incremental improvements.
- Communication and implementation. The CX team will need support from the entire business to affect real change. Consider how the team will communicate with other key decision-makers, and how its plans will be transformed into projects that require input from other employees.
- Tracking and refining. Finally, you’ll need a way to track the results of CX improvements. That includes specific metrics relating to your primary goals. But you’ll also want to look at big-picture measures that indicate overall CX quality, such as customer satisfaction and net promoter scores.
Developing a Quality Customer Experience From the Ground Up
You don’t need to budget for an entirely new customer experience department. In fact, building a strong customer experience team from existing employees is preferable.
Their deep understanding of your business and products, combined with a front-line view of how changes impact customers, works to your advantage. Maximizing CX requires leaders as well as commitment from the entire organization. Even if they’re not on the primary team, everyone should be encouraged to share ideas and suggest improvements.
This type of collaboration is much easier with Groove! Our support helpdesk is designed to help you deliver a top-quality customer experience. Sign up for a free trial today to see how Groove prepares your CX team for success.
