Delivering a Consistent Customer Experience

Viewpoint by Vanessa Cohen, Partner

Very few organizations around the world are known for creating a unique and compelling customer experience. Either because it doesn’t deliver the brand promise, is not distinctive, has little relationship to customers’ true needs, or is inconsistent across channels and time. Developing the ideal customer experience is a big opportunity and also a big challenge for organizations.

Solving the customer experience challenge is simple in concept but requires detailed, relentless choreography and alignment in practice. First, brand promise and segmented customer needs should be established. These should then be further developed into innovative customer experiences that happen at key moments of truth for the customer across a variety of channels.  Then, customer experiences should be enabled by aligning organization capabilities, ways of working, culture, leadership style, metrics and rewards. And finally, design and delivery of the customer experience should be monitored, maintained and adjusted over time through appropriate measurement and mechanisms for continuous improvement. No small task, but get it right and organizations could join the hallowed ranks of high performing, consumer-loved brands like Google, Amazon and Apple. Get it wrong and they will always be an ‘also ran’ or even face extinction.