Customer experience initiatives are boosting the bottom line of our clients daily. The desire to manage the experience a customer has with your company becomes the guide to most successful CRM implementations. Before you install any software, particular attention has to be paid to understanding what needs to be managed, and how we are going to measure and manage that success. So here are some suggestions I have gleaned from recent projects.

8.75 Key Recommendations:

1. Build a Diverse Team: Customer experience initiatives teams are often comprised of people who are responsible for customers across the organization. We suggest a diverse group from sales, marketing, customer care, administration, and management.

2. Design Processes from the Customer’s Viewpoint: Mapping the customer experience requires your team to walk in the customer's shoes for a while. The exercise will reveal the difficulties that customers have working with you. Build a touchpoint map that lists the touchpoint, customer importance rating, and customer satisfaction rating for each one.

3. Actually Listen to the Customer: Feedback is a better indication of faulty processes and procedures than surveys. The challenge is not how to solicit feedback, but actually listening and taking action on the suggestions. Confronting internal process managers with raw customer feedback can be very painful. However, when the changes are deployed as the customer suggests, this needs to be communicated to employees and the customers who offered the feedback. Customer communication is a two-way street. They need to hear back from you that you heard them and that you worked to improve their experience.

4. Get Up Close and Personal Personalization is complex, and complexity can mean increased costs for the company. But increasingly, customers are expecting an Amazon.com experience. Organizations mastering offerings and services tailored to customers' expectations are beating their competition by almost every measure. Reward customer loyalty with personal attention and friendly, helpful, and caring employees.

5. Build Institutional Memory: Ensure that information gleaned from a customer at one interaction is not forgotten later on. Customers hate repeating their stories. From their perspective, they think we all work together and know everything about them because they just told the last person at our company the same information. So they get irritated when the next touchpoint in their journey does not know what happened before.

6. No Sacred Cows Allowed: Extending hours, or giving web access to order history are typical first steps, but organizational improvements often take courage, innovation, and risk. The team should be transparent and clear, open-minded and inclusive. Basically, everything should be on the table and nothing should be so sacred that it can not afford to be changed. This is where a committee structure can often be detrimental to success, as a committee will often skip over process improvements that are too hard, even though the reward may be very high. Failure needs to be allowed, and risk need to be taken.

7. Get An Attitude Adjustment: I have stated often that the lowest paid employees in a company have the highest effect on a customer’s perception of value. Training employees to how to behave with customers on the phone, in person, or in writing will make a good experience better. It is personal “one on one” interaction that defines the core customer experience.

8. Eat The Whole Enchilada: Taking charge of the experience from end to end is not an easy task. Expect resistance and barriers from people. Many of the managers that are stake holders in their specific processes fail to realize that their process, although important to company policy, may be negatively affecting the customer. You will find these the most difficult issues to deal with.

8.5 Pull Up A Chair You Are Going To Be Here A While: You may want to change team members every six months but this process will never be complete; it is a journey not a destination. The process is a continuous quality improvement, unless you never expect your customer’s needs or wants to change. This process of improving the experience will keep going moving as long as customers needs and wants change.

8.75 Embrace The Ambiguous: Solutions to effective customer improvements are locked up in the heart of your customers. What improvement is going have the good ROI, or please customers enough to stay longer, or spend more money with you is often a mix of common sense, innovation, and failures. There are a lot of “Best Practices” that consultants are can bring to the table. The ones that work best vary from project to project.

Remember that most of your customers like working with you. Let their wishes, feedback, and direction be your guide.