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At 91º£½ÇÂÒÂ× Wholesale’s customer event Business Connect, Karen Ganschow, Head of Data Sciences at First State Super and Marketing MBA Lecturer at Macquarie Graduate School of Management, shared some key customer experience learnings that she’s put into action throughout her career.  

We hear a lot about ‘customer obsession’ these days: about how customer experience is the new competitive battleground; about how your competition being only one click away. 

The real issue is how do we implement customer obsession in our businesses. And implement it we must, because every company is now being judged against the best, regardless of industry or country.

The good news is that there is a practical framework with a series of steps to build great customer experiences. Businesses of all kinds use this approach to create magical moments for their customers.

Talk to your customers

Speak to customers to discover what they need. Find out what’s keeping them awake at night, what frustrates them, where they see opportunities, and what might delight them? Your competitive advantage arises when you solve those problems and take away their pain points.

Affinity mapping

Once you know what customers need, you can start to focus your research. The best answer is usually not the most obvious. Discover if there are relevant trends that relate to these problems, or whether there are technologies out there trying to solve the same problem. Then think about whether there’s a better way to help meet your customers’ needs.

An affinity map is a visual representation of information that can give you a clearer idea of what your future strategy should be. Affinity mapping is a really helpful way to start spotting trends, themes and areas of opportunity, helping you make sense of the data arising from personal interviews and competitor analysis. All you’ll need are your research findings, some markers, post-it notes, and a big space. Then start by grouping similar insights before establishing broader categories and patterns you can act on.

Make sure their entire journey is frictionless

Imagine you’re on your way to catch a flight. You packed, weighed your suitcase to make sure it’s within the weight limit, and booked a taxi so you’ll get there on time. When you get to the airport you queue for a coffee to give you the boost you need to get through your early start. There’s a long line of passengers snaking through the check-in area and security. You overpay for a currency conversion. Then your flight is delayed and you board feeling stressed. The point is – there’s a lot more to catching a flight and travelling abroad than simply walking onboard the airplane.

The same is true of any product. The path to purchasing and consuming a product is often full of other frustrations. Customer journey mapping is critical to providing the best experience. A forward-looking company would look at each of those touchpoints and ask how can we distinctly solve these for our customer. Can we make as much of this process as frictionless, and even as delightful, as possible?

Usability testing

Once you develop your solution, usability testing is critical to making sure your product or service is not only functional and user friendly but also provides value. You should ensure you are not creating more issues for your customers, for example by making unintuitive design choices or using language users don’t understand.

Making magic moments for your customers is all about walking in their shoes. Talk to them, step through the journey they’re taking with you. Get feedback and truly understand them, test and test some more. Disrupt your assumptions and get to the core of what your customers really want.