Mastering the Customer Experience with Edwin Margulies

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This episode of Amazing Business Radio with Shep Hyken answers the following questions and more:   

1. How can companies effectively integrate new technology into existing systems to enhance customer experience? 
2. Why is creating a frictionless customer experience important, and how can businesses achieve it? 
3. Why is understanding consumer behavior crucial for improving customer experience? 
4. What role does technology play in transforming the customer experience? 
5. Why should your customer experience strategies align with corporate goals? 

Top Takeaways

• The customer experience has become the most important differentiator between companies. It’s not just about the products or services offered but the entire journey and interactions a customer have with a brand. 

• A frictionless experience leads to happy customers and a stronger relationship with the brand. Eliminating unnecessary steps and making processes more convenient can create a significant impact on customer experience. 

• Customers today are more educated and demanding than ever before. With information at their fingertips, they often know as much or more than the agents assisting them. Businesses must adapt by providing tailored, knowledgeable, and efficient customer service.  

• Edwin Margulies developed an  8-step process to help businesses tackle CX improvements: 
  • Teaming and Goal-Setting: Understand the corporate goals and ensure that your CX goals are aligned with them. Secure support from leadership by ensuring that they understand the return on investment in the customer experience initiative. 
  • Transaction Taxonomy: Make an account of the different types of transactions you are already doing. Then, categorize all customer interactions to identify where improvements can be made. 
  • Customer Maturity Model: Evaluate your appetite as a company to determine how advanced you want to go in terms of CX capabilities. 
  • Mapping Volume and Complexity: Prioritize interactions to improve by analyzing how complex and frequent they are.  
  • Workflow Candidates: Identify specific processes that are ideal for optimization and automation. 
  • Rationalize Business Rules and Policies: Avoid potential errors by aligning your organization’s current policies with the new automated processes. 
  • High-Level Workflow Worksheets: Map current to future workflows to see where you can enhance the customer journey. 
  • CX Best Practices Template: Develop a blueprint combining all the moving parts for seamless implementation. 
• Plus, Edwin shares more insights from his book, Mastering the Customer Experience. Tune in! 

Quotes:

“The modern consumer is a wily beast. They are demanding, and they want great service. They want personalization. They don’t want to repeat themselves. They want to communicate on the channel of their choice, and they self-publish, giving them a megaphone on the experience.” 

“Consumers now have more information at their fingertips. When they call for support or to complain, sometimes, they are armed with more information than the agent.” 

“Develop a thirst for understanding the customer’s problem. When you try to solve the customer’s problem, you can figure out where the friction is, which drives the best outcome.” 

About:

Edwin Margulies is the Chief Evangelist at Nextiva. He is a serial entrepreneur and is the author of 19 books, including his latest, Mastering the Customer Experience. 

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert, New York Times bestselling author, award-winning keynote speaker, and host of Amazing Business Radio.