Customer experience strategies and practices
To achieve strong financial returns, companies need to undertake a customer-centred business transformation. Our Customer Experience White Paper recognises that Customer Experience is an organisational wide strategy; enabled by highly engaged people who leverage rich customer understanding when making decisions. The results are explicitly designed solutions and experiences that build customer brand loyalty and share of wallet.
At Connections, we can support your organisation to empower everyone to contribute to creating truly customer-centric solutions. This is when real transformation will occur.
Connections can help with:
- Strategy Development
- Operating Model definition
- Customer Experience Transformation
- People Leadership Development Programme
- Development of Customer Commitment Statements
- Customer Experience capability build
- Aligning your brand and customer experience
Omni-channel development
The team at Connections have a wealth of experience in channels – digital, contact centres, face to face, chat, email, social as a service channel, omni-channel knowledge management.
At Connections, we’re experts at working alongside organisations to guide them and build their internal capability to improve their channel performance. We work on projects to improve performance within a channel, or we work across channels to create a stronger omni-channel experience for your customers.
We can help to:
- Develop your channel strategy
- Build your teams’ ability to deliver effortless service experiences – and using Customer Effort Score (CES) to measure your results
- Understand current state channel performance and frame-up a programme of work to improve
- Define and implement a volume reduction programme, eliminating interactions that add no value to customers, increasing first contact resolution and enhancing your digital customer experience
- Define your coaching framework
- Build your leaders’ confidence and capability to coach their teams to lift sales and service results
- Plan and execute effective change management to support people to implement change
- Design and implement reporting to track benefits
We often use proof of concepts and pilots to demonstrate the potential up-lift that will be achieved by implementing the initiatives we plan together.
Knowledge Management
Lack of knowledge among staff is the biggest pain point in customer service according to a recent consumer survey (conducted by Forrester Consulting).
Ashu Roy (eGain CEO) states that staff “need to have 30-pound brains to be able to handle the breadth and depth of today′s customer issues…the only viable solution to this challenge is smarter knowledge that can guide them quickly and accurately to answers and through processes.”
Sue from our Connections team explores why Omni-channel development is a key cornerstone of customer experience in her article on Omni-Channel Knowledge Management.
At Connections we have extensive experience in step-changing use of knowledge by both customers and staff so that it can be smart enough to overcome today’s challenges. We’re experts on working on both customer-facing and internal knowledge management programmes.
We can:
- complete an entire knowledge transformation
- assist with a specific task
- help guide your project in the right direction
- Up-skilling your team to write engaging content that is highly rated by both customers and staff
- Writing new content and rewriting existing content – we have a team of experienced technical writers
Self-service benefits realisation
A lot of companies and businesses often talk digital first, but is digital the first channel you plan for in your organisation?
Over the past few years, Connections developed and successfully implemented methodology which enables organisations to accurately calculate and define self-service benefits.
Our methodology enables you to:
- Accurately quantify the financial benefits of digital service
- Prioritise your improvement activity to maximise customer and business value
- Track and forecast digital volumes, business benefits and self-service ROI
- Adjust contact centre staffing levels to account for expected growth in digital service usage
- Prioritise proposed self-service activities based on forecasted business benefits
Process management
At Connections, we work alongside organisations to guide them towards becoming more efficient and more capable of adapting to today’s ever-changing environment.
Utilising process management to improve customer and business outcomes
We provide tailored process management services to improve an organisation’s customer and business outcomes.
A potential approach can include:
- Define desired strategic outcomes
- Convert into key performance outcome and key performance indicators (KPI’s)
- Understand performance drivers and processes that deliver the performance outcomes
- Prioritise processes based upon impact on performance outcomes
- Measure current performance to understand baseline and opportunity to improve
- Map current process from an end to end outcome perspective
- Form a cross-functional team to identify improvement opportunities utilising structured problem solving techniques
- Prioritise improvements and implement changes
- Identify process governance and process management roles & responsibilities
- Implement measurement and regular reporting of key performance indicators and key supporting measures, including visual management of performance
- Define and implement process performance governance meetings focussed on continued improvement of process performance
Building the capability of your people to continually improve the process outcomes
We also assist our clients to design and deliver how they will build capability within their people to continually improve their process outcomes.
Our work in this area is personalised to each client so we deliver a solution that will produce sustained results.
A potential approach can include:
- Understand customer requirements
- Develop high level design
- Define detailed business design
- Implementation plan
- Deliver prioritised implementation actions
Some of the key areas to be considered when developing your design:
- Support model, centralised or decentralised capability
- Business Improvement methodology(s) to be utilised
- Leadership & Governance model
- Change approach
- Prioritisation approach of improvement activity
- Guiding principles providing direction
- Measurement framework
Leadership and Cultural Change
Leadership and culture change makes all the difference to create transformation change and sustain it. We have developed practical ways to on-board your leaders and equip them to lead change.
In our experience, leaders need time to reflect and consider how they will lead differently to create the desired change. This was also highlighted in a recent Harvard Business Review article:
“Organizations can’t change if leaders can’t change with them.” (Ron Carucci, October 2016), which highlighted that sub-conscious leadership behaviours can unknowingly undermine transformational change.
We can help to:
User Experience Design
At Connections, we see that User Experience Design is a critical element of every digital project, whether it’s going to be used by customers or your internal staff. We know that creating intuitive, easy to use interfaces are not only critical to engage your customers, but also your internal teams.
We can take care of all aspects of the User Experience Design. By completing this work alongside the Information Architecture investigation and development ensures the best outcome where both users and technology are taken into account.
1. Requirements and Wireframes
- Facilitate user research and workshops to define user interface requirements, ensuring user-centred design
- Design the user interface to increase the variety of content used and to increase findability
- Test a variety of potential user interfaces with users to get feedback and ensure the interface will work as intended
- Iterative design
2. Content Framework
- Execute a creative approach and create a content framework to transform complex information into elegant and intuitive designs
- Collaborate with subject matter experts and teams to create future-proof team sites, homepages and landing pages, housing a rich variety of information to help users on a daily basis
- Identify development opportunities to decrease Content Producers workload, increase usability and improve the user experience
3. Visual Design
- Create the visual design to be consistent with the organisation’s brand guidelines
- Customised mobile platform design
- Add icons and visuals to the design to increase appeal and ease of use
4. Design Specifications
- Document technical specifications with mark-up, CSS and images to ensure correct implementation
