DSNews delivers stories, ideas, links, companies, people, events, and videos impacting the mortgage default servicing industry.
Issue link: http://digital.dsnews.com/i/1274660
64 for the company. Foster a curious environment where your team asks questions and pushes on "noble truths" to ensure the customer is getting what they need from your business. You need to know what is working and what is not for both customers and the business itself to build a sustainable customer experience. Similarly, understanding gaps between customer expectations and experience is critical to your institution's initiatives. Knowing what is top of mind for customers and evolving to accommodate changing expectations will positively impact customer experience. Voice of Customer or VOC programs help institutions accomplish this on whatever scale is necessary. Customer interviews are always your most direct route to more immediately actionable insights. ey allow you to independently collect their candid and honest feedback and maybe even watch them use your product, service, or technology to see how they are using it and if there are any changes that could be made to make key interactions optimized for user- friendliness. Methods like surveys, customer panels, and interviews are always helpful. Additionally, some form of compensation for surveys also goes a long way, if budget allows. Customers are also always receptive to blind surveys as they feel they can truly answer questions. is provides customer service teams with unbiased opinions. We've found a lot of success using third-party customer interviewers who know how to ask the right questions and probe for the right insights in a more objective and unbiased setting. In fact, our executives use customer verbatims and sound clips to help leaders understand the importance of customer insights on business decisions. Talking with customers directly isn't your only source for insight, though. Work with the sales teams and support teams to collect information and feedback to paint a more complete picture of customer feedback. Using VOC tools and CX platforms together will help you find blind spots in the process and capture less obvious qualitative and quantitative customer experience data. Having rich customer data from listening is great. Having a plan in place to act on it is even better. A word of caution, however—if you're reaching out to your customers and asking for their ideas, opinions, and insights, you want to make sure you have a plan to do something about it. Few things can alienate your customers more than sharing a complaint with you only later to find out you did nothing with it. CREATE CUSTOMER PERSONAS AND JOURNEY MAPS Another way to optimize your customer experience is by creating customer personas and journey maps for key segments or groupings of customers with similar characteristics. ese powerful tools allow the business to see customer types more deeply and holistically and can help enrich decisions made on their behalf. Each customer segment (and individual customer for that matter) has a unique situation and unique needs, so it is best to identify what makes them different in their expectations and needs. Better understanding these differences allows CX teams to zero in on customer segments that matter most and focus on meeting the different needs with greater effectiveness. It's important that CX teams do the work to iterate and gather feedback and refine personas over time. Developing journey maps for each segment persona will help identify friction and opportunities to improve. To do so, involve people who can help paint the most complete picture of the customer's journey through interacting with your company and products, like sales representatives or anyone else who interacts with the customer or the platforms customer use. Commit to developing journeys for all priority segments and keep them updated. e most recent data is always the most useful as circumstances may change frequently. Lastly, share the wealth. Publish personas and journey maps broadly across your organization and request feedback. Ask whether the correct information is being collected. Additionally, ask if this persona is getting the type and quality of attention and services in the areas they most need or expect. Have circumstances or needs changed? What unique identifiers fit this persona? If you are doing the work to collect the right information about segment personas, mapping their journeys, and sharing this information on a regular basis, you have begun to close an important loop in better understanding your customers with the help of the larger organization. EXPERIMENT After the listening, persona and journey mapping stages, you should conduct some strategic experiments. Some good methods of experimentation are A/B testing and new product and service delivery options to relevant personas. A/B testing helps you "test drive" certain options and pick from the ones that perform better. Another great experiment is to take one part of your customer's journey that you have mapped and go much deeper into the specific interactions that happen between them and your organization. What specifically are they thinking, trying to accomplish, expect from you, and what channel are they using to accomplish that interaction? An example might be the customer's onboarding journey. You'll likely be surprised by how many deeper-level details there are to capture. Once you have done that, ask yourself three questions; 1. is there any friction that we can reduce or eliminate, 2. are there any specific innovations to our internal process or service delivery that would be good to A/B test with a focus group of customers, and 3. is there a specific part of the process or journey that your organization does that Foster a curious environment where your team asks questions and pushes on "noble truths" to ensure the customer is getting what they need from your business. Feature By: Erika Martin