10 CX mistakes hiding in plain sight
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Customers rarely tell you when they’re having a great customer experience. In other words, if there are mistakes, you’ll probably hear about it. Poor CSAT scores, frustrated emails, and worst of all, churn, can all be signs of poor customer experience.
Some problems are simple, and can be solved with simple solutions - for instance, hiring more customer support reps, or bringing in QA engineers to squash technical bugs.
But many customer experience problems are more complicated than they appear. These are the CX mistakes hiding in plain sight. They may show up on the journey map, or they may not. These issues can only be solved by addressing the root cause — and that means digging deeply into customer behavior, as well as looking internally at your own processes.
Ultimately, it’s up to the customer to decide what their experience is, and it will never be perfect. But you can take steps to control certain outcomes. When you nip these common mistakes in the bud, you’ll not only improve your immediate CX metrics, but set your team up for future success by building customer trust and loyalty.
10 common mistakes that lead to bad customer experiences
When customer satisfaction is low, you’re going to want to get to the bottom of the issue as soon as possible. Going straight to the journey map is a good idea. But what if your journey map doesn’t tell the full story?
As a company working with leading service providers from around the world, from financial services to healthcare to telecoms, on their customer journeys, we’ve got years of experience observing successful companies. We’ve also noticed several recurring mistakes.
Here’s a summary of the top 10 CX mistakes organizations make:
Hidden biases in customer interactions: Unconscious biases among customer service representatives may not be evident in mapped touch points, but they are there, and they affect the overall customer experience.
Inadequate employee training: The omission of crucial training elements for staff — such as technical training or conflict resolution coaching— as well as inadequate support for junior hires, can lead to inconsistent service quality and customer dissatisfaction.
Misalignment of internal processes: Flaws in internal operations interrupt the processes laid out in your journey map, and significantly impact the efficiency and effectiveness of the overall customer experience.
Failure to anticipate emerging trends: Neglecting to adapt CX strategies to evolving customer preferences or technological advancements — for instance, not having an AI chatbot or a 24/7 helpline — results in a gap between customer expectations and the provided experience.
Lack of personalization: Don’t overlook opportunities for personalization in the customer journey. Personalization can start small, by using the customer’s name in every interaction, and can also include bigger gestures, such as assigning the same agent to a customer’s account every time, so that they see a familiar face. Strong connections with individual customers is not only a positive qualitative indicator, but can also lead to increased profits from retained customers.
Ineffective use of customer feedback: Not leveraging your customer feedback (both positive and negative) can lead to missed opportunities for improvement and an inaccurate representation of customer sentiment on the journey map.
Inconsistent omnichannel experiences: Discrepancies in the quality of service across different channels — for instance, Sales responding to emails within one day, while Customer Support responds within 1 week — undermines the seamless experience promised by your journey map.
Ignoring emotional touchpoints: Many key moments in the customer journey occur outside of transactions. Be sure to address and enhance emotional touchpoints too. Emotional aspects of the customer experience are often subtle — such as how you greet a customer before making an ask, or the design of the banner images in your emails. But these details can also make you stand out from all the other brands that simply meet the status quo.
Over-reliance on metrics: Placing too much emphasis on quantitative CX metrics (CSAT, NPS, NRR) without considering the qualitative aspects of the customer experience, results in a skewed representation of success or failure. It also can result in robotic decision-making. Your team knows your customers best, and should take both quantitative and qualitative data into consideration when analyzing customer experience.
Inattention to customer recovery: Engagement and retention are some of the most overlooked paths to profitability for CX initiatives. Don’t forget to to implement effective strategies for recovering from service failures and mistakes. At these moments, it’s important to listen to the voice of the customer, and communicate personally with customers.
Simply being aware of these common mistakes goes a long way towards not repeating them.
However, you can also proactively intervene to fix customer experience issues and start to regain trust and build those customer relationships that you can rely on.
To anticipate mistakes and work towards prevention, you’ll need a strong Journey Management strategy.
Correcting CX mistakes with Journey Management
A system for managing and improving the customer journey helps teams fix CX mistakes quickly, in realtime, so that little mistakes don’t result in revenue loss.
A Journey Management tool such as TheyDo goes beyond simple journey maps created during design brainstorms. It’s actually a workspace for team members to dive into individual customer journeys, pinpoint issues, and develop personalized solutions so they don’t happen again.
A Journey Management workspace also allows you to identify opportunities and insights, as well as tie your team’s projects and initiatives to success metrics. This includes qualitative and quantitative metrics.
With Journey Management, you’re taking the right steps to include the voice of the customer in everything you do, so that you stay close to the customer experience at all times.
In summary, Journey Management prevents common CX mistakes with:
Journey mapping: to get the big picture of where a customer comes from and where they’re going; to document customer feedback
Personas: to understand them on a human level and to document needs, behaviors, quotes, and other useful customer data
Experience scoring: to gather positive and negative feedback in a rating system for touch points
Pain points, opportunities, and insights: to precisely locate and document opportunities for improvement
Journey metrics: to measure success based on your industry, personas, and goals
Journey hierarchies: to align teams and stakeholders as well as eliminate silos, redundancies and slowdowns
Journey collaboration: to align all teams around the same vision for the customer experience
Using a centralized workspace such as TheyDo makes collaboration on customer-centric projects that much easier. Whether you’re working with Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering, or the C-Suite, they can all access one up-to-date source of truth on the customer experience in your Journey Management system.
Creating processes to prevent CX mistakes in the long-term
Journey Management is not a one-and-done exercise. It’s a long-term model for working in a customer-centric way. To actively grow using Journey Management, focus on these broader goals and processes to minimize CX mistakes and improve customer experience over time:
Processes to support the employee experience, especially frontline workers: All-Hands Support Days can increase empathy for customer support teams. Professional development programs can help managers and individual contributors level up their hard and soft skills.
Processes to create a customer-centric culture: No one outside of your team is going to care about the customer experience if it doesn’t factor into business goals and company culture. Work with the C-Suite and HR, as well as internal employee groups, to develop top-down and bottom-up initiatives to increase awareness about the customer experience, and increase contact with customers, such as meet and greets and webinars.
Processes to maintain and refresh customer Journey Management: Journey Management isn’t a one-time process; it’s an evolving project. Appointing journey managers is one way to ensure your customer experiences remain positive, and that customer-centricity becomes a long-lasting part of your business
Build customer loyalty through honesty and continuous improvement
CX mistakes are just that — unintentional lapses. The first step towards fixing a mistake is just to be honest. Owning up to a failure, then following up and fixing it, can do a lot to repair any damage done to a customer relationship. And customers will forgive you, especially if you deliver on your promises.
As parting words of advice, we’ll leave you with this: communicate your improvements. If you mess up, tell customers how you are working hard to reward their service and bring them value over the course of their experience with your brand. Remind them early and often, in personal chats, via email, and on social media. Your commitment will be reciprocated.