Creating a remarkable customer experience is always a challenge for any startup business. After all, each person might be looking for a different experience from your company. However, various strategies can help you achieve that.
One of these is the so-called experience engineering. It might sound like some uber-technical term, but it can be a surprisingly effective approach. Let’s dive in and see what it can do for you and your customers.
How Does Experience Engineering Work?
As its name implies, experience engineering is a strategy for creating and controlling the support experience that a customer goes through. Its goal is to reduce actual and perceived customer effort as they interact with you.
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Note that the more in-depth definition of the strategy is where it can get complicated at times. There are various aspects to the strategy you should know. These range from the overall CX design, to the skills your service team needs. Because of that, you need to approach the strategy from a more holistic angle.
Why Experience Engineering Matters
With all the intricacies, it can be hard for those new to it to jump in immediately. However, there are certain benefits that it offers. These would be a strong reason for you to explore the strategy further.
It Reduces Customer Effort
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When customers exert more effort than they want, they can feel like your service is not worth it. Experience engineering lets you reduce that effort by as much as 75%. With that, customers become more confident about your service as a whole.
It Boosts FCR Rates
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Effective first contact resolution is an essential part of a good customer experience. Here, customers don’t have to struggle with lengthy support engagements. An engineered experience helps you increase that rate by more effectively guiding customers through the support process.
It Paves The Way For Customer Success
Most customer success efforts are often handled only by a specific department. That means the rest of the startup company is not involved in it. It can lead to the effort’s failure. Experience engineering brings all these departments together and encourages them to develop a more inclusive customer success strategy.
The Laws That Your Startup Company Needs To Follow
Despite the word engineering in it, experience engineering isn’t something too complicated to implement. But you need to know the specific “laws” that govern it. Business intelligence firm Chassi outlined these in its paper on the topic. Note that you might already know of these. However, the experience engineering approach brings a new perspective to them.
Know Your Customer
Trying to learn more about your customers can quickly become a challenging task. Often, you find yourself swamped with too much information that can lead to confusion. In experience engineering, you go about this more methodically.
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Here, you start by defining your customer in the broadest sense. You can then start narrowing down the specifics, such as their roles in their respective organizations and profiles. This strategy helps you better segment your customers and determine which types of experiences they best respond to.
Understand The Value Of Your Startup Business
Once you have an idea of who your customers are, you need to know what value you give to your customers. Note that this isn’t just the value that you think you offer. You should also know the value that customers gain from the service. That gives you the perspective from both sides.
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You also need to know how this value is delivered. For this, you can use techniques like value stream mapping. That will give you an idea of how your customers actually interact with your product to get the value they want. You can also get an idea of the measurements you should focus on to get a better picture.
Map The Startup Business Customer Journey Cycle
To provide most of the value your customer expects, you should be with them throughout their journey. That is where comprehensive mapping comes into play. Here, you aren’t just listing the major touchpoints. You also want to cover other activities that customers do when engaging with your startup business.
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Once you have mapped the customer journey, don’t think of it as something static. As customers evolve, so do the way they engage with the business. You should continuously study that and update your customer journey map to adapt to these changes. To make things more effective, you can develop a framework for the customer journey and build around it as you learn more.
Do Analysis At The Outset
Companies often wonder when is the right time to start analyzing the customer data they have. Here, customer experience engineering suggests you do it right when you get them. As mentioned above, the customer journey is always changing. The real-time analysis gives you the benefit of being able to tailor the experience as it happens.
But to make it easier for you to do the real-time analysis, you need to define the data to focus on. Go back to the prior experiences that your customers have and see what matters the most to them. These data points will give you an idea of how to shape the experience according to their preferences.
Define The Orchestration Your Startup Business Will Do
A unique aspect of experience engineering is that it lets you define automatic reactions to each customer experience. But to do that, you need to identify how to trigger such responses. The data you collected also becomes essential for this purpose.
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Use this data to determine the actions that lead customers to the desired engagement points. You should also bring all client-facing assets together to help your customer reach a specific point. Be sure to track their progress to know if they are getting the value they want.
On the other hand, you need customers to buy into these controlled experiences. Otherwise, it becomes a distraction for them. For that, you need to be more sensitive to their preferences. This will help you determine when is the best time to launch these controlled experiences and guide customers.
What An Engineered Experience Looks Like For Your Startup Business
Now that you know the laws, you might wonder what these will look like in practice. As already mentioned, customers vary a lot. Hence, the appearance of your engineered customer experience will also vary accordingly. However, there are three aspects that you should incorporate into them.
Customer Advocacy
An engineered experience is not a passive approach. You need to advocate for the customer’s success at every turn. That encourages them to take the right actions so that you can guide them better.
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For that, your customer support team should also be readily accessible. Preferably, you want the same agent to guide the customer throughout the experience. However, if that is not possible, ensure that the team works seamlessly so there are no breaks in the experience during transfers.
Affirmative Language
The success of the engineered experience lies in how well you can guide the customer through it. Here, affirmative language is a handy tool. It helps you convince the customer that they are on the right track.
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But you should know how to use this language effectively. You don’t want the customer to feel as if the whole thing is just scripted to convince them to make a purchase. Here, your agents should be empathic to understand the customer’s situation. That will help them determine when it is best to use positive language.
Contextualizing Options
When presenting options to customers, your support agents should know how to position them. First, they start with the less desirable option. That creates a “mental anchor” from which they can compare the succeeding options.
When presenting the best option, you want to position it as an alternative to the first option. Here, you want to cast the former in a positive light so that customers gravitate toward it. You should also ensure they understand exactly what they gain from that option.
Helping Your Startup Business Engineer Customer Experiences
With the things you have to do, you want the right help in delivering an engineered experience for your customers. Virtua Outsourcing is ready to be on your side for the effort. Our customer success agents have adapted to this strategy for a long time now. Your startup business is sure to give patrons more through us. Contact us today for appointments.