Operational Customer Experience Interview Preparation Guide

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Research shows that attitudinal loyalty plays the biggest role in customer loyalty. If customers have a positive emotional outlook towards the customer experience, especially when measured against a competitor, they are more likely to buy from you and become loyal (repeat purchases).

Lot of time employees need to get on the same wavelength as customer to determine what would constitute a just outcome for the experience in the customer's mind and then weigh that against the limits the company has set on the experience and come to a mutually agreed upon resolution.

Employee emotions are as important as customer emotions in the customer experience. Employees and managers who feel unable to do their jobs as they perceive they should be done and feel powerless to change the situation become unhappy and less able and willing to put out the effort it takes to keep customers happy. Rather than speak up about problems, they simply focus on doing what they are told, what research company For rester calls a "culture of compliance."

There is clear evidence that digital contributes a lot to making the experience easy and fast, especially in transactional types of relationships such as buying a book, which customers like. Digital is also great for information-intensive experiences, such as complex products and services that require customers to do a lot of research before buying and of course, digital experiences are much cheaper for companies, though most surveys show that companies do a poor job of managing them especially when it comes to coordinating across digital and human channels.

Companies that invest in delighting the customer without first making sure they are at least meeting the expectations of the vast majority of customers are probably wasting their money. Getting a free gift card for a restaurant is meaningless if the food and service are not so hot to begin with. The first priorities should be to drive down customer effort and sacrifice.

If, through competitive analysis and surveys of customers, it is clear that your customer experience lags behind your competitors then improving customer experience should be considered part of the cost of doing business. Customers can research you and your competitors much more easily now through the web and social media. The holes in your experience will be revealed, causing negative emotion and an exodus to competitors.

This means hearing customers out and treating them with dignity and respect at every point in the interaction and acting to defuse emotional tension without having to put on false emotions such as a painted on smile.

Employees need to get on the same wavelength as the customer to determine what would constitute a just outcome for the experience in the customer's mind and then weigh that against the limits the company has set on the experience and come to a mutually agreed upon resolution.

Companies should focus on training employees to offer two things:
★ Treat customers with empathy
★ Offer customers justice

Even the best employees can burn out if they are forced to adopt what researchers call "surface acting," in which employees have to put on the proverbial smile and feign emotions that they are not feeling during an encounter with customers. Part of the stress is that customers can sometimes detect the falseness of employee's emotions, which research says causes customers to react negatively.

For those who interact directly with customers, yes. Research says that extroverts do better in customer experience roles because they are more naturally inclined to want to interact with others. But these extroverts should also have the ability to do three things:
★ Regulate inner emotions
★ Tolerate ambiguity
★ Enjoy helping others
In combination, these factors give employees extra endurance when it comes to dealing with people and more ability to suppress inappropriate behavior (even when customers deserve it).

Most people who work directly with customers these days have been trained to suffer. Researchers have even developed a term for it, emotional labor. Studies have shown that employees expend a lot of mental energy in the customer experience, such as having to express happiness when they do not feel it and having to suppress anger and other inappropriate behaviors when customers treat them abusively.

Companies use people to try to ameliorate the long hold times and the call transfers that stem from having to navigate among different archaic systems and process workarounds. It is an extremely difficult job and it is why call center turnover rates are so high.

The good news is that technology has finally caught up with the customer experience problem. Cloud technologies make application integration easier and in-memory databases have the power to hold massive amounts of information from multiple systems together in real time, that would have seemed like science fiction to mainframe developers of the sixties and seventies.

To make matters worse, companies have layered customization on top of customization over the years to make these systems more able to talk to one another and to company networks, databases and the internet. They have made huge investments just to attain the level of mediocrity we all endure today.

It is one thing to identify potholes in the customer experience, it is quite another to fix them. The reason that customers must be put on hold and transferred to different departments and asked for their identification information again and again is usually because the systems that serve these departments were developed in the mainframe era when the concept of integration - and more importantly, the technology to accomplish it, simply did not exist.

Digital channels and processes play the most important roles in pursuing the goals of speed and convenience and reducing customer effort. Of course, fixing existing problems with the digital experience (not just for customers but also for employees) is easier said than done because it is expensive and time consuming. Many of the systems that customer service representatives use in call centers, for example, are as old as a graying dad even a few grandfathers.

Most companies begin by mapping out the customer experience both in terms of how customers interact with the company and the internal processes designed to make the experience flow smoothly. You also have to capture all the processes that happen outside your company, with partners and out sources. Having a holistic view can reveal where failures are occurring and form the basis of the case for change.

Removing the bumps in the road that cause customers to expend extra effort is the best place to start. Research found that moving customers from rating the experience "below expectations" to "meets expectations" gave companies as much economic value as customers who said their expectations were exceeded. So just fixing the existing potholes in the experience will go a long way.

In any relationship with a company, customers expect or at least hope that their interactions will require as little effort as possible to get what they want. This means that companies have to make the experience smooth, reliable and efficient. If, for example, customers are shuttled among three different departments (all asking for their customer numbers) before they can accomplish a typical transaction, then the experience generates negative emotion (frustration is the one that researchers agree is most common) and leads to reduced sales and loyalty.

Though this is a relatively new and controversial area, research shows that personalizing the customer experience in the right ways creates positive emotion and leads to more satisfaction and loyalty.

Customers want their interactions with companies to be free from delays and extra effort. Another issue is the trade off between what customers want and what companies are actually capable of providing.

Some interactions matter more than others. The ones that matter the most have a measurable impact on the answers to these two questions:
★ What do your customers think about you?
★ What do your customers do based on their perception of you?

Many experts like to say that customer experience is any interaction that customers have with a company.

Emotion shows up again and again in the research as being the most important factor in the customer relationship. Positive emotions are necessary to build satisfaction and long-term loyalty while negative emotions can destroy in a few moments relationships that companies have invested years in building.