27 Customer Experience Pros and Business Leaders Reveal Their Single Most Important First Step in Developing A Successful Customer Strategy On NGData, July 12, 2017
Alan Zucker has over 25-years of experience working in Fortune 100 companies leading projects and large organizations. In 2016, he founded Project Management Essentials to provide training and advisory services.
“This may seem obvious, but the first step in developing a customer experience strategy is…
Understanding your customer(s). Many of us think we know what our customers want. But, we don’t go through the effort of asking them or soliciting their input.
There are many methods that can be employed to understand our customers’ wants and needs. There are traditional methods such as gathering metrics and data about your customers, conducting focus groups, or if you are in a B2B environment meeting with your customers. New practices include customer journey mapping, value stream mapping, and empathy maps.
All of these techniques have their pros and cons. But the important thing is that you understand what is valuable to your customer without assuming that you know.
Recently, I supported a client in financial services that was updating its B2B system interfaces. The client had assumed that they knew what was important to their customers. But, after a few customer site visits, they learned that they had missed the mark. Fortunately, this revelation came during the exploratory phase and refocusing the project was easy.