In the second season of the Vincit Talks vodcast, we’ll be discussing the fundamentals of digital business: online stores, web services, customer data, customer experience, and more.
We sat down with Ulla Jones, a long-time customer experience professional, change leader, and advocate for human-centeredness. She’s led customer experience at DNA and Posti and is also the host of the popular "Lähtijät" work-life podcast. In our discussion, she explained what’s needed to put the customer at the heart of your operations.
Customer experience is for everyone
To start with, customer experience must cut through the whole organization – it can’t be driven by a single department but needs everyone to get involved. That means just relying on marketing to manage the customer experience is not the best approach. Instead, a company should have the following elements in place to make the most of customer experience:
- A supportive company culture and strategy
- Top management that is fully onboard
- Recruitment and development of existing employees' capabilities
- IT systems that support long-term development and customer experience needs
- Supportive operational methods in the company and decision-making processes
A long-term commitment
Developing good customer experience takes commitment, time, and investments at all levels – it’s not something that can be created in a short project. Ulla feels it typically takes about three years to see some return from a customer experience initiative, which means companies and management must commit to the process to get the most out of it.
Customer experience also requires proper investment. In big companies, marketing often gets seven-figure budgets while the budget for developing the customer experience is a fraction of this. That needs to change for companies that want to put the customer at the core of their offering.
When it actually comes to appealing to the customer, Ulla thinks about humans as having three brains: the head, the heart, and our “gut feeling.” Very often consumer action comes from a gut feeling, which means companies need to appeal more to emotion as part of their customer experience.
Create a clear goal
Even if customer experience is something for the whole company, it doesn’t mean that every individual should head off in their own direction. There needs to be a Pole star so everyone knows what the company wants to achieve, what kind of customer experience is on offer, and what level of customer experience is sufficient. That shared vision needs to be created together with the management team so that everyone has buy-in.
It’s also important that there is someone who leads customer experience – making customer experience central to a company requires clear leadership. This person has the responsibility to make sure things move in the right direction once the shared vision has been created. In this way, a company can more effectively achieve their customer experience goals.
