Client Experience heavily influences client retention, loyalty, and advocacy – all important factors for modern organizations. Managing the client experience, however, can prove to be challenging, and there are myriad considerations to weigh when creating a client experience management program. ArkCase provides the software structure to help improve your clients’ experiences, and it is important to think through where your efforts focus on improving customers’ interaction with your organization.

We’ve rounded up some tips to help you navigate the complex maze of client experience management, the encompassing challenges, some examples, ideas for best practices, and strategies for creating an amazing client experience for your most important assets: the people who give you their business. Read on!

Solve Problems before Your Clients Even Realize the Problem Exists

Beat them to the issues! By staying one step ahead of the client, you can proactively solve problems and create a seamless client experience. You can also plan your client outreach and personalize it. For instance, if you notice an issue with a specific user segment you can pull their user history and contact information and incorporate that into a personalized e-mail or powerful in-app message. Being proactive allows you to stay in the driver’s seat of the client’s brand experience.

Get Employee Buy-In

Employees are the key to optimizing the client experience. First, organizations must assure that they have loyal employees committed to the organization and thoroughly understand the organization’s mission. An unhappy employee typically will not provide the type of client experience the organization wants to deliver. Organizations that aim to get employee buy-in for their client experience initiatives should build a business case that clarifies why the initiative is important…from a client’s point of view.

Recognize Performance

Establish a program to nurture and recognize superior performance. Make sure both clients and team members are encouraged to participate. Regular improvement needs reinforcement. An ongoing recognition program keeps client service in focus. Don’t assume a positive client experience is just happening, and reinforce it when it does!

Make Sure You Have Covered the Five Elements of Client Experience

Community, connection, convenience, choice, and utility – experts consider these 5 elements as an essential part of a great digital client experience. Determine if your organization offers:

• Community – Client to client interaction
• Connection – A sense of belonging
• Convenience – Easy accessibility
• Choice – Client empowerment
• Utility – Something valuable

Use Positive Language

Positive language is an excellent way to avoid accidental conflicts emerged from miscommunication. The change is pretty subtle, but the effects are drastic.

For instance, one of your products is back-ordered for a month, and you must relay this information to the customer immediately. Consider the following replies.

• Negative language: ‘I can’t get you this product until next month. It is back-ordered and unavailable at this time.’
• Positive language: This product will be available next month. But I can place the order for you immediately and make sure it is shipped to you as soon as it enters our warehouse!’

Redirecting the response from negative to positive puts focus on the proposed solution. When the payoff takes center stage, it decreases the odds that clients will be upset.

Outline a Governance Structure

Without a governance structure in place, we sustain silo thinking and fail to attain cross-functional alignment, involvement, and commitment. A governance structure regarding client experience outlines people, tasks, and responsibilities when it comes to your client experience strategy.

Who is going to ensure that there are alignment and accountability across an organization? We often notice this piece of the governance structure indicate to a core program staff, an executive sponsor, and cross-functional champions.  Your oversight board should include the staff of people you believe will best execute the strategy, driven by your corporate and client experience vision, for your organization.

You will need to have clearly-defined guidelines and rules for the execution of the client experience management strategy. For example: Who will drive the efforts and how? How do you continue to motivate the employees to focus on the client? How will you listen to clients? Who will use the data and how? What processes and policies need to be in place to roll out these efforts? How will you measure success?…

Develop Effective Governance Practices

At its core, client experience management comes down to leadership. But what really is this leadership/governance? You may have a number or different governance processes in your organization. The word governance may stir up pictures of executives in closed-door meetings talking about compliance. Yes, teams of senior decision makers are an essential component of governance practices in many organizations. But client experience governance is not about a broad that hands out edicts from on high. And I am not saying that you form a police force to issue tickets for client experience infractions.

Client experience governance is about helping you to drive accountability by assigning particular client experience management tasks to particular people within your organization. It is also about developing new business processes and creating oversight across your organization’s customer experience initiatives. If implemented well, governance practices will help you monitor client experience quality, improve it on a regular basis, and keep bad experiences from reaching outside the door in the first place.

Governance is just one of the 6 disciplines that organizations must master if they want to attain the full potential of client experience. The others are client understanding, strategy, design, measurement, and culture. Of course, these concepts are not new in the business world. However, they do take on a little different twist when it comes to client experience management.

In conclusion…

When you focus on your clients’ experiences with your organization, you are focusing on a sort of endgame. Client Experience is can be a bellwether for your organization. Think it through. Simplify it. Digitize it. Prioritize it!