How to Deliver Frictionless CX

See more videos from CX Connect 2021 on the CRM YouTube channel.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Kate Adams: What are the ways that we can remove friction? Because a lot of the friction within our own processes, the friction within these customer experiences, ultimately all comes back to data. It all comes back to our need to acquire that data and verify that data and validate that data on the customer experience side. I can't tell you how many times--and I know I'm not alone in this--you have to give one one of your vendors--of which you are a customer--all of this data that they already have in their system somewhere. They're asking you for it again. And so how do you think about opportunities where you can remove friction through your customer experience? I've got three recommendations for external customers.

My first one--and I know that nobody on the line here is going to be a stranger to this one--is secret-shopping yourself. Given the turmoil of the last year and a half that we've all lived through, some of this may have fallen off of our purview in terms of like, "Hey, look, we've been just trying to keep the boat together here. We've been trying to keep all rolling in the same direction and that's what we've been more focused on." So what I'm hoping is as we emerge from this world health crisis, that we can all get back to basics a little bit here and get back to some of the fundamental things that we all have been doing.

But the first one is, how are you secret-shopping yourself? How are you making this a priority? How are you literally going through all your own customer flows today and understanding that experience just from an external perspective, whether you are doing that yourself, or you find a vendor to help you do that and walk you through that process? And really, as you're going through that process, documenting it all the way through, what is it that you actually had to do in order to get through one of your own flows? What information did you have to give? How many pages did you have to visit? How many people did you have to talk to? How many buttons did you have to press? How many fields did you have to fill out?

All of those things, documenting that whole thing, then getting up and walking away and coming back to it with a fresh set of eyes to go onto this next step, which is -1, on a regular basis? I don't care whether you do this monthly, quarterly every other quarter, or however often you do this, you need to obviously assess your ability to do this, given the resources that you have today. But I'm constantly thinking about, what is the -1? How can I eliminate one thing on a regular basis? And look, I'm not saying we have to eliminate this massive shift. I'm not saying you should eliminate every form on your customer experience flow. That's certainly not what I'm asserting, although that is possible. But that's a different talk for a different time? But what is one thing that you can cut out? Whether that's one, click, one field, one pressing-the-button, what is one thing that you can eliminate every time? Because I think what happens--undoubtedly, I've seen it in businesses so many times--is, as we build new flows, we add new requirements. We add something into that mix. Either. We add a page into that mix, or we add another option into that mix, or we add another field into that mix so that we can change routing or do something like that. But as we're adding, we're never thinking about subtracting. And so that's why I'm saying you should secret-shop yourself.

And then. When you come back and you look at that flow, what can you eliminate out of that flow completely? Are you asking a customer to validate your email when you could do that in real time, on the form itself? Are you asking them to come out of your web flow to go to your email, to click a button so that they can show that it's actually true? All of those things.

The last thing--and I know this is going to be a controversial subject, so take it all with a grain of salt--is that you are all better than smiley faces and unhappy smiling faces in terms of rate-your-experience. And I think that we are all better than the ongoing surveys that happen on an ongoing basis all the time, whether it be NPS surveys or customer satisfaction surveys, or product market fit surveys, or all of these things. I think there's a time and a place for surveys, but I've seen far too many organizations have ongoing surveys that are happening and not doing anything with the data.

If you have a survey going on today, that you are not looking at on a regular basis and have not actioned in the last 30 days, stopp doing it. Eliminate it. Every single time I complete an online transaction today, I get asked, "Will you take the survey?" Every time I go to a website, sometimes people are dropping in this window, "Hey, will you take the survey?" No, you're not going to do anything with it, so no. I've provided in-depth feedback to people many, many times, and there's no action that comes out of it. So find where are you asking for survey data that you are not actioning and eliminate it.

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