Creating the Customer Experience Strategy
Andrew Reise worked with functional leaders across the enterprise, including representatives from Sales, Marketing, Web, Social, Customer Service, Operations and Market Research. Andrew Reise consultants facilitated multiple workshops and interviews with various subject matter experts and stakeholders. The work was broken down into the following areas.
1. North Star
It is our fundamental belief that the Customer Experience strategy must align with the corporate strategy and company’s brand promise. Executive interviews were conducted to understand the vision for the company, what is communicated internally to employees and what expectations are set with customers. A project mission statement was then developed to ensure alignment.
2. Customer Insights
In addition to analyzing existing industry and market research, we interviewed brokers, completed mystery shopping and conducted in-depth interviews with customers to better understand their needs, wants and expectations of a health insurance company. This provided consumer insights to guide our work and also highlighted the most critical customer touch points.
3. Customer Lifecycle Mapping (current state)
An end-to-end customer lifecycle (DISCOVER-SHOP-BUY-USE-DEPART) was developed to provide an outside-in perspective of current customer interactions with the company. This exercise identified existing pain points and opportunities including visiting the web site to get a quote, receiving an explanation of benefits and calling customer service about a claim. The result was a clear understanding of pain points and gaps in how they interact with customers today.
4. Moment of Truth
The next step was to identify which interactions were the most important to address first. The process of analyzing voice of customer data, talking to consumers, interviewing employees and documenting customer touch points allowed us to identify the most critical customer interactions, or Moments of Truth, that influence a customer’s decision to purchase, stay or leave. This allowed us to focus our attention in areas that will have the biggest impact from a customer and company perspective when making experience enhancements and recommendations.
5. Future State Ideation
We then had to come up with creative solutions to solve the pain points. A group of cross-industry experts, consumers and health plan SMEs were assembled to ideate new experience solutions for each Moment of Truth. Customer personas were used to look at each Moment of Truth from different consumer types and over 200 ideas were generated. Each participant voted on the best ideas, which were incorporated into the future experience design recommendations.
6. Strategic Themes
Andrew Reise then organized and analyzed all of the inputs to create a set of strategic recommendations that would address the customer pain points for each Moment of Truth. The strategic recommendations were grouped into strategic platforms or themes, such as:
- Transform into a customer-centric organization
- Deliver at critical customer interaction points, or Moments of Truth
- Personalize and simplify the complex ecosystem
- Facilitate transition across channels
7. Strategic Initiatives
In order to make the customer experience strategy achievable, detailed tactical initiatives were identified, scored and prioritized based on benefit to company and customer. Some initiatives were quick hits, which could be implemented in less than 90 days, and others were longer term. Initiatives addressed foundational capabilities such as developing a customer-centric culture, establishing governance and creating a CX scorecard. Other initiatives focused heavily on delivering a seamless, simple experience for each Moment of Truth, and better understanding consumers in order to provide a more tailored, personalized approach across sales, marketing and service.
