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This article is a simple, yet practical viewpoint on how to deepen customer experience, for vibrant connections & long-lasting relations.

Firstly, let’s understand what is customer experience?

In simple terms, customer experience is how much a customer feels connected to you / your brand. Customer experience is more of a broader aspect, encompassing the journey from the very first connect(could be at a talk demo, proposal, sale of a product/service or even an online glance at your website). It is putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and considering how to provide the best possible experience across all touchpoints.

One cannot measure customer experience, directly in numbers. However, it’s an indirect contributor to business growth. Hence, the importance of customer experience & customer experience strategy must be given due weightage.

Enhancing the customer experience is easy said than done. It’s very sensitive and requires subtle focus. For a very long time, we have been operating in a customer-centric model. We have abundant resources that emphasize how to serve customers, know customer’s business, customer’s customer, etc. A very famous quote – “Customer is king”, is the essence. Even after being technically sound, even after delivering their needs, yet we fall short of striking a great connection with many customer stakeholders. Have you ever wondered, why this happen? There is one finer aspect which is subdued & gets less attention. In my experience, it is THE strong catalyst, that terrifically enhances the customer connect, customer experience & success rate.

One of my toughest stakeholders is my 4 yr daughter. She loves cartoons, playtime and a lot of talk time. Our bedtime conversations are vibrant, with unrelated, yet interesting topics. She adds her imaginations, characters, and dialogues.

Even though our talk time is flared with abundant topics, sometime back it felt fragmented. A few of her cryptic words, punch lines, some specific actions and sounds, bounced off me. I could understand the essence but missed catching on to the feel & flow of her expressions. Repetitions helped, but didn’t quite address the issue. The equation of connection seemed just right, but still, something was missing & it was not juicy to the core. It was not as smooth as the oil-greased machine.

One day, while my kid was watching a cartoon, I joined her on the couch. As usual, the cartoon characters were silly & funny. But in a while, I experienced a euphoric moment. I discovered a connection to all her cryptic words and actions. These were nothing but imitations of her cartoon characters. Those next 2 hours of cartoon time, were a kind of gateway to a secret entrance of emotional talks. I felt as if I had ever decoded the most complex nuclear chemical formula.

After this, I could connect our discussion contexts, to those cartoon scenes, relate to her core emotions and reply in similar dialects. Very quickly I saw our joys skyrocketing. What added more fun and life to our bonding, is a better understanding of situations, her connections & her operating space. Our conversations turned smoother than butter. They grew highly reverberant and resonating.

There is a strong parallel between that cartoon incident and the approach to a strong stakeholder engagement & eventually a wonderful customer experience. Stakeholders’ cultural background, socio-economic situations, connections, personality traits etc, form the core of their interests & communications style. They would melt down with anyone, who appreciates their state of being and their lifestyle.

The way I go about enhancing customer engagement is – Observe their operating conditions, their connections and their stake. Observe their daily routine, interactions, relations, influencers, pain points, gain points etc, from a plain unbiased lens. Implicitly, experience as much as possible, from their role point. Being in their shoes for a while gives a sense of their thought process and ideology.

That way, one will better understand the factors that can embrace the bonding & connection with another person. One will know how a stakeholder might act at any opportunity/ threat, their decision-making patterns, what data he/she would need to make decisions etc. To an extent, one can start pre-empting their mindset. It fosters a better chance for an empathetic customer connection.

Once this emotional connect is set right, the rest of the broader aspects will automatically fall in place. The discussions are much more engrossing, warm and definitely more seamless. After all emotional experience influences each one of us, much more than the data & product itself. It’s a similar state of cartoon euphoric moment and will open up elated discussions.

It is observation & implementation of these finer aspects, that sway from a good customer experience, to a great customer experience. As stated by Newton’s laws of inertia, a body will continue to be in the same state, unless it is acted upon by a force. So, if customers are happy with you / your brand, they’re more likely to continue with you. They are more likely to join hands in all challenges, pains, and gains. They are more likely to be your promoters. And eventually resulting in more business, more sales and more growth.

Isn’t that an absolute bliss?

So, to conclude, understanding your customer’s business & needs is like knowing all the nice ingredients of a recipe. But understanding their associations & personality is like actually oozing the flavours of ingredients, into the dish.

Do you agree? Do you share similar viewpoints? Comment your thoughts.