Recently at LMD, we’ve seen an increased interest in improving customer experience among our clients. This is a good trend for branding and marketing because delivering outstanding customer experience (CX) is the most effective way to differentiate your brand and create unique value. 

LMD’s consulting practice is applying the same concepts and processes associated with customer experience to government agencies (citizen experience) and strategic recruitment campaigns (candidate experience). It doesn’t matter if you are B2B, B2C, or G2C—the same core concepts of customer experience apply.

At a very basic level, CX is an exercise in empathy. We start by reflecting on how a customer feels as they interact with your brand through a technique called customer journey mapping. We map every touchpoint your customer has with your brand to understand their thoughts and feelings, and the challenges they encounter along the way. Journey maps help us understand how customers make decisions to take action—whether that action is selecting a college or university, a job, or a branch of the military.

Once we’ve collected all of this data, we have the information we need to improve the journey for the customer by changing people, processes, tools, policies or to promote the customer experience differently. We often discover that an organization may not have the right resources assigned, there are duplicative touchpoints with the customer or the process is so complicated and time consuming that people give up. On the other hand, if the customer experience is positive, then we promote those benefits through marketing and messaging. 

Think about your own behaviors. Which brands do you decide to interact with and why? For example, experience makes a difference for me personally when it comes to selecting a dentist. If the dentist has friendly and knowledgeable staff to help process insurance claims then I’ll select them over a qualified provider that does not offer a similar experience. 

For my son and his peers, they often decided which colleges to apply to, based on the technology tools being used. The lesson? Don’t underestimate how each new generation has increased expectations for technology-enabled experiences.

The bottom line is every touchpoint matters and brands that maximize the power of CX will win every time.