7 steps to kickstart your customer experience project

Customer experience is a big deal in other industries, but it’s also important to pensions, especially if you want to build a lasting relationship with your members! Getting started is just the beginning – it’s all about continual learning and developing…

1

COLLABORATE WITH COLLEAGUES

Collaborate with colleagues

You can’t go it alone when it comes to customer experience projects. You need to include a variety of stakeholders from across the scheme. From operations to compliance and marketing to developers – they’re all important.

You don’t just need individual stakeholder buy-in. You’ll also need people to champion customer experience and become ambassadors when it’s time to embed positive changes.

2

SET THE VISION

You need to understand what you want your customer’s experience to look and feel like.

To create a plan you need to know where you’re heading. Do you want to be fully customer-centric? How committed are you to that goal? 

Think about how you want your customer to feel about you and how you might measure success.

3

ANALYSE THE DATA

Analyse the data

Get to understand as much as you can about your customers. 

Look at all the data you have on your touch points; email stats, web analytics, call centre data, contact analysis. See if you can identify any trends or problem areas and use this to help you build a picture.

But, customer experience is about how they think and feel, so don’t base your approach on data alone… 

4

LISTEN TO CUSTOMERS

Listen to customers

The voice of the customer is incredibly important, but analyse it fairly – not just after a successful call resolution.

You can also gain valuable insight by looking at reviews and getting in-depth with social listening.

Understand the sentiment across as many touch points as possible and create a single source of customer truth.

5

IDENTIFY THE PROBLEMS

Analyse the data

With all this information at your fingertips, identify areas where your customer journey doesn’t align to your vision.

Problems generally fall into a few categories – technology, process and service are the usual suspects. 

Once the issues are clear you can go about scoping the effort and appetite for changing them. Most schemes are likely to have a few so you’ll want to prioritise them.

6

EMBED SOLUTIONS

Working together to embed solutions

Use your priority list to make changes, these don’t need to all be done at once, plan them and keep a positive momentum. 

Change is always better when you have buy-in from the rest of the organisation. This is where your stakeholders from step 1 can really come into play in helping to embed process or service changes.

Try to include as many measurable metrics as possible to test success.

7

CONTINUOUSLY IMPROVE

Continuous improvement

Creating a positive customer experience can be a bit trial and error. To assess the success of any changes you need to continually stay connected to the data.

Analytics and insights will help you see what is working and what isn’t. Learn and adapt.

Be prepared to try different approaches and experiment to find a journey your customers are most happy with.

You can read more about why customer experience is important for pension communications in Karen’s blog – Putting customers first… 

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