Customer experience is one of the customer intimacy activities that aim at easing the customers’ journey in observing, trying, using products, and re-using confirmation. In this article, I will discuss the concept of customer-experience innovation and tactics to increase it.

What is customer-experience innovation? 

The centric focus of any innovation is to improve the value offered to customers and increase operational efficiency. Customer-experience innovation aims at optimising value propositions extended to customers and includes services pre and post-sales, channels, promotion, branding, customer engagement, positioning, unique solution, pricing, lead time to the market, and more. Keeley’s book ‘Ten types of innovation’ explained the customer-experience innovation comprising service, channel, branding, and customer engagement (Keeley, 2013)¹.

• Service

Service ensures and enhances the utility, performance, and apparent value of an offering. Service innovations include maintenance plans, customer support, information and education, warranties, guarantees, etc. The spot service innovations can be judged on solving customers’ problems and complaints, providing warranties and guarantees, running digital platforms for marketing other than direct and physical sale channels, and customer relationships. 

• Channel

Channel focuses on how you connect your company’s offerings with customers. The goal is to ensure that users can buy what they want and when and how they want it with minimal friction and cost. Channels can be physical and digital outlets, direct and indirect, owned by distributors. Channel innovations can be judged as easy to access and suitable to target customers, using mixed channels, channel partnerships, etc. 

• Branding

It focuses on how you represent your offering and business. Brand innovation will help to ensure that customers and users recognise, remember and prefer your offering to those of competitors or substitutes. A strong brand is a promise that attracts buyers and conveys a distinct identity. It is developed as a strategy and communicated to target customers and the public, conferring meaning and value to your offerings and enterprise. The success of any branding innovations depends on the level of distinct identity, design and content, and customer connections with the brand (e.g., loyalty and image).

• Customer engagement

It is about understanding the deep-seated aspirations of customers and users and using those insights to develop meaningful connections between them and your company. The significance of any customer engagement is judged against to what extent customers are satisfied, repeated or growing customers, and how customers engage with your offering and the company. 

• Market mix

It includes a bundle of marketing services extended to customers like product fit (i.e., creating a creative solution to a pressing problem), promotion (i.e., inventing promotion schemes that are effective in increasing awareness and customer development), positioning (i.e., enforcing the customer-wanting image of your company and offering), pricing (i.e., offering low prices), or reducing lead time to the market (i.e., maximising the speed required to deliver an order to the market).

Tactics to increase customer-experience innovation

The following is a brief description of tactics to increase the customer experience:

• Creating a business section within the firm’s organisational structure to look after customer services, customer development, customer engagement, and market mix.
• Using digital and direct channels to increase the efficiency of channel distribution.
• Building up a branding strategy enforced by extensive digital and non-digital communication tactics.
• Drawing a customer development strategy, including customer discovery, retaining and growing customers, and executing tactics including awareness and loyalty increasing schemes.
• A better understanding of customers and creating creative solutions to pressing issues that groups of customers will gain. 
• Use digital and non-digital promotional tactics, such as an online presence, social media and chatbot on your website, to increase awareness of the firm’s offering, customer development, and customer engagement.
• Offering a high-value product targeting low-end customers and creative payment methods, which are more attractive to customers.
• Applying enterprise digital technologies, such as ERP applications, to reduce the lead time to the market and improve efficiency.
• Gamify the pre and post-purchase experience to turn such an experience fun and interactive and enable customers to try your product or service before buying.
• Automate your daily activities, such as ticketing, sending follow-up messages and answering queries to increase customer experience.
• Building up a system to frequently collect customers’ reviews and estimate your customer satisfaction and use such data to improve customer experience and satisfaction.
• Build up a customer-support culture that can be exercised across the firm by all staff to help increase customer experience and satisfaction.

• This post is sourced from my new book- Your Guide To Reach Innovation. 
• For more information about the book: https://growenterprise.co.uk/your-guide-to-reach-innovation/
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Final note: the book- Your Guide To Reach Innovation, is an actionable guide to innovation from beginning to end. Enjoy reading the book, and I look forward to your reviews.

Author: Munther Al Dawood

www.growenterprise.co.uk

maldawood@growenterprise.co.uk

References:

1. Keeley, L. 2013. Ten types of innovation, Willey, USA.