Designing the Customer Experience

Background Situation

This was the second course in the customer focus curriculum developed for a contract manufacturing company which answered “how do we continue to provide value to customers?” Designing the Customer experience involves being immersed in reading Customers’ careabouts and producing recurrently delighting experiences that meet or exceed their expectations. The definition of value is different for each customer. Expert effort needs to be directed externally toward the Customer by identifying and providing strategically targeted value and internally toward company processes and the management of people to meet Customer commitments.

Learning Objectives

• Utilizing the 4 strategies leading to a delighting Customer experience:
  • Touch the Customer
  • Provide Value
  • Focus on Process
  • Get Buy-in
• Identifying Customer’s careabouts through a value chain analysis and assessing the impact of political, economic, societal, technological and environmental forces
• Analyzing the components of value and segmenting customers according to what they value
• Customizing value for every Customer
• Mapping current business processes
• Designing improved business processes
• Increasing commitment internally to provide value externally
• Managing projects for increased efficiency

Learning Process

In this 3-day course, best results were achieved when intact customer teams attended and focused efforts on identifying that customer’s value chain and unique value components, and identified specific actions to improve the “got/cost ratio”. Additionally, business processes contributing to a non-value assessment were identified and mapped with suggestions to reduce waste and cycle time. Participants identified critical customer-related projects requiring team buy-in and created plans to improve the project’s likelihood of producing successful results.

Length

3 days