The delivery of customer experience will always be a complex mix of internal and external factors and topics for discussion have included many models and ideas - CCD, Six Sigma, EFQM - all have the same or a variation of the same component parts.

The snippets below give a flavour of the some of the many topics we have debated, the experiences and questions that have occupied - and will continue to occupy - the thoughts of those who are involved in the implementation of a quality customer experience.

Customer engagement in today's multi channel self-service environment

How do we establish the right balance to meet business objectives?
Can the self-service environment establish and maintain customer engagement?
Is self-service another channel or the pinnacle of a customer centric organisation?

We heard members' findings on how consumers are behaving in a new way - how they want to self-select content, defining who they are, customers tune out when the information isn't relevant, they are afraid to be 'tied in', how making it easy to switch has been seen to encourage adoption and improve retention, how the lack of transparency on pricing is a huge barrier to adoption, how consumers trust each other more and use new social channels to warn others off. How deceptively simple, online social networks contain great power.

Building and maintaining the self-service experience

Which personality types will choose self-service, and why?
Can we use this knowledge to everyone's advantage?
Which of our own people will adapt to the changing environment?

Most agreed that self-service is a more consistent and quicker service at a fixed cost and accept that the majority of customers would like some level of self-service but are not sure how it affects the relationship. It has the potential to raise QoE as the repeatable experience builds advocacy.

Opinions varied on how much self-service is appropriate. Whilst industry sector and product type have some influence, sacrificing voice touch points, answering common enquiries, efficient transactions, sales and generating sales opportunities - all have a bearing. A more confusing picture emerged on who opts for self-service and how long they stay. Internally focused questions or difficult information requests cause most of the problems further into the experience.

The business case for improved quality of experience

Orange shared the model they developed when tasked with improving strategies that were based on the financial impact, to ensure that budget and resource were correctly allocated to maximise the impact on the Orange customer experience. They successfully achieved the ability to track the effectiveness of improvement strategies on revenue generation and quality of experience.

Members highlighted their concerns on how far you can you push call centre staff and how agents are being measured, asking if these measurements drive a diminishing experience on general enquiries. Some organisations preferred to look at the customer life cycle to prove the business case, while utilities aim to streamline their delivery by analysing what the customer actually wants and focusing on its delivery. All agreed that putting a cost to advocacy would be a good development.

Who owns the customer experience?

Some would argue that every employee owns the customer relationship, but can we rely on a collective consciousness and responsibility?
Do we abdicate that responsibility when we define and fill roles?

Wanting to deliver the best customer experience is only part of the equation - knowing what it looks, feels and sounds like can vary enormously across silos, functions and the personalities they contain. There were many examples of a personality representing the customer within an organisation but the voice of the customer leaving with them when they move on.

It is common to find that the leadership and customer facing employees are enthusiastic but middle management is more focused on promotion and compliance. Leadership from the top, therefore, is rarely totally effective and there was general agreement that a customer experience role is needed to balance the view from the top as these positions usually lack consistent contact with customers. Organisations that communicate a clear holistic view of the customer experience and reinforce behaviour with appropriate rewards will undoubtedly have an advantage over their competitors.

Business design for QoE

How far should we go in designing our business around the customer?

Our discussions continually highlight just how complex the delivery of customer experience is - a mix of internal and external factors where cause and effect are not straightforward. But all agree that anything of complexity that is required to deliver a pre-defined output has to be designed to deliver that output and if what you want is to deliver a quality customer experience, why wouldn't you want to design the experience?

All models and ideas - Six Sigma, EFQM, CCD - have the same basic components and the need to align the many functions within these component parts in order to have a significant effect on the effectiveness of each of the others, led members to the proposition of having a role that is responsible for business design, rather than for customer experience.

Another way of looking at it would be to have the customer experience manager responsible for looking at all the component parts to establish their alignment. We are continually hearing of situations where organisations are looking at call centres and customer experience issues when it is, for example, the controls that are causing the problem.

Roles and responsibilities

How do we define appropriate levels and the scope of the roles within, and across, silos and customer segmentations?

Lloyds TSB shared with members recent changes that have taken place within Telephone Banking roles and responsibilities, the aim being to focus on designing, implementing and embedding initiatives that remove service detractors and improve customer advocacy. This highlighted the difference between who owns the experience and who delivers it. "The customer sees us as one company and doesn't care how it is achieved".

Some argued that the Board should own the experience, the debate then being around process improvement versus strategy. Every organisation has, at its core, a stated purpose to deliver a product or service to meet customers' needs. Its protection should be fundamental to any role designed to help the delivery of customer experience. Our continuing discussions provided us with the start of a blueprint for the perfect customer experience role.