CXREFRESH was incorporated to create a global community of CX leaders and thought leaders who will come together to create world class CX strategies for businesses to grow. In our quest to showcase industry leaders and iconic professionals on CXREFRESH, we got a chance to meet Mr. Kashish Ahuja, Chief Experience Officer, Excitel Broadband.

Know how Excitel is transforming CX benchmarks in the competitive ISP domain.

Introduction

Kashish is a part of the core team at Excitel with primary objective of growth & expansion. He is a renowned business leader with 15 years of rich experience in managing various functions & digital transformations across industries. Known for his result-oriented approach, his key strengths are formulating robust strategies, building high performing teams; backed by strong execution focusing on Customer Experience, Value Generation & Cost Optimization. Before Excitel, Kashish held key roles in Customer Experience & Marketing with companies like American Express, Home Credit & Hyatt Hotels.

Excerpts from his interview: Q&A

Q. We see that very recently you have taken up a new job, what is your role now with Excitel?

A. Yes, it’s been a few months since I joined Excitel which is an Internet Service Provider, I am a part of the core team with growth & expansion as our primary objective. From strategy to execution, I am accountable for everything that touches the customer. It’s a new industry for me so there is learning, some challenges & a lot of excitement. At present, I invest most of my time in studying the existing CRM landscape, shaping up essential processes, profiling our customer, understanding their challenges & expectations.

Q. What do you think is great customer experience in today’s age?

A. Customer expectations are ever evolving, there is a shift in customer behavior every now & then. Due to cut-throat competition, we must learn to value customer expectations & consistently adapt. Personalization has become very important, they want you to know their preferences & expect customized interactions (tailor made for them). More & more customers now prefer digital channels to communicate, be it a Mobile Application/website or Social Media, Email/Chat – any company’s Customer Relationship Management needs to be constantly evolving with customer needs in order to stay relevant in the industry.

Q. How do you build a CX strategy?

A. I would do this in three steps – First, use available data from internal sources to understand what your customers feel, identify what triggers dissatisfaction & what they appreciate. Second, draw a customer persona, draft an engaging discussion guide covering all aspects that can help you understand customer sentiment w.r.t. a product/service, conduct some focus groups, personal interviews & digital surveys directly with the customer. Third, stitch it all together to address gaps & expectations, improve processes, arrive at what can be potential wow factors, you could use what they already appreciate about you or innovate using learnings from the research to create these ‘wow factors’  that give you the competitive advantage.

Q. How do you identify the problems in your current CX strategy?

A. In order to measure how good or bad your CX strategy is, one must periodically solicit feedback from customers, could be in terms of Customer Satisfaction surveys or even Net Promoter Score through any digital channel. Though, not too often, else it could irritate your customers but just enough for you to know how your customers feel about your product or service, how they think you are doing right or wrong & you must use these insights to constantly sharpen your CX strategy – this is the most important part of this exercise.

Q. How do you think you can create an unfair advantage in CX in this futuristic competitive business environment?

A. Proactive versus Reactive – Don’t wait for the customer to point out where you’re going wrong, have systems in place that are monitoring your relationship with the customers, even the interactions & based on some predefined internal triggers such as usage patterns & external triggers such as market trends, you can proactively know if something needs to be addressed so you can take immediate corrective steps to recover before you’ve lost the customer.

Q. How is your organization making personalized interactions better during this entire journey?

A. We’re always trying to make it easier for the customer, be it reciprocating each customer’s choice of communication channel, or be it implementing a strong omnichannel CRM system so we can capture details from all previous interactions across touch points, highlight customized offers for customer benefit in order to value & strengthen the relationship. We’re trying to use a lot of data intelligence to build a strong CRM system which enables us to deliver unparalleled personalized experiences.

Q. Why do you think that the CX strategies should not work in silos?

A. Customer Experience cannot be a departmental goal, it must be a culture that is embedded consistently – the very system an organization lives by. In a customer life cycle, they may touch different departments and CX should be a consistent binding force built into the DNA of all employees across the organization in order to ensure seamless customer experience. The team in action – breaking the silos @ Excitel HQ, New Delhi.

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Customer service (CS) is critical for delivering a great customer experience (CX)All too often, these terms are used interchangeably, but they are not synonymous—CS is not the same as CX.

Customer service is part of the overall customer experience, not the entire customer experience. It is vital to understand the difference between CX and CS as you implement Voice of the Customer (VoC).

What is Customer Service?

Customer service is probably a more familiar term — it’s also the more narrowly scoped of the two.

Customer service is the assistance and advice provided to a customer for your product or service as needed.

Customer service requires your customer-facing team to possess a particular set of skills, including patience, product knowledge, and tenacity, so they can provide the answers and assistance a customer needs. It’s the human element in the customer journey and the voice your customer will recognize as representative of your organization.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience, or CX, refers to the broader customer journey across the organization and includes every interaction between the customer and the business.

CX involves all the ways your business interacts with a customer, including and outside of traditional direct, customer-facing service. CX captures how the customer uses your product or service, their interactions with self-service support options, the feeling of walking into your retail store, customer service interactions with the team, and more.

Customer experience includes three main components:

  1. Customer Service: This includes Customer Support, Customer Success, and self-service support — the points at which your customer interacts with your team.
  2. Technology: This is the product itself — how it works and the interactivity points.
  3. Design: This is the brand touchpoint — the marketing, the design, and the feelings your brand creates for your customer.

While those three areas are quite distinct, there are no hard lines between them. All of the pieces combine and work together to make up the customer experience.

Customer Service[CS] Vs. Customer Experience[CX]

The key difference between customer service and customer experience is that customer experience involves the whole customer journey, including customer service.

Customer service is limited to the interactions a customer has when seeking advice or assistance on a product or service. Understanding the customer experience, on the other hand, can involve analyzing data from non-customer-facing teams who contribute to a customer’s overall experience with a product or service.

Customer service and customer experience are both important pieces to an organization’s success, yet it’s not possible (or necessary) to draw hard lines between them. The line between how customers use a product and how they interact with the people supporting it are more blurred than ever. Customers consider the whole picture when thinking about your offerings, and you should, too.

CX is holistic and covers a wide number of touchpoints. Some of them are CS oriented, some are not. A complete VoC program includes all touchpoints, including those that are product or digitally oriented.

 

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