Customer experience is of vital importance for any organization. When a person interacts with a company, for example by browsing its website, studying its products or services, or using online support, this allows them to form a general opinion. The expression "overall experience" is used. Nowadays, more and more organizations think in terms of service level and customer experience (and not only in the private sector). In fact, they should all focus on the people who use their products, services and/or solutions. Does your team know its target audience? Can it say how to guarantee an optimal customer experience?

• Know your target audience and make sure your team thinks of them before any business decision. You absolutely must know your customers – and also why they buy, when and how. You must also know their budget, their needs, their desires or expectations, their motivations, etc. Be careful, however, not to just study your customers. Instead, create opportunities to interact with them and directly entrust your team with managing the customer experience.
• Develop a detailed map of your customer journey and focus on what makes their experience enjoyable. Think about how you ideally want them to feel when they interact with your organization. Once that's done, define service levels for each touchpoint, and make them a reality.
• Don't forget that the devil is in the details: pay attention to all commercial dimensions of your activity. Every interaction with your customers counts. Don't forget anything: speed of responses, quality of products or services, reliability, punctuality of deliveries, courtesy of the customer support team, design and usability of your website, etc.
• Continuously improve your customers' overall experience. Dedicate time to process analysis. Conduct in-depth investigations to improve the quality of your services, aiming for constant progress. Develop creative solutions to generate customer feedback (both quantitative and qualitative). Use tools such as the Net Promoter Score and customer rating systems. Translate the results into usable data for your team.
• Correct errors as they occur. High-performing teams know how to recover from missteps. As soon as they make a mistake, they reach out to customers, empathetically and sincerely acknowledging what went wrong. At the same time, they provide those concerned with a strategic response, which they will apply without delay by offering apologies on behalf of the organization. Once the case is resolved, they will conduct an internal follow-up to understand exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent it from happening again.

• Relying on a single team for customer service. Instead, seek a reorientation of the organization's culture towards your target audience. All teams must feel empowered to improve the customer experience and take on the role of ambassadors.
• Over-automation of processes, to the detriment of direct contact. You risk cutting yourself off from your target audience. Personalized contacts are always appreciated. Receiving a standardized email or having to struggle with automated phone systems is never fun.
• Denigrating customers. Respect should be a given. Unfortunately, I sometimes hear teams speak ill of the people they are supposed to serve. In the worst-case scenario, they don't care, treat them like objects, or even like the common enemy. This lack of consideration, whether direct or not, is unacceptable.
• Settling for a reactive strategy and considering customer service as a last resort. Instead, think about how to satisfy your target audience upstream, by constantly improving the quality of your responses to their requests. Do everything possible to avoid complaints. For example, ask all your teams to take customer calls. You can also integrate customer service objectives into compensation and reward systems.
• Thinking you know better than your customers. Do what they say they expect from you, not what you think they want. Make use of the data you have (e.g., results from a satisfaction survey). Get rid of predefined scripts for call handling. Popularize listening techniques not only in customer service, but also in other departments.