Customer experience is of vital importance to any organization. When a person interacts with a company, for example by browsing its website, studying its products or services, or using online support, it enables them to form an overall opinion. We use the expression "overall experience". These days, more and more organizations are thinking in terms of service levels and customer experience (and not just in the private sector). In fact, they should all be looking at the people who use their products, services and/or solutions. Does your team know its target audience? Can they tell you how to guarantee an optimal customer experience?

• Know your target audience and make sure your team is thinking about them before making any business decisions. You absolutely must know your customers - and why, when and how they buy. You also need to know their budget, their needs, their desires or expectations, their motivations and so on. But be careful not to study your customers. Instead, create opportunities to interact with them, and put your team directly in charge of the customer experience.
• Create a detailed map of your customers' journey, and focus on what makes their experience enjoyable. Think about how you want them to feel, ideally, when they interact with your organization. Once you've done that, define service levels for each touchpoint, and make them a reality.
• Don't forget that the devil is in the detail: pay attention to all the commercial dimensions of your business. Every interaction with your customers counts. Don't forget anything: speed of response, quality of products or services, reliability, punctuality of deliveries, courtesy of the customer support team, design and user-friendliness of your website, and so on.
• Continuously improve your customers' overall experience. Spend time on process analysis. Carry out 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 Net Promoter Score and customer rating systems. Translate results into usable data for your team.
• Correct mistakes as they happen. High-performance teams know how to get their act together when they make a mistake. As soon as they make a mistake, they reach out to customers, acknowledging with empathy and sincerity what went wrong. At the same time, they provide those concerned with a strategic response, which they promptly implement by apologizing on behalf of the organization. Once the case has been resolved, they will follow up internally to understand exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent it from happening again.

• Rely on a single team for customer service. Look instead for a reorientation of the organization's culture toward your target audience. All teams need to 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. Personal contact is always appreciated. Receiving a standardized e-mail or having to deal with automated telephone chains is never fun.
• Denigrating customers. Respect should go without saying. Unfortunately, I sometimes hear teams speaking ill of the people they are supposed to serve. In the worst-case scenario, they don't care about them, they treat them like things, even like the common enemy. This lack of consideration, whether frontal or not, is unacceptable.
• Settle for a reactive strategy and consider customer service as a last resort. Instead, think about how to satisfy your target audience in advance, by constantly improving the quality of your responses to their requests. Do everything you can to avoid complaints. For example, ask all your teams to take customer calls. You can also integrate customer service objectives into remuneration and bonus systems.
• Think you know better than your customers. Do what they say they want you to do, not what you think they want you to do. Make the most of the data you have (e.g. satisfaction survey results). Get rid of predefined scripts for handling calls. Popularize listening techniques not only in customer service, but also in other departments.