The Ticket: Stacy Sherman on how to design customer experiences that drive loyalty

With customer expectations at an all-time high, it’s no surprise that businesses are constantly on the lookout for new and effective ways to elevate the customer experience. In this day and age, customers have a world of options at their fingertips for almost every need, so the experience you create for them can be make or break.

But designing and consistently iterating on a customer journey is no small feat. Just think about how many touchpoints a user has with your business, from the moment they first encounter your brand right through to them becoming a happy customer and beyond. They all add up, and the customer’s experience needs to be consistent across all of those touchpoints, or there’s a real risk that they’ll get frustrated – and ultimately look elsewhere.

This week’s guest on The Ticket podcast, CX author and speaker Stacy Sherman, is an expert at turning that aspiration into reality. In this episode, she joins our Director of Human Support Bobby Stapleton to discuss her Doing CX Right framework to design a standout customer experience to help you get – and keep – customers, and shares her best practices for empowering your teams and creating a culture of customer excellence.

Here are some key takeaways from the discussion:

• The importance of doing: Thinking and talking about the customer experience are great first steps, but they’ll only get you so far. To be successful, companies must focus on moving from planning to action.
• Go back to basics: Customer journey design can be complex, but the most important thing is to get the basics right. Walk in your customers’ shoes to understand the experience. Make it simple, intuitive, and most importantly, not frustrating.
• Don’t assume – validate: To create a successful customer experience, the key is to validate your approach with real customers to ensure it’s meeting real needs. This will enable you to spot gaps and address them in order to continue delighting customers.
• Happy teams create happy customers: A great customer experience starts from within, so it’s vital to ensure your teams feel valued, appreciated, and set up for success to deliver customer excellence.
• Create a culture of customer excellence: Customer experience doesn’t begin and end with your frontline teams. Your customers will have interactions with teams from across your company throughout their journey, so it’s important to cultivate a sense of shared responsibility and commitment to ensuring they have a strong, consistent experience.
• Understand where AI can enhance the human experience: AI is a powerful tool, but it shouldn’t be thought of as a replacement for human interaction. Companies should take the time to go through their customer journey and figure out where it makes sense to inject AI, and where the human touch should be prioritized.

If you enjoy our discussion, check out more episodes of our podcast. You can follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice.