Companies that create exceptional customer experiences can set themselves apart from their competitors.

What do my customers want? The savviest executives are asking this question more frequently than ever, and rightly so. Leading companies understand that they are in the customer-experience business, and they understand that how an organization delivers for customers is beginning to be as important as what it delivers.

This guide intends to explore the fundamentals of customer interaction, as well as the steps necessary to redesign the business in a more customer-centric fashion and to organize it for optimal business outcomes.

Armed with advanced analytics, customer-experience leaders gain rapid insights to build customer loyalty, make employees happier, achieve revenue gains of 5 to 10 percent, and reduce costs by 15 to 25 percent within two or three years. But it takes patience and guts to train an organization to see the world through the customer’s eyes and to redesign functions to create value in a customer-centric way. The management task begins with considering the customer (not the organization) at the center of the exercise.

OBSERVE: UNDERSTAND THE INTERACTION THROUGH THE CUSTOMER’S EYES.

Technology has handed customers unprecedented power to dictate the rules in purchasing goods and services. Three-quarters of them, research finds, expect “now” service within five minutes of making contact online. A similar share want a simple experience, use comparison apps when they shop, and put as much trust in online reviews as in personal recommendations. Increasingly, customers expect from all players the same kind of immediacy, personalization, and convenience that they receive from leading practitioners such as Google and Amazon.

Central to connecting better with customers is putting in place several building blocks of a comprehensive improvement in customer experience.

TO IMPROVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, MOVE FROM TOUCHPOINTS TO JOURNEYS.

OBSERVE: Customer journeys consist of a progression of touchpoints that together add up to the experience customers get when they interact with companies. Seeing the world as their customers do helps leading companies better organize and mobilize their employees around customer needs.

SHAPE: Designing the customer experience requires reshaping interactions into different sequences and, though the effort may start small, soon entails digitizing processes, reorienting company cultures, and nimbly re­fining new approaches in the fi­eld.

PERFORM: Rewiring a company to provide leading customer experiences is a journey in itself, often taking two to four years and requiring high engagement from company leaders and frontline workers alike.

“It is a significant challenge to reorient a company toward the customer. That’s the hard part. The good part is you actually do have a customer to rally around and, as you go through this, you get to know your customers increasingly well, analytically; and also, as humans, as people having an experience. Building that alignment and closeness to the customer brings the organization together and keeps it together. You stop talking about yourselves and your processes and the things that you want to do, and you start talking about customers and their experiences instead.”

How serious is your organization in building a real Customer Experience?

How well do you understand your customers? How well do you know them? Beyond analytically, as humans?

How often do you listen to them?

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Dogma C3X is an Intelligent Business Consulting Platform inspired by the 3Cs industry model, which offers a strategic look at the pillars that every company needs for success: Customers – Company – Competitors. "Intelligent" because by using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) it can collect, process, and analyze the growing tsunami of data (structured and unstructured) related to the 3Cs, which is incredibly valuable. Only by strengthening, positioning, and integrating these three pillars (Customers - Company - Competitors) you will be able to build a sustainable competitive advantage.