Customer experience influencer and speaker, Dennis Wakabayashi, divulges on key touchpoints in the customer journey.
/ An interview with Dennis Wakabayashi
The following summarizes an interview facilitated by Capterra team member Kyle Rich and customer experience influencer and speaker Dennis Wakabayashi. This conversation was edited for length and clarity
Can small and midsize businesses (SMBs) really deliver a customer experience (CX) that matches the sophistication and prowess of their Fortune 500 counterparts? We spoke with Dennis Wakabayashi, a global expert in CX to find out.
He believes that SMBs are particularly nimble, and often have faster, better success in expanding or overhauling their CX programs than their enterprise counterparts. The secret lies in breaking CX success down into manageable actions that deliver measurable ROI. Let’s look at his unique perspective.
Your customers are the heroes in their stories
A common belief is that customer experience is the process of creating intimate relationships between customers and brands, but Wakabayashi has a different view.
“Our job as marketers is to empower customers to be the heroes in their own stories, not to empower them to have better relationships with us—the brand.”
Dennis Wakabayashi
Customer experience influencer and speaker
According to Wakabayashi, good customer experience celebrates the individual and creates experiences customers crave. To create those experiences successfully, brands must understand what their customers’ goals are, their influences, their preferences, their motivations, and their expectations.
Wakabayashi urges that when a brand creates experiences for their customers, those experiences must be familiar, recognizable, nostalgic, memorable, and relevant. Only then will a brand become a character in the lives of its customers.
Fundamental pieces of the CX puzzle
Wakabayashi agrees that CX can feel overwhelming, mainly because of the jargon and technology surrounding the subject. He relieves client anxiety by breaking CX down into what he believes are its two fundamental pieces:
Understanding your customer
Creating a team that serves the customer
“CX doesn't have to be complicated,” says Wakabayashi. “If your team can focus on these two basic skills, you will move the needle on CX.”
Key touchpoints in the customer journey
According to Wakabayashi, the customer journey traverses three key algorithms that drive our economy.
These three algorithms are:
The reputation algorithm (This consists of social ratings and reviews.)
The reach algorithm (This consists of search and media.)
The relationship algorithm (This is where customer interaction happens.)
Wakabayashi believes that where those algorithms hand off to each other create important moments that companies must focus on.
“Where reputation and reach touch creates a moment of consideration. Where reach and relationship touch creates a moment of choice or commitment.”
Dennis Wakabayashi
Customer experience influencer and speaker
Get everyone on the same team
A major stumbling block—and one that can be difficult to overcome—is that each client team typically has a different performance incentive within the organization. When performance metrics among teams are significantly different, that conflict or division can create a situation counterproductive to building a CX organization. Management needs to consider incentive alignment as a key foundational element in CX.
/ 3 common CX pitfalls:
Focusing on the wrong touchpoint or too many touchpoints
Not aligning team incentives around the 2 key touchpoints—moments of choice and moments of consideration.
Failing to build a business case for CX within your organization.
Build a blueprint for successful CX
Wakabayashi sees a CX framework that works, scales, and has enduring value year-over-year to measure long-term CX success. The three key elements of this approach are:
Stop organizing team silos around business outcomes or business services (which is the norm) and start organizing teams around customer touchpoints.
Each customer touchpoint must have a team motivated by metrics associated with that touchpoint and only that touchpoint.
Assign a customer champion per customer persona; this individual will reach across the full customer journey and help each team report value and roll this intelligence up to senior leaders.
Add social listening
Wakabayashi believes one of the most effective new tools to improve CX is social listening—analyzing how your annual content calendar maps to actual topic interest and consumption by your customers.
Most brands are surprised by what topics are resonating with their customers and when. For example, tax professionals are more likely to have the time and energy to consider innovative new strategies after tax season has wrapped rather than during the first quarter when they’re heads-down to meet April deadlines. In the consumer health insurance space, most individuals think about healthcare choices all year long, not just in the two-month lead-up to traditional fall open enrollment and plan selection periods.
Wakabayashi sees companies who take the time to perform this 12-month social listening exercise, challenge their content assumptions and make necessary adjustments celebrate success in year two through competitor displacement and better ROI on media investment.
Practical advice for SMBs
For SMBs to employ a more CX performance-oriented business model, Wakabayashi recommends capturing and analyzing two data streams over the course of 12 months. What does that look like?
A company creates its annual content calendar and tracks content by week, across all outreach.
Simultaneously the organization tracks revenues by week.
At the end of 12 months, correlation analysis of this combined data will show trends between content and revenue, to illuminate where content and CX move the needle.
As noted earlier, since SMBs are more agile, they can often execute this model faster to reach substantive conclusions.
Embrace change management
Wakabayashi firmly believes that embracing change management is at the heart of pivoting to a successful or expanded CX program. Many organizations are held back by the inability to change, which is often incentive-driven and can be stratified by role within an organization. For example, in a public company the CEO answers to the shareholders who often don’t want change, so this can be a stifling point.
“People love innovation, but they hate change.”
Dennis Wakabayashi
Customer experience influencer and speaker
Embrace new technology that powers customer experiences—AI, automation, and chatbot are transforming an SMB’s ability to interact with customer intelligence and deliver more efficient, accurate customer care.
Travel the path to CX success
Customer experience doesn’t have to be intimidating. Organizations can achieve success by knowing their customer and creating teams that serve them, even if that means breaking down long-existing silos. Focus on the touchpoints that matter—the moments of consideration and moments of choice, and embrace change management.
On the content side, embark on a 12-month journey of content calendaring and social listening married to revenue review and make connections as data rolls in. When creating content, focus on making your customers heroes in their own stories. All these ideas will help drive the CX success of your business.
For more insights on Capterra from other customer experience guest experts, check out the following pieces: