What is Taxing Your Customer Experience?

In our customer experience consulting engagements with organizations from travel and transportation to corporate environments, we see the same six challenges to delivering seamless customer experiences. The struggle to deliver experiences that meet and exceed customer expectations across these six fronts threaten the CX-ROI connection necessary to shift customer experience from a cost center to a revenue driver.

Across industries, we see organizations struggling with fragmented digital and physical experiences; long wait times and inefficiencies (including challenges with queue management); and personalization that fails to connect with real customer needs. We also see CX challenges with limited accessibility and inclusivity, and complex navigation and communication. And ultimately, we identified the most significant threat to customer experience as a sustainable program and a revenue driver: lack of strategic alignment between the customer experience strategy and the business strategy.

The good news is, real, actionable solutions are available to businesses. And those solutions do not require massive overhauls to the ways you do business. Rather, they require an intentional, strategic approach that leverages customer feedback and actions intelligent strategy to better serve both your customer and your bottom line.

Fragmented Digital and Physical Experiences

Consider travel and transportation spaces (though it certainly is not limited to this environment). Note the challenges customers seeking seamless experiences face. Today’s customer expects smooth transitions across digital platforms, mobile apps, kiosks, and in-person services. However, many organizations continue to rely on disjointed systems. These disjointed systems create friction that leads to broken experiences, frustrated guests, and overtaxed employee teams.

Fragmented travel and transportation experiences persist due to inconsistent systems and multiple digital touchpoints. Though we see improvements in these scenarios in the US and internationally, seamless engagement continues to pose difficulties for passengers and the systems that guide them.

As far back as 2020, we wrote articles highlighting the experience benefits of digital assistants, or a digital concierge, to help bridge the gap between physical and digital environments to build stronger customer relationships and meet customer needs at scale in changing environments.

Solutions to the Experience Fragmentation Challenge

Of course, the digital concierge is not the only solution to fragmented digital and physical experiences. And we certainly do not propose it as a “patch” to the larger problem that fragmented experiences push to the forefront. Ultimately, to overcome the challenge of fragmented experiences in ways that are sustainable and repeatable, it is imperative to invest in intentional CX design, journey mapping, and CX technology design. But again, none of that happens in a vacuum. The right kind of journey mapping, and customer experience design that drive revenue have two key features. First, they connect to both the customer experience strategy and the business strategy. Second, they align all customer touchpoints holistically.

Of course, none of this can be done successfully without a robust understanding of who your customer is and what your customer needs and wants. As we explore in detail later in the article, Voice-of-Customer (VOC) insights are also essential to resolving the fragmented experiences challenge. Voice of the Customer Programs further help you to identify usability gaps and create more seamless interactions across your customer’s journey.

Long Wait Times and Inefficiency

Excessive wait times have a significant negative impact on customer satisfaction. And on internal efficiencies. The list of inefficiencies and poor queue management is long. We see examples in airports around the world, and in local transportation hubs. Whether waiting for check-in, approvals, or ticketing services, these inefficiencies create frustration at best, and erode brand trust at worst.

A 2023 study by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) identifies congestion at airports as a major challenge, despite the advent of technologies designed to improve efficiencies and promote seamless travel. In addition to confirming what we all know on the ground, namely, that queues remain a problem, the IATA report recommends biometric technology and digital IDs to improve passenger flow. All CX efficiency and security solutions we have identified and discussed in the conversations we have led on modernizing air travel and transportation hub experiences.

Solutions to Queuing and Efficiency Challenges

To tackle inefficiencies, organizations must adopt a human-centered approach. That approach enables you to integrate stakeholder collaboration and communication, and to refine operational workflows. Journey mapping further supports this effort. Journey mapping helps to identify painpoints and streamline customer interactions at every touchpoint. All of this improves flow, increases efficiency, and optimizes customer experience engagement.

Remember, customer happiness is at the core of efficiency. While efficiency creates operations challenges, and operations can and should be designed and executed in ways that improves efficiency, the need for seamless, comfortable, guided experiences is a human need. So, hospitality standards and training also come into play as a solutions-driver for efficiency. Hospitality standards and training, like customer experience programming, is more than a nice to have. These are fundamental engines of seamless, guided, efficient experiences that passengers and guests crave, and that airports, transportation hubs, and brands across industries need in order to see experience ROI.

Personalization Without Research

Of course, you need to know who you are creating CX programming for, and how to action hospitality within your brand. Within that scope, personalization is a powerful tool for engagement. However, personalization only enhances customer experience when it is executed well. And all too often, it is executed poorly. What does that look like? And how does it happen? Poor execution of personalization happens when you initiate programming without doing the proper research into customer personas. Absent research, it is impossible to understand (and deliver) what customers need and want, and what motivates them in their interactions with your brand.

Just like the broken digital and physical experiences we highlighted at the top of the article, personalization without research into what you are personalizing and how you are personalizing it can yield disconnected experiences. We see this frequently in corporate environments. Forbes reports that this occurs because “[c]orporate strategies were not designed to serve the unique needs of people in today’s age of personalization.” Failure to adapt to the era of personalization results in customer disengagement and, ultimately leads to customer churn.

Solutions to Personalization Challenges

The solution to personalization challenges lies in truly knowing who your customer is, including what they need, what they want, and what motivates them. This comes through customer research and Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs. But, as we always say, having the program is not enough. Customer research and customer feedback programs must be aligned with CX and business strategy. At the most basic level, you need to know what you are asking, who you are asking, and how you are asking. Feedback truly is a gift, so you must invest in it in order to reap the benefits from it for your organization and for your current and future customers.

That means it is essential to set the goal to capture authentic customer feedback. To do that, we recommend integrating research-driven programming. This enables you to ensure that your personalization is thoughtful, relevant, and aligned with your customer personas in meaningful ways that translate into experience and satisfaction gains.

Limited Accessibility and Inclusivity

Accessibility remains overlooked in many corporate and transportation environments. Organizations often fail to provide accommodations for individuals with disabilities or diverse language needs. That alienates key customer groups. But it also undermines the essential tenets of customer experience, which put human experience at the center of interactions with your brand. It should go without saying that when we make claims about human experience, we do mean the experiences of all humans.

Central to any conversation about accessibility (and we have led many) is the understanding that truly accessible design, namely, universal design, goes beyond compliance. Universal design enables truly inclusive experiences in train stations and airports, as well as in office buildings, public spaces, and health centers and hospitals. Design for accessibility takes many forms, including digital accessibility design in transportation, like real-time flight information and adaptive self-service kiosks. And that is only the tip of the iceberg.

Solutions to Increase Accessibility Across Customer Experiences

To address accessibility barriers and to find new opportunities to introduce universal design impactfully, the first step is, once again, to ensure you know your customer. That knowledge starts with customer feedback programs.

To fully capture accessible design opportunities along your customer’s journey and across digital and physical modalities, we see positive changes through CX and accessibility audits. Finally, applying the principles of human-centered universal design (for airports and transportation hubs especially, this includes wayfinding strategies aligned with universal design) transforms experiences for all. By embedding accessibility into core design and CX strategies, it becomes possible to move towards truly inclusive experiences that are welcoming for all guests.

Complex Navigation and Communication

Customers frequently struggle with unclear communication and navigation in transportation hubs and other environments. Whether it is confusing airport wayfinding or inconsistent brand messaging, these unnecessary complexities add unwanted stress to experiences. Clear wayfinding; consistent, reliable service delivery; convenience; and clear communication are all drivers of customer satisfaction across environments. But they are often underfunded or tacked on to programming to late.

In the retail setting, we have talked about how communication breakdowns happen when technology is not integrated across channels and customer service agents lack access to the information they need to support customers empathetically and actionably. In aviation, we have studied the impact of communication strategies for supporting customer recovery efforts during irregular operations (IROP), including flight delays. All these scenarios reveal the importance of orienting your customer and making them feel safe, guided and cared for.

Solutions to Navigation and Communication Challenges

Organizations can mitigate communication and navigation challenges through wayfinding strategies, customer-centric communication plans, and journey mapping that refines navigation touchpoints.

Most importantly, resolution of these challenges requires strategic alignment and cross-stakeholder collaboration. This alignment ensures that the information customers receive is consistent, intuitive, accessible, and actionable.

Lack of Strategic Alignment

None of these solutions are possible without customer experience strategy alignment with the overall business strategy. However, misalignment between CX efforts and corporate strategy happens frequently. And when it does, it leads to inefficiencies and wasted resources.

To bridge this gap, implement CX strategy consulting and establish CX Centers of Excellence that ensure  customer experience remains a central driver of operational success and revenue.

Solutions for CX Strategic Alignment

CX strategy consulting empowers you to define what customer centricity means to your organization by creating a shared mental model of how experience authentically reflects brand promise. An actionable CX Strategy is, of course, aligned with the business strategy. This establishes the path for the right CX investments, and accelerates the CX-ROI connection.

A CX Center of Excellence, what we like to refer to as the antidote to failed customer experience, is a centralized unit within an organization that provides training and resources, best practices, leadership, and support for a specific area of focus. The CX Center of Excellence focuses on a strategic approach to improving customer experience. That includes  promoting innovation and fostering growth. A successful Center of Excellence makes an organization stronger and more impactful, fueled by a clear, unifying purpose that guides decision making.

For more on maximizing customer experience value for your organization, schedule a complimentary call with us.