Three Pillars of CX - People Process System

--By Barkha--

As almost all of us talk about customer experience day in and out, it brings an obvious need to understand and take a look into what the word experience means; a look at the meaning of experience as per Oxford dictionary –

(1)Practical contact with and observation of facts or events

                                                              or

(2) An event or occurrence which leaves an impression on someone.

Put across in other words Experience is, what I perceive when I interact with an individual, a brand, an organization, or an institute. Every entity we talk to in literal terms or the way it impacts our lives gives us an experience – good or bad. These experiences over some time become perceptions, turning into memories driving our decisions to react.

In business parlance, it’s the brand that is remembered and we call it the recollect value of a brand. Every brand gets created by its People- Process – System, the interaction between these three creates the experiences which impact the lives of customers. A well-designed and thought-through framework will always give a lasting impression

A small example will prove the point- the importance of soft skills with an understanding of processes and systems is always given an A+ in every organization and the same is never negated. Organizations spend enormously to train people. However, despite all of it, we have heard the most well-trained and knowledgeable workforce saying “You are right, however, our processes do not support this” or “this is currently not possible in our system”.

This is where the CX story starts, the organizations need to look deeper and work on improving, and redesigning processes, systems, customer journeys

A quick look at the individual aspect and the relationship:

PEOPLE – Most of the time people-level issues are related to soft skills, grooming, and product knowledge. A casual analysis shows ambiguous processes or training on processes that leave the employees wondering, lack of time to settle into the job, or just too many changes to products and systems. The solution lies in providing systems and tools on the ground that is easily accessible, easy to understand and act as ready references for employees, making them confident and resulting in the creation of a Confident Brand

PROCESS – Effective, robust, and easy to work upon are the processes that are simple to understand and implement. In the view to ease the work, we end up complicating it by designing a complex process which in turn would be cumbersome. Hence, every organization should religiously work towards looking at processes and have a clearly defined timeframe for process relook. As it is said “there is always room for improvement”.

SYSTEM – The third pillar, the most talked about and the best creation of humans to make life easy is the system and technology that drives the processes and people. A system is a masterpiece work only if the end user, who is agnostic to technology or the stack or the platform, who is a layman or commoner, can understand it without much of intervention. One classic example of the same is Apple- talk about interface, talk about customer service one single go connects. Another example that comes to mind is Amazon – just provide your mobile number and everything’s sorted.

Many times we use the best technology but sometimes we also end up creating a complex system that makes the user feel lost.

And finally, when organizations connect the dots between People, Processes, and Systems it often ends up in the creation of complex frameworks, whereas the need is to keep it simple and easy.

Customer experience is about keeping it simple, easy, and memorable.