Client Experience Video Series: Leverage Your Business’s Most Valuable Assets for Change and Growth
Learn how client experience affects success, and how to get the most from your efforts. Era Ziroe, KeyBank Director of Client and Employee Experience, shows how to implement strategies and processes that deliver valuable, authentic and actionable insights. And, she explains how to use these insights to achieve profitable growth for your business and drive greater customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Era Ziroe:
Hi. I’m Era Ziroe and I lead KeyBank’s Client & Employee Experience. My team and I are strong advocates for our clients and teammates. We listen to them, empathize with their needs, and collaborate across the bank to create meaningful, differentiated, and memorable experiences at KeyBank.
As a company, we are laser focused on delivering the best experience for our clients - day in and day out. And our Key4Women program is one example of that.
The Key4Women program was designed to advocate, connect, and empower women in business. With that in mind, we have created a series of short videos on the importance of Client Experience for your business.
We’re going to talk about:
- What client experience is. It may be different than you think…
- Why client experience matters.
- And some tips on how you can get started.
Hopefully, you will find something you can put into action and help you make your business more successful.
So, let’s get started and talk about what client experience is.
It goes without saying that clients are important – we wouldn’t have businesses without them. However, focusing on client experience means looking at your business not as an owner or an employee, but as a client.
Although ‘client experience’ may seem like an intuitive term, often folks think it’s all about customer service. Yes, customer service is a part of it, but it’s not everything.
Client experience is how your clients perceive your business and brand across every interaction they have with your company.
Client experience is also about creating frictionless and memorable experiences. Sometimes that’s by ensuring the simple things just work. Sometimes it’s about creating a special moment.
When you think about your favorite brands or a company that WOW’ed you, most likely it’s one that left an imprint on your memory.
But it’s not only about providing good experiences, it’s also how you recover from bad ones.
Either way, creating a positive client experience is a way to stand out from competitors. As more brands compete for public attention and more options are readily available, client experience provides a way to put your product and brand at the forefront.
As you’ve probably noticed, today’s customers are not just evaluating what you provide, but how you deliver every time they interact with your business. These days, clients are demanding more from businesses, and they have higher expectations.
When making decisions on where to do business, they are comparing companies against each other, even across industries. Which means that there is no better time than now to focus on delivering a positive, memorable, and differentiated experience for your clients at every touchpoint with your company.
In our next video, I will share why client experience truly matters and the compelling impact it can have on customer spending patterns.
Era Ziroe:
Welcome back to Part Two of our Key4Women video series on Client Experience.
I’m Era Ziroe and I lead KeyBank’s Client & Employee Experience. My team and I are advocates for our clients and teammates. We listen to them, empathize with their needs, and collaborate across the bank to create meaningful, differentiated, and memorable experiences at KeyBank.
In this video, we will explore why client experience matters to your business.
Why does CX matter?
As a business leader, you’re incredibly busy. And if you’re like me, you’re data oriented. So, what does the data say about focusing on your clients’ experiences?
Clients who have had the best experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest experiences.
Experience matters, especially for a small business. It impacts your success and sustainability.
The bar for experience continues to rise as companies keep innovating to deliver faster, simpler, and more engaging experiences.
Differentiation on consistency and personalization matters more and more. These are factors that clients expect smaller organizations to deliver on exceptionally well.
In fact, research indicates that 42% of customers will pay more for a friendly, more welcoming client experience. And the more expensive the product or service, the more customers are willing to pay for better client experience.
So, what makes a great client experience?
Take a minute and think about your best reviews … I bet they’re about moments of truth - in other words, a critical moment that could possibly make or break how your clients perceive your business and, whether they’ll come back.
Most stellar reviews often mention moments of truth that…
are emotional
are consistent across various interactions, and
are personal
For the best run businesses, these moments don’t happen by accident, they are not random – they are meant to happen and are intentionally designed through your entire business model.
Taking the time to personalize moments with all of your clients has true impact and can be easy to do.
Please listen to our next video in our series to learn how you can put your client experience design in action for your business. It may surprise you how simple it can be.
Sources:
1 Customers Who Have Excellent Experiences With Brands Spend 140% More (forbes.com)
2 Customer experience is everything: PwC
Era Ziroe:
Welcome back to Part Three of our Key4Women video series on Client Experience.
I’m Era Ziroe and I lead KeyBank’s Client & Employee Experience. My team and I are advocates for our clients and teammates. We listen to them, empathize with their needs, and collaborate across the bank to create meaningful, differentiated, and memorable experiences at KeyBank.
Now that we know the what and the why, let’s dive into “how” you actually “do” client experience.
There are multiple ways to get started. But at the end of the day, the most important thing to do is listen to your clients with a deliberate intent to learn. You don’t have to create a survey. Read reviews, talk to your clients or employees, and truly understand, from their lens, what it’s like to do business with your company.
Put yourself in the shoes of your client. What does it feel like to open the package? Do you feel like you’ve bought a high-quality product? Do you know how to use it without instructions? If you do need instructions, do they look like a technical document or an easy-to-follow guide?
A common mistake businesses make is their client experience strategy is more hope than intention, thereby experiences can be random and inconsistent. You need to design experiences just like anything else you design for your business.
Let’s review some key steps.
First, you should define your client experience vision and declare how you want your clients to feel when interacting with your business or using your products.
Your vision should be aligned to your purpose - why you exist, and your mission - why people should care.
Keep your vision realistic, as you want it to be attainable, but it should also be aspirational as you think about your target client experience.
Second, journey mapping is critical. A journey map is simply a visualization of the steps that a user takes in the process. And it’s written from the user’s perspective, not your company’s.
You should journey map major experiences from your client’s point of view and identify the moments of truth… those critical moments for your clients that could possibly make or break how they perceive you, and if they come back.
For example, at KeyBank, we are heavily focused on continuously refining the experience for opening a new account. We mapped out all the steps in the process a client went through, identified moments of truth like the speed of the application, and analyzed them from a client’s lens. How do clients feel as they go through the process? What would they prefer the experience to be? This exercise informed a series of improvements we’ve been working on.
What are your make or break moments? When do they happen, how important are they, and how consistently do you deliver them?
Lastly, take your client experience vision and journey maps and translate them into 5-8 clear and observable employee behaviors. In other words, how must your employees behave in those make-or-break moments for your business model to live up to your Client Experience vision.
Be sure to plan for how you will teach, motivate, and monitor for those behaviors.
Wrap Up
To recap, Client Experience is a true game-changer and differentiator for many businesses if done right and with intention. Be deliberate and design memorable experiences for moments of truth from a client’s lens. And don’t think of client experience as another new thing to do. Find a way to engrain it into your normal business practices and evolve your thinking to ensure you deliver the best product, service, AND experience every time.
I hope you have identified some meaningful tips and best practices you can put into action for your business.
If you have not yet officially joined Key4Women, I encourage you to enroll today to receive our latest insights, advice, and event opportunities to help your business run better. Visit Key.com forward slash Join K 4 W to enroll today.
Journey Map
Use this journey map tool to reveal your business’s major experiences from your client’s point of view and identify the make-or-break moments for your business.
About Era Ziroe
Era Ziroe is SVP and Director of Client and Employee Experience at KeyBank. In this role, she acts as a change agent to propel a client-centric culture across the various channels, service, and product journeys of the bank. This encompasses inspiring improvement across complex experience opportunities using transformational capabilities around listening, analytics, cross-functional collaboration, solution development and employee enablement to drive growth and overall client lifetime value.