When an organisation is able to recognise Customer Experience opportunities and then make the most of them, they will stand out and offer a superior Customer Experience. This enables them to delight their customers, which in turn comes together to build customer loyalty, reduce churn and increase revenue.

What is a Customer Experience Opportunity?

It is a chance to impress and go beyond what is expected. Importantly it can help to deepen the relationship in a positive way.

The Disney Institute, an independent Customer Experience training arm of Disney, uses a great example to illustrate a Customer Experience opportunity. The rather inane question ‘What time is the 3 o’clock parade?’ which is regularly asked by Magic Kingdom guests. They recognise that the true opportunity lies beyond the obvious answer – and that the question gives them a unique opportunity to shine by delivering the kind of Customer Experience that builds a lifelong relationship.

So instead of just giving the answer (i.e. the 3pm start time) to the often frazzled parents and over-excited kids; their staff stop to ask questions and then personalise the guest’s experience with their insider knowledge – best vantage points, what time it pasts certain places and when they need to leave one area of the park to see the parade on time etc.

This example also clearly demonstrates a crucial success factor… knowing your customer at an individual level, inside out. Understanding their requirements, concerns, lifetime value, touchpoints, and pain points is vital to delivering outstanding Customer Experience.

How do you spot Customer Experience opportunities?

This doesn’t happen in isolation. It starts with your Customer Experience strategy that defines what customer experiences you want to deliver, and how your organisation will weave this together seamlessly between channels and departments.

The diagram below shows the key elements that need to be on place to deliver a consistent customer experience over and over again.

Basic process framework for spotting Customer Experience opportunities

Spotting opportunities is best built into the process. Training and managers leading by example are important in facilitating this. Also management must ensure that employees are empowered with the right tools to identify and take action. Proactive staff who actively look for opportunities, because they understand the importance of Customer Experience, are key and in a position to deliver a seamless customer-focused experience. Zappos is a great example of a business which has successfully differentiated its business with outstanding customer service. They do this by constantly innovating and empowering their staff; giving their telephone customer service operatives free reign to make their customers happy.

Whether you use an external expert, or implement your Customer Experience programme internally, there are a number of challenges that may hamper your efforts. We find the most common are:

Board buy in – the whole senior management team needs to buy into the programme or it will be undermined. Leadership has a vital role to play, not just believing but living and demonstrating behaviours on a daily basis.

Whilst no one person or department can own Customer Experience, having a designated Customer Experience leader is also critical to success. This is someone who can lead the rallying cry as the chief customer advocate, and build a framework so everyone in the organisation knows what information is collected and how to access it.

Knowing your customers – if you don’t understand what your customer’s wants and needs are, it will make your ability to meet and exceed them difficult.

Talking to customers regularly is one of the best ways to address this. Listen to them – ask them questions and analyse the feedback to see any patterns in customer behaviour.

Not embedding action – it is not enough to talk to customers, or have a systemised customer feedback process. You also need to take action with the information you collect, otherwise you risk losing credibility with your customers.

Ensure action is taking place by embedding the insights gathered into the systems that employees and customers use every day to make decisions. Also share analysis and reports widely within your organisation. Remember world class organisations thrive by using customer feedback to drive all their actions.

Engagement and empowerment – engaged, empowered employees are inextricably linked to delivering excellent Customer Experience. Employees must have the ability and the autonomy to provide the best service possible, rather than fear repercussions. Training can help. A well-trained employee will feel comfortable, confident, and empowered during customer interactions. They won’t hesitate to answer questions, fix issues, and go the extra mile..

Also a clear vision and strategy will help give employee a strong sense of what the company stands for, what its goals are, and why it exists. This will enable them to feel connected and invested in the organisation.

Momentum – implementing Customer Experience can be big and unwieldly. Building and then sustaining momentum can be a challenge, especially when the day job gets in the way. So it is critical that ownership is assigned and objectives are set, and then everyone is held to account. However it is equally important is to make it fun, employees must want to do it.

Also at the outset do some elements quickly so that some momentum is built. Once started, keep pushing the different streams until momentum is developed. We find it is very much like pushing the proverbial snowball up the hill, a great deal of effort will be required initially, however when you reach the crest and it runs on its own accord.

Good luck with your Customer Experience programme!

Arabic web design UX tips Web design

Arabic is the mother tongue of one of the fastest-growing sectors of internet users, with a 30-fold rise between 2000 and 2012 − and 41% of Saudis on Twitter, the highest rate in the world – so why are fewer than 1% of web pages in Arabic?

The answer is more technical than you might think. Although a kind of block printing called tarish developed in Egypt in the 9th-10th centuries, Arabic was not used with movable type on a large scale until after Napoleon brought printing presses to Egypt. Arabic script is far better adapted for hand lettering than separate metal types, as most letters change shape depending on the letters before or after them; some combinations can even be written vertically.

We needed to spend weeks making Arabic typography fully functional across all devices, given the poor support for Arabic fonts online

Challenges of Arabic Typesetting

Arabic website visitors will be used to reading right to left

Electronic media solved most of these problems, since Arabic fonts are designed with algorithms that alter letters depending on their place in the word. But the number of Arabic fonts available is still minimal compared to Latin fonts, and even fewer are supported online, leading to websites that often look outdated and clash with their company image.

Over half of all pages on the Internet are currently in English. However, Arabic grew more quickly than any other online language (over 2,500%) from 2001 to 2011, proving that Arabic speakers are making huge steps to catch up – sometimes in defiance of regimes that limit internet use. The political role of Arabic online is considerable: at least two regimes, those of Egypt and Tunisia, disintegrated due to the direct impact of social media.

Going mobile

Above all, smartphones are leading a sea change in web design, as they are now the principal means of accessing the internet for many people in towns and cities, and often the only way to get online in rural areas. Recent news stories of Syrian refugees using smartphones confirm their usefulness in our globalised world, enabling families to stay in contact even in conflict zones.

Mostly, though, we use internet for work, communication or leisure, wherever we are in the world. According to our research, 30-40 % of internet users in the Middle East surf the net regularly on their smartphone or tablet, and that’s a figure that is only set to grow. In our redesign of the University of Dammam’s bilingual Arabic-English website, we made the site fully mobile-friendly and flow intuitively like an app, as it was clear that most current and potential students would be using a mobile or tablet to access information on the site.

Switching to RTL

So what are the main obstacles to Arabic web design? Since Arabic reads right to left (RTL), Arabic versions of existing websites need to be completely flipped horizontally. Image selection is crucial: pictures need to be chosen specifically for LTR and RTL interfaces, as simply making a mirror image of them will look strange – and turn any writing in them to gibberish.

Most of all, Arabic websites that also incorporate European languages present a real challenge, as the text will be switching back and forth between RTL and LTR. A platform such as Drupal, which supports international and localised websites and even contains ready-made translation files for most standard strings, is ideal.

HTML Prototypes

Patternlab is based on creating pages via atoms, molecules, organisms and templates

When building an Arabic language website it’s helpful to start with an HTML prototype.

When we were commissioned to redesign the University of Dammam’s multilingual website, working with the web design company Bright Lemon, who designed the web architecture and built the back end of the site, we chose to use the HMTL software Patternlab. Patternlab uses a more organic method of creating websites by way of ‘atoms’, ‘molecules’, ‘organisms’, templates and pages, rather than the traditional wireframe model.

HTML prototypes enables the developer to create a clickable workflow that can be altered easily, and therefore cheaply. This in turn allows all the clients to see an overall view from the outset. Furthermore, if the HTML or CSS is of a high enough quality it can be used throughout Alpha, Beta and Production stages.

There are far fewer Arabic web fonts available than Latin fonts

Arabic Aesthetics in the Digital Era

Apart from the technical aspects of structuring an Arabic language website, the aesthetic experience is crucial. It can be tricky to make an Arabic version of an English site look the same across both formats, yet it is essential to brand coherence. For the University of Dammam site, we spent weeks making sure that the Arabic typography worked across all devices.

The Arabic script has provided us with a tremendously rich artistic legacy, from the boldness of early Kufic to the splendour of Ottoman monumental scripts. With each new evolution, Arabic writing has been adapted to suit new materials and mediums, from papyrus to paper, ceramics to textiles, metalwork to mosaic. Online typography is merely the latest in a long line of mediums in which we’re sure Arabic will triumph in too, using these keys to open the way.

We are delighted to launch our highly acclaimed sales training,Creating a World Class Buying Experience, as a standalone one day workshop.

Aimed at retailers who want to train their sales people how to provide an exceptional buying experience for their customers so their business really stands out from their competitors.

Based on our unique, proven approach we focus on the ‘relationship’ and not just the ‘sale’. We show delegates how, through the delivery of a great buying experience, to get customers to WANT to buy from them, rather than them having to do the selling.

Highlights of this riveting one day interactive workshop include: the psychology of buying, understanding a customer’s decision process, ways to engage and connect, tailoring product presentation to create desire, handling objections, recognising buying signals and a natural ‘close’.

Steve Dudley, course director says: ‘Research shows more than 50% of customers will spend more on products and services if the overall experience is great and memorable.  This workshop gives sales teams the skills and confidence to deliver a superior buying experience, helping them to understand both the ‘why’ and the ‘how’, creating standout and differentiation from the competition and increasing customer delight and sales.’

Enlightened CEOs embrace Customer Experience (CX) as the new competitive battleground and the route to profitable differentiation in organisations. However, delivering a sustainable Customer Experience strategy is not without its challenges. Here are some pointers to help embed an effective CX strategy from the outset:

Go large or go home

Conventional wisdom calls for piloting changes on a limited basis which if successful are rolled out more broadly. Whilst this works for individual elements or small tweaks, it does not work for implementing an effective Customer Experience strategy. You need to think in terms of Change Management that embraces the whole organisation and have the Board and senior management fully committed, leading by example to be able to achieve results fast.

Also it is useful to focus on quick wins early in your programme implementation, as we find that when staff see results early on in the programme they buy in wholeheartedly.

A holistic approach

Adopt a holistic approach when looking at the customer journey and the stakeholders involved. Understanding the functional relation between parts and the whole is important for managing the spectrum of interactions that combine to impact on Customer Experience.

Often the temptation is to focus training and incentives on front end staff, when it is internal service providers like logistics, IT or accounts that are key in providing the right support for customer facing staff. These internal service providers are as important enablers in ensuring front line staff can deliver an excellent Customer Experience.

Continual refinement

Customer expectations are dynamic and evolving, and so too will your CX strategy. Think of it as an iterative process, that has a beginning, middle but no end. It will be evolved and measured, even changed or paused if necessary, never stopped. And each iteration will realise learning and refinement.

In terms of measurement try not to just track traditional metrics like Net Promoter Scores or Share of Wallet, whilst they are useful, they are lagging indicators. Look at the number of new value adding service ideas in your organisation, the levels of staff engagement, voice of customer studies and customer’s reviews.

In closing… once you have an integrated, fully embedded Customer Experience programme that is producing results …the challenge is then how to take it to the next level.