How To Start Writing Your Customer Experience Story
Human beings are story tellers. It helps us make sense of reality and our place in this universe. From movies to books, people love stories, and desire to be moved on an emotional level. Customer experience is no different. It has a story to tell, an experience to share, and a set of feelings to convey about your company’s brand and identity.
The minute a customer walks into your field of influence, every interaction they are participating in has been (hopefully) fully rehearsed ahead of time. Marketing has a beautiful stage set, your customer service team is full of brilliant actors, and the story wraps up with a final, climactic ending as the customer walks out the door.
How would you rate your customer experience, if you viewed it through the perspective of a movie? Are you producing a 5-star film consistently, or do you have some editing to do in order to make your story a blockbuster hit? Just like a movie script, there are several steps when taking the journey of writing and producing your own customer experience:
- Dream big. Take the time to sit down with your executive team, and plot out a vision of your customer experience across all departments. Share ideas, form common grounds of agreement, and come up with some kind of grand vision that everyone can agree upon.
- Gather your crew. Every great story requires a variety of people to play their parts. Know who your on-screen actors are, and who shines best behind the scenes keeping everything together.
- Start writing. Start writing the script you want every customer to interact with as they enter and leave your experience. This starts the moment they walk into your metaphorical or physical door, until the time they leave. The goal is to craft a story so compelling they want to share it with others and experience it again.
- Rehearse. Perhaps this stage never ends, since we are acting out the same scene daily. It’s critical to reiterate what the original story or script is, and make sure everyone still knows their lines and their roles.
- Edit. Take the time to sit back and view your customer experience story. Does it feel like a genuine, feeling-based journey that customers latch onto, or are there improvements to make? This is the most important step of the journey and one you will come back to consistently. Never be afraid to make a change, test it out, and see how your story improves.
What’s amazing about customer experience is that it’s an organic, ever-changing story. Actors come and go, sometimes people forget their lines. But at the end of the day, as long as you’ve dreamt big and have a vision, then you have a goal to work towards, a meaning in your customer experience.
Take some time now to sit back and watch your current customer experience story unfold. What would you improve? What already works great? Are customers walking away with a “Wow, I can’t wait to do that again” impression? It’s all up to you, and how you write your story.
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