How a Customer Experience Specialist can make the difference

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Decades of psychological studies on the motivations and desires of consumers have led to an almost scientific approach to sales. This extends from sales strategy to maintaining relationships with customers, to creating loyal brand ambassadors. A deep knowledge of customer desire and spending behaviour is intimately linked to business success. For a Customer Experience Specialist to succeed, they need to understand exactly how customers live, breathe and buy. 

This means that there are specific tactics that a Customer Experience (CX) Designer will come armed with, ready to ensure exceptional customer experiences. Sometimes, the business may have needs that are beyond the vision of its leaders and it requires an outsider to provide an objective outlook on the best strategies for marketing, selling, and maintenance of the brand and its processes. 

What tactics does a Customer Experience Specialist employ to deliver what they promise? These can vary between different industries and markets as customers do not behave the same the world over. Therefore, a specialist in this field needs to bear some sensitivity towards the fact that there will not always be a one size fits all approach. 

This case study will show how one MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) leveraged the power of customer experience and how they benefited from finding a freelance Customer Experience Specialist. Before diving in, let’s look at what characteristics and capacities a successful CX Specialist should bring. 

What makes a good Customer Experience Specialist?

A Customer Experience Specialist looks at the ways that a customer interacts with the product or the company in all aspects. This involves several irreplaceable skills that they need to have. Foundationally, it is essential that they are good communicators. This means finding someone that is able to communicate with customers in order to understand what makes them tick as well as being able to oversee large teams. Maintaining unity across the company requires excellent communication, clearly conveying aims and desired outcomes.

Secondly, a good Customer Experience Specialist needs to be somebody with empathy who genuinely cares about their customer’s needs. However, they also need to be able to be aware of the business needs and regulations. Therefore, they need to be able to juggle these two positions which can sometimes be opposing or in conflict with each other.

They also need to possess a deep knowledge of the product to understand how best to market and sell it. It also allows them to offer relevant solutions to particular pain points.

Finally, they need excellent time management skills and a willingness to continue learning. While overall customer desires remain relatively simple, the methods in which they are delivered are changing on a rapid basis as technology moves. Let’s look out how this CX Specialist delivered all these characteristics in an Outvise project with an MNVO based in Saudi Arabia. 

A CX case study for an MVNO in the Middle East

An MVNO is a mobile service provider that does not use its own network. Instead, these types of companies rent network space and infrastructure from larger networks that have the capacity and bandwidth to do so. This benefits the MVNO as they can create their own branding, marketing and pricing structure to appeal to other sectors of the market. When these MVNOs emerge it also provides a unique opportunity for a customer experience that the public might not find in the traditional network operators. As they’re smaller, they can provide a more tailored and personalised customer experience. 

The company faced challenges from different areas. Firstly, they wanted to make their product launch available over different platforms, which added layers of complexity. Different platforms, (web, native mobile, sales hardware) required different programming and customisation that had to be implemented by other teams of people. This meant working with different external agencies that had their own teams. 

As anyone who’s worked with multiple teams will know, part of the challenge is ensuring standards are kept across the board. Maintaining a unified customer experience means greater customer loyalty by reducing friction and pain points. However, pulling this off requires high-level oversight and cross-team management. When your work groups are spread across different outsourced companies and time zones, upholding brand and experience standardisation can be hard. 

The method 

The best solution was the most obvious, but was one that required a lot of attention to detail. The MNVO hired CX and UX Specialists that were focused on ensuring standards across every iteration of the company’s product, regardless of the platform. This meant coordinating the various teams and improving communication and collaboration. The specialists had to get right to the heart of the company and discover whether their intended customer experience was going to work as intended. It also meant ensuring that customer flow complied with local regulations as well as business requirements. 

More specifically, the Customer Experience Specialist’s team needed to guarantee that common data points would be found in all places where customers would interact with the product. This meant making sure that experience and customer flow was smooth across all platforms. They also had to make sure that customer data was consistent and correct across these platforms, thus reducing pain points for customers and increasing ease of use. 

Increasing the uniformity of interaction across platforms also meant creating a reason, if not a need, to access the product on different platforms. For instance, it meant guiding the customer from the website to downloading the app for an enhanced experience and extra features but in keeping with the flow of the whole ecosystem.

One important aspect of making sure that there was a flow and unity between platforms was using UX Designers and CX Specialists to create a modular system. This modular design allows for changes later down the line, removing one piece and replacing it with another, more functional aspect. Without a Customer Experience Specialist on hand to manage the process, this modular design that was so important for the client would have been difficult to achieve. One of the strengths they, therefore, brought to this case was oversight. 

Summary of approach

• Understand customer needs through surveys, interactions, data analysis and feedback.
• Create customer journey maps that identify pain points and areas for improvement.
• Focus on the highs and lows of the customer experience – what was working well and therefore could be amplified, and what wasn’t working so well and needed to be fixed. 
• Monitor customer feedback to identify trends and common complaints about customer interactions with the product.

The results

With these solutions implemented by a freelance CX Specialist, the company successfully delivered and launched their new web app which received positive and encouraging user tests. They combined this with the launch of their native mobile apps for Android and iOS and created a self-sufficient UX design department to continue iterations into the future, adapting to the customer’s needs as necessary. 

Throughout the whole process, the MVNO needed to figure out how to design and implement a customer experience transformation. This transformation, in consultation with a Customer Experience Specialist, required careful planning and a systematic approach. 

1. First, they needed to define their objectives and what they hoped to achieve throughout the project. For them, it was creating a consistent experience with an aim to have positive user tests but it could also be increasing customer loyalty or reducing customer churn. 

2. Next, a Customer Experience Specialist needs to understand their customers. Through market research, collecting customer feedback and monitoring social media they were able to collect an array of data that gave them closer insight into their customers’ needs.

3. Along with the UX designer, the Customer Experience Specialist needed to map a complete customer journey to visualise the path a customer takes throughout the product. This helped them identify critical areas that were most commonly used, allowing the specialists to focus efforts on bolstering these areas.

4. The next step was a good moment to evaluate how and where to establish KPIs that measure the effectiveness of the customer experience transformation. This could include metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), customer effort score (CES), and retention rates. To assess progress, they regularly tracked and monitored these metrics.

5. Especially working across several disparate teams, it was important to design a customer-centric culture. This involved ensuring that all workers, whether hired on a freelance basis or as full-time employees, were aligned in understanding the importance of delivering exceptional customer service. 

6. One of the main benefits of creating an MVNO is to deliver a far more tailored and personalised approach to customer service. This meant ensuring that at all steps customers had the ability to get in touch with support. They did this by leveraging technologies like AI and machine learning to anticipate customer needs at specific critical points in the journey.

7. They also needed to include an opportunity to gather and act on customer feedback. By enabling customers to share user metrics and create opportunities for customers to share their feedback through a Q&A page, they were able to stay on top of what customers really wanted.

8. The Mobile Virtual Network Operator in question finished up by utilising their KPIs to foster a culture of constant measuring and iteration. They continue to regularly touch upon their customer experience initiatives and gain insights to refine and implement new strategies and tactics. As customer expectations evolve over time, it’s essential to continually adapt and improve the customer experience.  

Summary of achievements

• Successfully delivered and launched the new web app, 
• Obtained positive and encouraging results on user tests.
• Native mobile apps (Android & IOS)
• Creation of a self-sufficient up-to-date UX design department and the first iteration of the design system.

Effective CX design can take a business to the next level

A Customer Experience Specialist is an essential part of managing a complete multi-platform business ecosystem. As we’ve seen, it involves having a deep understanding of both the market in which they are operating, the customer whom they are serving and maintaining a strict identity across platforms that conforms to the intended outcomes of the business. 

As most customer experience transformation is attached to project-based work, employing a Customer Experience Specialist on a freelance basis can be a shrewd move. Seeking out a freelancer has the benefit of the opportunity to recruit someone with a variety of experiences in different industries and markets all across the world. Using a talent platform like Outvise makes it easier still, with CX Specialists already on hand to help businesses effectively implement a coherent customer experience management. Browse the network here to find your ideal CX match.