Ep 24: How to optimize customer experience with Adrian Brady-Cesana

Problem: How to optimize customer experiences to reduce customer churn

Adrian is a customer service guru. He has built his business around the importance of customer experiences. Today we’re going to talk about how you can reduce your rate of customer churn. How do you slow down the number of customers that switch from your service to a different one or swap from your product to a competitor’s product?   

I think the big crux of what we’re going to be solving today is talking through some ideas for how people can think about improving churn and really reducing that pain that they feel when they lose customers.

The Four CX Pillars 

While Adrian was building and scaling companies, he realized that the same problems kept popping up. There kept being the same challenges. There kept being the same issues. People kept flagging the same thing. And that’s how he compartmentalizing and developing the Four CX Pillars. When Adrian brings on a new client, they go through each of these pillars to see what needs to change in order to optimize the customer experience. 

It kept feeling like that Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day. I kept feeling I was on repeat again and again and again.

Step 1: Focus on your Team

Look at the composition of your team, the size of your team, the connective points for your team, the communication between each team member, how the team is driven and managed. Communication is key, especially for companies that aren’t used to having remote workers. Luckily, a lot of companies that Adrian works with were already set up with the digital tools they needed to be able to stay in contact with one another. 

We look at where they’re killin’ it, and where they’re weak. Because you immediately begin to see which areas are ripe from improvement.

Step 2: Look at your Tools

Depending on the business or business-type, there are different combinations of tools out there for each business. Generally speaking, however, you can start at the same point: keeping customer information. Now is a good time to start thinking about a lightweight CRM (customer relationship management), like a Hubspot or even keeping everything on a Google doc or spreadsheet. The second tool you need to think about is the communication piece.

How are you actually managing your phone calls, your emails, your text messages?

Step 3: Streamline your Processes

Consider having a living playbook. A lot of the big companies out there have been able to stay on top because they have a living playbook. Living playbooks (sometimes called live playbooks) are documents that contain the processes you use within your business. They’re called “living” playbooks because they are malleable since processes are constantly changing. They contain proven and best practices for your company.

[Living playbooks] are one of the easiest ways you can make sure that everyone has a snapshot or the most up-to-date story around what’s happening with your company.

Whether you’re a small business, a medium business, or a large business, literally everyone can have their own version of a living playbook. 

Step 4: Analyze your Feedback

There are two points of feedback: customer feedback and employee or team feedback. 

There are so many ways you can collect customer feedback today. There’s NPS (net promoter score). There’s CSAT (customer satisfaction). There’s customer effort scoring or CES scoring. There’s transactional scoring or TranSat.

How to learn more about customer experience with Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Adrian Brady-Cesana has literally written the book on enriching customer experience with, The Four CX Pillars to Grow Your Business Now: The Customer Experience Manager Playbook. He also has an incredible podcast, CX Chronicles Podcast.