How to embed customer experience thinking

Every aspect of our organisation is driven by customer experience, from the front line to the boardroom. I lead a team of customer success-focused professionals dedicated to excellence across various areas, including service proposition management, product support, service delivery, customer engagement, and project management.

We create software for accountants and tax advisors, and it’s an exciting time for us as we transform to become a Software as a Service business. Despite the pandemic, our service remained uninterrupted in a disruptive landscape where our Customer Success team had to shift to a remote working model quickly. And in mid-2020, we launched several initiatives that have proven to be real differentiators in the competitive tax and accounting software industry. Now that we’ve had time to evaluate and measure our success, we’re ready to share what we’ve achieved and the successes we’ve seen in our customer experience.

Embedding customer experience across our entire organisation
Today, organisations are breaking siloes and realising just how essential it is that everyone across the business is aware of and accountable for CX improvement. Our team leads customer feedback sessions to encourage open and honest discussions with our customers to identify both our strengths and the areas which may need more attention.

We have developed dedicated programmes such as our Customer Service Week series, where our team shares best practices and expertise from a CX point of view, engaging teams from engineering to sales, to marketing in what it means to provide the best possible customer experience.

Improved customer journey: you said, we listened
Customer journey research is used extensively throughout our organisation, and we have shared the results extensively to encourage wider feedback across the company.

We have conducted extensive research surrounding our customer journey to identify pain points to improve on. We have identified a number of areas where customers share increasingly positive comments: in reliability/quality, ease of use (content and resources) empathy, and responsiveness.

We also launched our Customer Engagement Programme, which has changed how we communicate with customers. Based on the theme of ‘you said, we listened,’ we now update customers monthly on the aspects they have requested and how we have delivered.

Improved response times with our new customer community
My team launched our Wolters Kluwer Support Portal in July 2020, based completely on direct response to customer feedback and as part of our commitment to continually improving our customer experience. Using the Support Portal, our customers can now:

• Get involved in discussions and ask questions of their peers in other practices
• Join groups that may be relevant to their area of expertise or role in the practice
• Raise a case for support with software, billing or invoice queries
• Add comments or updates to a case and, if required, close a case without the need to contact our support team
• See the full list of open cases for their practice, as well as a history of their cases
• Access the Knowledgebase, help documentation or e-learning to help find answers at a time that works for them

We have always measured response time, but now we can measure the effectiveness of these new digital resources as well.

Putting the customer at the heart of everything we do
As a business, our entire workforce measures success through our ability to help advance our customers’ work, prioritising optimised customer interactions across the entire journey into a seamless, customer-focused end-to-end digital experience.

We’re continually putting the customer at the heart of everything we do, from user groups to in-depth panel discussions that examine the issues affecting our customers today. Moving forward, we will continue to evaluate new metrics to help our business understand our customers better, advancing and evolving customer experience thinking in both our customer success team, and throughout our entire organisation.