Q&A with Michael Lung on Customer Experience

We speak to XpertiseNow’s Design Advisor, Michael Lung, about how XpertiseNow is creating the platform of choice for specialist consultancies.

Q: What is customer experience?

A: It’s the sum of all the interactions that a customer may have with your business. That can begin from the beginning of the journey, where they’re getting to know about your business, to the products that they can purchase from you, or the services that they can acquire from you, all the way to how they may be sending customer queries. It’s how your customer support team may be answering those queries, even down to whether they choose to buy with you again. And whether you share those recommendations with your friends and family. It is end-to-end and if you can design those interactions into one holistic customer experience based on how customers naturally behave. And if you orchestrate your business team to be able to deliver on those experiences, you can drive some real business benefits from improving your customer acquisition rates with a strong proposition and a really easy way to be able to close purchase or conversion. You can either also improve how you retain your customers to with awesome engaging customer experiences on platforms and products that you design, as well as how you live on those customer experiences and customer service. You can even reduce your cost in how you serve your customers.

Q: Why is customer experience important for a platform like XpertiseNow?

A: As a customer, you’ve got the specialist consultancies that experience a range of problems from running their business to winning new work, delivering projects, all manner of different tasks. There are different types of consulting teams as well. Taking that customer experience approach where we dig deep into understanding the nuances of what the problems are, being very clear on what the problem we want to solve amongst them is, as well as working with consultancies to design something that they use is critical. Because it’s such a large area, it can be easy to try and tackle it all and end up being a jack of all trades, but a master of none.

Q: So how is XpertiseNow making that a great customer experience?

A: We followed the customer experience approach spending time mapping the holistic journey by speaking to a specialist consultancy of various types from one-to-many shops to larger teams with offshore capabilities. We asked how do they currently go about winning work. How do they go about pitching for the work and responding to different proposals and requests request for proposals? How do they go about collaborating with different types of partners in delivering those projects and running the operations of their businesses? Then we worked very closely with the XpertiseNow team to identify which are those areas which we can be most meaningful to specialist consultancies on a platform. What are those features which will be most useful for them? These included collaborating, finding other specialist companies to work with finding ways to bring them together as they go about pitching for a new project and how they deliver.