That doesn’t mean I’m not proud of what we’ve accomplished. I’d just rather let the facts speak for themselves. Our Clutch.co profile is a perfect example: I much prefer letting our clients talk about their experience with us over trying to prove our expertise and professionalism.

With a stellar score like ours (spoiler alert: we’re at 4.9 out of 5 as I write this), you’d think the last thing we should do is mess with a winning recipe.

Maybe, but that’s not how I see it. And it would have made for a pretty short article.

What’s Behind a Near-Perfect Score

Our Clutch.co profile has been active for several years. Our near-perfect rating there makes for an excellent calling card and shows the level of service our clients are entitled to expect.

We also measure our Net Promoter Score (NPS) with our clients, and here too, we have an exceptional score of 83. Not a single detractor in sight.

What our 26 Clutch reviews and roughly 25 NPS respondents don’t show are all the people who didn’t answer the call. Where are the hundreds of clients we’ve served since we started out in 2003?

That missing data keeps me up at night: what on earth is the silent majority thinking? With that in mind, we’ve launched a major customer experience initiative to get to the bottom of it and, let’s be honest, help me sleep at night.

Customer Experience: Where Do You Start?

Customer experience is the heart of aservices company. Probably of every type of company, but certainly of ours.

Every department, every employee, can tie what they do directly to a client, or at most with one degree of separation. In the famous RACI matrix, if everyone is Responsible for customer experience, who is ultimately the one person Accountable?

The easy answer would be me, but you could say that about practically everything.

Instead, we agreed that the marketing team would take charge of our clients’ experience, or more specifically, our Vice-President of Marketing. We took the opportunity to change her title to “Vice-President, Marketing and Customer Experience” to highlight how much importance we place on it, and to reinforce that this isn’t a project with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Now that there’s an accountable VP, we’re all set. Right?

Systematizing Human Experiences

Customer experience rests on a series of human interactions. The words used, the tone, the speed of the exchanges and the outcome all matter a great deal, but ultimately, it’s how people feel that truly lasts.

So how do we make sure our clients’ experience is memorable, for the right reasons, consistently, no matter who they’re talking to? Here’s the approach we chose to take.

First, we need to take stock of where things stand:

• Who talks to clients?
• At what point(s)?
• How?

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It’s also essential to measure current client satisfaction. Hard to improve if you don’t know where you’re starting from!

As mentioned earlier, we already had anindirect measure through our Clutch.co reviews, and we now systematically measure NPS with our active clients. The next step will be to get the silent majority talking, without alienating them.

The biggest challenge is still ahead of us. Once we’ve mapped out every client interaction, we’ll need to define the RACI for each step and make sure it’s clearly understood, and applied, by every single person.

Next, standards (response times, communication channels, level of language, etc.) will need to be defined across the board, adapted to our different client personas, and our staff trained accordingly. Once that’s firmly in place, we can look at the key moments in our customer journey to delight our clients and build even stronger loyalty than we do today.

It’s no small feat, but we’re convinced thatin a world undergoing profound transformation, a customer experience built on meaningful human relationships remains essential.