What is CX?: How to Improve Customer Experience w/Chui Chui Tan

Chui Chui Tan is the founder & Director at Beyō Global. Having originally studied industrial engineering, she went on to become a culturalization expert who has worked in user/customer experience (UX/CX) for over 14 years.

Now, she helps companies like Spotify, Netflix, Marriott, BBC, and others with their international launches and expansions in order to maximize their global reach.

SME Strategy · Improve Customer Experience at Home & Internationally w/Chui Chui Tan Ep#106

Is your team having a strategic planning session soon? Make sure you ask them these 15 questions first:

On this episode of the Strategy & Leadership Podcast, Chui Chui joins us to discuss everything customer experience, including:

Why it's important for organizations to consider customer experience

Chui Chui explains that without taking the time to figure out who your customers are, what they want, and what's important to them, you're just putting everything out there to see what works. On the contrary, if you know what they want, you can provide them with the best experience as possible. To help us with the concept of international customer experience, Chui Chui uses the metaphor of a cupcake. The customer experience is the baked part, and the toppings are the international elements sprinkled on top (that could be packaging, content, payment method, etc.)

How organizations can improve their international customer experience

Chui Chui mentions that avoiding stereotypes and assumptions, and always being curios is the best mindset when considering CX internationally. It's not enough to simply translate the English language into another. In order to provide the best experience, you're have to test and validate what you know. As an exercise, gather your data and your people, and place every assumption in one of these 4 boxes:

We know this to be factual
Strong hypothesis: We know this is true, but might need to expand on it
Weak hypothesis: We think or we heard someone say, but don't know
We don't know

Who is responsible for the customer experience?

Chui Chui knows that it should be everyone responsible for CX, in one way or another. When you're inside an organization, you can see each of the departments and teams and how they operate. But when a customer comes to buy your product, they experience your entire organization, not just one department. For that reason, CX needs to touch every department in your organization. In a practical sense, most commonly, the user experience specialists will sit in with and get involved with each team in the organization.

An international customer experience 'aha moment' in Japan

Chui Chui mentions working with Asana, the team based work management software, in Japan. One of the things they were doing was testing Asana's feature that allows users to assign tasks to each other. In Japanese culture, it is considered rude to assign a task to someone without talking to them (you don't want them to feel embarrassed if they don't have time or the skills to complete the task).