Transforming the customer experience requires a level of speed and precision that traditional approaches can’t meet. The best practitioners do it in real time.

Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Line Hartvig Müller, Andrea Peyracchia, and Vik Sohoni for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. They explain what to do and how to it. To read the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, obtain subscription information, and register to receive email alerts, please click here

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Time was that a company with the next big thing could bank on a year or so of cushion until competitors caught up. No more. Fast-track product development, advanced software techniques, and the ready availability of digital channels have made products dramatically easier to commoditize. Such changes are one reason the battle for competitive differentiation has increasingly shifted to the quality of the customer experience. For their part, customers accustomed to the immediacy, personalization, and convenience that characterize digital-marketing pioneers such as Amazon and Google now expect the same service from all players, raising the stakes.

In our experience, customer-experience leaders start with a differentiating purpose and focus on improving the most important customer journey first—whether it be opening a bank account, returning a pair of shoes, installing cable television, or even updating address and account information. They then improve the steps that make up that journey. They design supporting processes with customer psychology in mind, managing expectations around such things as wait times, and surprising customers with unexpected rewards toward the end of the journey to maximize pleasure and enjoyment. They also foster a service culture that emphasizes consistent, high-quality touchpoints. And they innovate continuously, looking outside as well as in to cast a broad net for ideas. Finally, they are zealous about tracking and acting on feedback to improve steadily and rapidly.

But to achieve the speed and precision that the competitive marketplace demands, leaders are putting aside traditional approaches to transforming their digital customer profile. Instead of stepwise design-and-build approaches that culminate in a big-bang launch months later, they achieve rapid process digitization using concurrent-design approaches in which elements are added and refined in a continual cycle of testing and learning.

Using this method, multidisciplinary teams codesign high-impact processes and journeys in the field, iterating and rereleasing designs quickly—often in real time—based on direct customer input. Weaker designs fail faster and stronger ones succeed sooner under this approach, with the result that high-performing incumbents can release and scale major, customer-vetted process improvements in under 20 weeks. And because rapid process digitization incorporates continuous improvement from the pilot stage to large-scale rollout, initiatives are far more likely to be sustained over time.

That is not to say that accelerating an organization’s customer-experience transformation via rapid digitization is easy. Among other challenges, it requires established businesses to embrace new ways of working and adopt methods that will be foreign to standard approaches and the existing operating culture. Yet the payoff can be compelling.

Putting aside old approaches

In many organizations, process design has traditionally been managed sequentially. Product or business managers have an idea. They hand that idea off to IT. The technology team develops it, then hands it back to the business to review. All told, it can take months before customers see the improved process. Only then, after having committed all that time, does the business find out if its answer is the right one.

Such stepwise process-improvement approaches are too slow and insular to give companies the lift they need in today’s environment. And because they don’t incorporate customer feedback until late in the game, businesses often learn only after the fact that they invested in the wrong areas and made improvements that do not deliver a differentiating experience.

Another consideration is that the existing process environment is often too complex. IT legacy systems—many already stretched—often feature a jumble of patches and work-arounds that make them hard to integrate or update efficiently.

In addition, many processes were not designed with today’s digital and multichannel environment in mind. One bank, for instance, figured out that its current customer process for setting up an overdraft account took 10 to 15 days to complete. Automating those steps to a mobile environment would be impossible. The bank needed something simpler and faster that would take a 15-day process down to five minutes.

Transforming the customer experience in this way requires a different approach—one that is more responsive, integrated, and customer led. An iterative test-and-learn approach allows companies to move the needle more quickly and with greater accuracy (Exhibit 1).

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Line Hartvig Müller is an associate principal in McKinsey’s Copenhagen office, Andrea Peyracchia is a digital VP in the Milan office, and Vik Sohoni is a director in the Chicago office.

The authors wish to thank Robert Park and Mahin Samadani for their contributions to this article.