Cut Through the Chaos

In unpredictable conditions, relying on quantifiable measurements can reassure leadership teams that they are aligned with their customers and achieving peak performance. Today, change is happening at an unprecedented rate. This hyper-change (often bordering on frantic-change) has become a new operating reality for businesses, not by choice, but by circumstantial necessity. 

Even in the whirlwind of change, the fundamentals of business persist: Listen to your customers and continually transform your business to solve customer problems. Your customers are experiencing the same pace of change that you are. Some of their operating realities have been completely upended with store-front closings, distributed workforces, supply and logistical challenges and genuine worry for the future. Designing a program that will bridge the churning waters of change between your company and your customers will provide essential balance to your customer relationships and inform your team in times of disruption.

James Gilmore, an original experience-economy author, proclaimed just prior to the pandemic that “the experience economy is not next, or emerging, it has fully arrived.” Customer experience management has matured at the right time to be starkly relevant to business relationships navigating the pressures of hyper-change. Leadership commitment and proper execution are paramount to obtaining, distilling and rightly applying crucial customer feedback.

Customer Experience Management (CXM)

A common and powerful stating point is the Voice of the Customer (VOC) survey process. Success hinges on this being a structured, repeatable process that establishes benchmarks, opens dialogue with loyal and disloyal customers alike and creates new alignment and agility within the organization. A professionally designed Voice of the Customer survey is the information gathering engine of CXM. It will inform your team in key strategic areas, such as: customer experience measurements, market conditions, user experience, product experience, competitive comparisons and demographics.

Understand that your first effort is a stepping-off point where you will gather meaningful qualitative and quantitative data, all of which will become an important benchmark to measure future performance. You are creating a CXM process that will assist you in objectively assessing your current operating reality. The process will also have impact across your internal and external constituents. Internally, CXM will provide information to customer-facing teams on their individual and departmental performances, provide information to technology teams regarding user experience, provide product and market intelligence and create insight into systems and process performance. Externally, customers will have a formal voice to constructively offer ideas for improvement, identify trouble processes and employees of the company, and participate in an inclusive continuous improvement process that will transform relationships into strategic partnerships.

Key Customer Experience Measurements

Three quantitative measures that are essential to capturing the customer experience are Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter Score and Customer Effort Score. Each measure has individual merits as a benchmark but collectively are essential to track evolving customer sentiment over time.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a good short-term transactional measure. It measures interactions with the company that are important early indicators of overall customer experience.  Satisfaction is a fleeting, feelings-based sentiment reflective of the most recent interactions with the company.

Here is an example of the CSAT question: Overall, how satisfied are you with the company? 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a relational measure of customer loyalty. It reaches beyond recent interactions that characterize "satisfaction." By asking if the customer will refer (promote) the company to close acquaintances, it can determine if respondents are loyal promoters, passives or detractors to the brand.

Here is the established NPS question: How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague? 

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a transactional measure of the ease by which customers interact with the company. Even loyal customers will leave a company that is difficult to interact with. Thus, high CES scores connotate a stability in the overall customer relationship.

Here is an example of the CES measure: When an exception arises, the company makes it easy for me to resolve my issue.

Collectively, these three measurements will allow you to cross-section customers in various combinations of customer experience measurements. In practical terms the measurements can be viewed in relation to their outcome: happy/unhappy (CSAT), promoter/detractor (NPS) and stable/unstable (CES). The application of these measurements for each customer not only tells a story, but creates the opportunity to develop an actionable plan.

Here are two examples to consider:

1. High-satisfaction (CSAT), low-loyalty (NPS), low-effort (CES) customer: We will refer to these customers as happy, unstable detractors. This customer group would be considered “at risk." Externally, you should discover from these customers where they are experiencing difficulty as they attempt to resolve issues. Internally, you can then verify the service gap, make improvements and close the communication loop with customers. 
2. Low-satisfaction (CSAT), high-loyalty (NPS), high-effort (CES) customer: We will refer to these customers as unhappy, stable promoters. These customers likely had a bad transactional experience, but it has not colored the entire relationship and they often stay engaged with the company. Uncovering, addressing and resolving the root cause of the bad experience will bolster this customer group.

Gartner research supports the positive benefits of multiple customer experience measurements and states the benefits as:

• Increased Loyalty: NPS is 65 points higher for top-performing, low-effort companies than for high-effort companies.
• Increased Repurchase Rates: 94% of customers with low-effort interactions intend to repurchase compared to 4% of those experiencing high effort.
• Reduced Costs: A low-effort interaction costs 37% less than a high-effort interaction. Low-effort experiences reduce costs by decreasing up to 40% of repeat calls, 50% of escalations and 54% of channel switching.
• Increased Employee Retention: When service reps provide consistently good experiences to customers, they feel better about their jobs, and their intent to stay increases 17%.

It Matters What You Know

Tilting toward objectivity, a favorite expression is, “It doesn’t matter what you think, it matters what you know.” The purpose of a CXM process is to define what you know, and conversely what you do not know. The latter will enable you to identify blind spots before they become problematic for the company and your customers. Salted into the process is personal experience. Personal experience will inform knowledge, but objective results will balance intuition, creating a decision making continuum.

Context is critical and something that will develop over time as you implement a CXM process. As historical comparatives mature, you will begin to see the germination of predictive analytics. 

Armed with objective results, personal experience and predictive foresight, you can begin to elevate the customer experience and subsequently engage customers in meaningful dialogue.