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I do not spend much time “browsing the internet”; usually, my online activities are targeted and focus on something I need to accomplish. One guilty pleasure is the Malicious Compliance thread on Reddit. Interestingly, the stories that capture my attention tend to focus on customer experience and employee experience.
Many of these have the employee perspective, often dealing with a misunderstanding that results in management instituting a new rule to “structure” a response for a single situation and make it apply to all situations. Up front, I will say that creating a new policy based on a single customer incident is a bad idea.
What if that customer was wrong? What if that customer was not profitable or actually cost the company money with every purchase? Do we know if the employee had provided exceptional service yet there was still a complaint? Did we listen to both sides of the story?
In each story that I read, I find there are almost always two takeaways:
- I would really enjoy hearing from the other side (the customer or management)
- There is value in stories, regardless of whose perspective they come from
When companies are building a customer experience strategy, it tends to be built around the customer experience software platform instead of the entire customer journey and customer experience touchpoints. Instead of understanding the Voice-of-the-Customer, the focus seems to surround the implementation of the CX Enterprise Software – once it is set up, the focus shifts away from the customer even more.
There is a significant effort to launch a customer experience program, from the beginning in defining the customer journey map, to understanding the sentiment analysis all the way to creating business and operational workflows for the customer feedback loop. There is room for improvement however. These are just a few innovative ways this can be done:
- More Technology Requires More Empathy – the easiest way to lose customers is to remove emotional engagement from the experience. There are so many upsides to technology and the emergence of AI, but one thing to consider is that every time you layer technology between you and your customers, you risk customer apathy. It doesn’t take much to understand where customers are looking for attention: start with some social media analysis that allows you to respond like we have with QuestionPro’s CX Reputation.
- Go Beyond Detractor Management – this one tends to get a little controversial because there are some software providers that focus on operationalizing customer experience feedback and by stating the financial linkage analysis demonstrates that responding to detractor alerts provides the largest benefit to companies measuring customer satisfaction. I do not doubt the intention behind those analyses, and I also hold them up as an example. However, one might conclude that having no detractors can be equated as a failure because you no longer have a means for improving the financial impact of the experience. Or we could then surmise that service failures during the transactions are opportunities so we should have more of them. I do not believe anyone truly feels that way, but there is a certain irrational approach to have a strict workflow around every closed-loop detractor ticket. Not all customers are the same value, therefore the approach should be different for each one – not deploying the same workflow for everyone. The second part of this is that you must move beyond detractor recovery. Utilizing tools such as QuestionPro NPS+, it is important to understand and analyze the root cause so you can deploy Outer Loop techniques that will improve the core issue behind a problem, not just the symptoms.
- Go Beyond Dashboards – too often, once a program is up and running, everything revolves around KPIs and dashboards. Too often focusing on the wrong things. In time, customer experience dashboards will be a thing of the past. Too often they are used as a substitute for taking actions, instead debating the value of the information and using them as excuses about what additional information or view is needed to make it actionable. Much like revenue, it is a measurement, and action is taken outside the system. Much like Outer Loop, it is important to see the strategy that needs to be executed upon, not just standardized workflow actions.
- Don’t Forget The Employee – For years, there has been talk of showing the connection between employee experience, customer satisfaction and the monetary measures. This has been proven (see here), but often the connection between EX and revenue is deemed as a loosely correlated connection. What is forgotten is that all these things have a snowball effect. If something is impacted anywhere along the service-profit chain, it impacts the entire chain. If you just read the stories from Malicious Compliance, you may even think to yourself “I don’t want to shop there…”. The employees are the difference makers. Even if the stories have bias, even if they have a one-sided description – these stories tell you what’s on the mind of those that are responsible for serving the customers. Sometimes they are funny too. Another controversial idea, the Employee Experience program should be overseen by the same operational team that manages the Customer Experience program.
This is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but by looking at the big picture – focusing on actions that improve the customer experience for profitable customers – we can view these programs through the correct lens that these are marathons, not sprints. That, and reading Reddit can provide you with some great insights.
Is there something wrong with your customer experience?
When you complete an honest assessment, the outcome can be beneficial. Particularly when it comes to your Customer Experience program.
Take five minutes and complete an audit for your organization here.
You may discover a gap in measurement, an opportunity to improve a process, the place where an organizational shift needs to take place or an opportunity to win a greater share of your customers’ wallets.
We all want that bigger “return”. In this situation, the worst case scenario is that you’ll get some information that will help your organization since there is no cost or obligation in completing this audit. txt 06 11
