Building and running a company is not an easy task. Most of us hardly give it a thought when we go shopping, partake in some entertainment, or purchase a car. It goes far beyond getting the product into customers’ hands.
There are thousands of decisions daily to make certain that the customers are getting the services/products they want, maintaining the value of the offer and staying profitable.
The customer experience is one practice that impact all three of those areas but is often relegated to a budget line-item while other areas might remain unchecked. In my time working in this space, two of the three factors above usually impact that budget: getting our clients the services/products they want and maintaining the value (it is the practitioners’ responsibility to do it profitably whether you are working for the brand or the vendor).
LEARN ABOUT: Time to Value
6 hacks to level up your CX Program Success
If you are to be successful with your Customer Experience program, it comes down to demonstrating constantly the value. Following these six recommendations below will help you to maintain a customer experience strategy that goes beyond the Voice-of-the-Customer and into supporting the business broadly.
1. Understand the journey
This should be intuitive, but often gets lost in the shuffle. The most common mistake I see a company make – whether new to customer experience measurement or looking to refresh their program – is in failing to truly map the customer journey and keep it up to date.
How often? Each time you add communications or advertising channels. With every update to your product or service in which an announcement is made. For every new competitor that enters or leaves your space.
It may seem like it could be a full-time job, especially if it is the first time or the first time in a long time. However, if you keep it up to date on an ongoing basis, you’ll just be making small adjustments and reviewing the downstream impacts. This will minimize the daily impact, but you should also look to refresh it across the organization regularly (you know – in case IT forgets to tell you about the new cryptocurrency payment system).
2. Measure
This should seem obvious (especially from a survey provider) but having one listening post is not enough. Two? Three? Still probably not enough.
We often get so hung up on rolling out the “big CX program” that we forget that there are dozens of customer experience touchpoints – or just choose not to measure them to make our jobs easier. If you are focused on only measuring the two or three larger touchpoints, you are not listening to all your customers and providing them with enough listening posts.
A reason we give you unlimited surveys at QuestionPro is that we want you to have customers be able to give feedback in your customer experience software platform even if it is a low volume touchpoint. This is not about “getting a statistically valid sample”, but rather using feedback from the entire journey to inform your decisions.
Considering the listening posts you have in place today – just 10 years ago most companies barely used social media and now most use them for bi-directional communications with customers for service concerns and promotions.
3. Go beyond measurement
Let me start with this fact – I am a mathematician. However, when looking at Customer Experience dashboards and reporting, the last term I want to hear is “statistically significant difference”. That term is usually brought up to deflect blame or avoid work.
Can you imagine telling a customer that we aren’t going to respond to their complaint because they were a “statistical outlier”? Absolutely not. If you are worried about statistical significance, then your customer experience program is too focused on attaining a number – not the goal of improving operations and service for increasing the value of the offer to the customer.
How often do you worry about statistical significance in your sentiment analysis? When the CEO asks about decreased scores, they want to hear if there are some actions that can be taken to improve them, not “important information about statistical significance”.
Moving beyond a drivers’ analysis, utilize a tool like the QuestionPro exclusive NPS+ where you can easily assess the root cause, but also discover ideas that customers have to make them more loyal using co-creation and innovation voting.
4. Respond
This seems like it should go without saying, but I am still surprised to see how many companies and brands do not respond to complaints received in surveys or customer listening posts using a customer feedback loop.
I am shocked when I hear “we don’t need closed-loop feedback tools” (often related to saving a few budget dollars), yet I hear it enough that I am compelled to write about it. The reasons can be plentiful for why a company does not do it, but I’ll give you the one reason you should: if you do not respond to a complaint, you will likely lose the customer.
I am not suggesting that you need to buy off every customer that complains (if you’ve read any of my writings, you’ll realize I do not advocate for that), but you do need to let them know that you’ve been heard beyond “Dear Sir or Madam: Your issue and converting our fleet to green energy sources mean everything to our company….”.
5. More than Closed-Loop Feedback (CLF)
There are many providers out there that will push you into a “score, comment, CLF” system because that is what they built. You may see some fancy charts, a cool mobile app and the next wave of their artificial intelligence offer (BTW – all things offered by QuestionPro as well), but is their system designed to go beyond the numbers? If you keep up with this space, the key to progressing beyond one-off fixes through CLF is to consider the more strategic approach of what we call the “Outer Loop” of CLF.
Beyond just measurement in a silo, you bring together department leaders from across the organization to fix the root causes of systemic issues. Our Outer Loop system allows you to look across touchpoint feedbacks, identify those root causes, build plans and responsibilities to correct the action(s) and directly measure the impact. Instead of meeting with the CEO to talk about “statistical significance”, showing up with an active working team will impress her more.
6. Include your employees
This also should seem obvious, but still gets left behind in one of two ways – sometimes both. Ensure that the employees responsible for the customer service experience are also engaged. One is making certain that you give them the information they need to properly service the customer. While many other companies charge for each dashboard user, we give unlimited access to our manager dashboards. We also give you free access to our mobile reporting application.
If you can entrust your employees with serving your customer, you should entrust them with the data that helps them understand the customer. The second part of this engagement is in ensuring that they are satisfied.
It can be frightening at times to measure employee satisfaction, but even if you know something bad has recently happened (for example, if you accidentally informed 4000 employees that they were being let go through an automated payroll notification like in this story), you need to assess the needs of those that will remain with your firm during the hard times. Tools like the QuestionPro Workforce platform will allow you to get the entire view of the employee with standard employee experience measurement, pulse, ongoing measurement and 360° reviews.
Like everything in life, keeping the customer happy goes beyond just these six tips, but as a customer experience practitioner, these recommendations will help you keep your program relevant, dependable and free from budget cuts.
At QuestionPro, we work on what we believe in. Schedule a demo with Ken and discover how to boost customer loyalty and collect valuable consumer insights through our customer experience surveys and analytics management platform.
