Building Better Customer Outcomes With a Better Customer Experience
Many organizations invest heavily in tracking and improving the customer journey to support customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS), but they still struggle to make a measurable impact because they lack certainty about where and how to prioritize improvements and deliver the insights necessary for stakeholders to do their job effectively.
In fact, over 70% of CX leaders say they struggle to design projects that increase customer loyalty and achieve results, according to Gartner.
Also, most voice of the customer (VOC) programs—structural drivers of good CX—are not evolving, according to Forrester's "Top 10 Trends Among VoC Leaders" report. Instead, those programs focus too much on surveys, squander unstructured and unsolicited feedback, lack data integration, and struggle to prove business value.
In addition, most businesses aren't approaching CX with a holistic vision. Silos and one-off myopic projects get in the way. But a wide-angle, macro view is mandatory to see and resolve problem areas.
That may sound intimidating, but a unified and businesswide approach to CX actually simplifies a company's efforts.
And though it is important to move to a companywide, unified approach to CX, it is equally important to fully understand CX challenges. Every organization is unique, but most of them struggle with CX in the same ways:
They aren't listening everywhere: Despite the flood of information coming in, a lot of valuable data is left unused.
They can't analyze data intelligently: Scarce resources make it impossible to pull actionable insights from your CX program.
They aren't prioritizing the best actions: Finding problems is easy, but identifying fixes, product changes, and strategies that move the needle on CSAT and NPS is rare.
There's no companywide CX commitment: Teams are disconnected, insights are siloed, and executive interest waxes and wanes.
And CX is not getting easier. Even as CX grows more important every year, the landscape is becoming harder to navigate.
Customer journeys are becoming more complex as interactions increase and channels expand, and expectations around self-serve, speed, and engagement authenticity get higher. Organizations struggle with striking the right balance between automation and human touch, and internal teams and budgets are stagnant while external CX demands increase.
A New customer experience Framework to Supercharge CSAT and NPS
Organizations can't make measurable progress on satisfaction or meet business goals by playing CX whack-a-mole—i.e., chasing one problem after another hoping to hit on the right formula. Rather, CX has to be a holistic effort, driven by leadership to keep focused on prioritization and organizational alignment.
"The CX programs of the future will be holistic, predictive, precise, and clearly tied to business outcomes. Those that stick with the traditional systems will be forced to play catch-up in the years to come," McKinsey & Company predicts.
CX isn't a box you can check. It must be an essential part of doing business and a first-tier organizational mandate.
A new customer experience framework is needed to consolidate, visualize, and analyze experience data to drive fast, smart decision-making and move the needle on beacon metrics such as CSAT and NPS. To do that, businesses need a standardized approach to data integration, analysis, and visualization. The approach must allow senior executives to practically use large volumes of data to actively improve the quality of customer interactions.
The CX framework needs to include all inputs from all channels—behavioral, attitudinal, and inferred—from a company's physical shop to its sites and apps and contact center engagements.
Many factors affect CSAT and NPS, but CX programs that isolate and improve the quality of the experience have a direct and measurable influence on those satisfaction and recommendation scores to deliver a CX advantage.
Using experience quality as a CX strategy framework, executive leaders can better manage collecting, monitoring, and tracking large volumes of data; gain the ability to quickly equip their teams with the insights they need to innovate and solve problems; and improve customer interactions and connecting changes to business goals.
A Customer Experience Quality Framework Starts with Listening
The customer experience quality starting point is the listening program organizations build to understand customers. It must go beyond surveys and collect data from all channels—including Web, mobile, location, and contact centers—in the form of direct, indirect, and inferred feedback.
That can include contact center conversations, transcripts, and open ends; customer feedback data via email, SMS, post-call IVR surveys, websites, and mobile devices; operational data from contact center, digital, and location interactions; inferred behaviors, sentiment, and emotion; and employee feedback sources.
An essential part of a listening program is bringing all data together. That can be done with unification tools that map the data-source context, extending analysis capabilities while housing all sources of data within one platform. By unifying data feeds up front, the CX platform can provide a comprehensive, analytical view of customer interactions in real-time.
Seeing the results of the listening program through a set of dashboards makes it easier for decision makers to use the findings to break down internal silos, unlock the full value of an organization's CX investments, and prioritize and act on real-time and deep customer insights. The dashboard can cover many touchpoints, from digital search or chatbot experiences to purchases, delivery, and returns.
The good news is that customer experience quality already exists in a company's CX data sets. Uncovering and making it operational become possible by integrating the data through the right framework.
Using a customer experience quality framework, organizations can more easily process and analyze data, automate and speed decision making, and operationalize improvements across the organization—enabling them to compete on better customer experience.
By Bill Cline
Published October 19, 2020