The 4 Things You Need to Know About Customer Experience

Many organizations talk about Customer Experience (CX), but few have a definitive strategy. A CX program drives new business, customer retention, a positive work environment, positive online reputation and highly satisfied customers. If you are thinking about creating CX strategy or reinvigorating an initiative, make sure it built on these pillars of success:

• Measurement, at Critical Customer Moments
• Organization Integration (OI)
• Accountability
• Awareness

Measurement

Unless you can measure the attributes that contribute to a positive CX, it will be impossible to know if you are moving on the right path. 

Measurement is in the form of surveys, which can be online, pre and post-experience, but need to measure the critical parts of the sales funnel or process. 

What are those critical customer moments? Ask your customers? Examine your sales funnel for points of inflection. It is vital to include first and last contact points as measurable critical moments. However, longer more complex processes, such as originating a mortgage or buying a home may present challenges around where to begin.  The solution is to start at those obvious interaction points, and sales funnel fallout/success stages with your customer and refine.

Organization Integration (OI)

Want to kill a CX program? Make sure your leaders do not communicate the program. Leadership, starting at the very top, will need to make it a priority. 

How?

• Start looking at Key Metrics weekly, if you have a larger customer base. Monthly, for a smaller customer set.
• Communicate insights, point of view and ask a question about those metrics.
• Meet to review the metrics and feedback, in addition to communicating them. Hold team members accountable for scores and plans to improve low scores
• Consistently talking, communication and emphasizing the importance of the customer experience in all leadership, team, and peer interactions. 

Making CX part of each decision is an important step in integrating it into the organization.  

Accountability

Accountability can be difficult to rationalize in a CX program. The small sample size is an obvious issue. Focus group of one that proposed change is based on.

While an accountability program needs to have a protocol, a known method for handling positive and negative findings, it also needs to be fair. Here are some working examples:

Example 1: Low scores are a signal of poor CX. Not poor performance. They are different. 

Establish that performance reviews and terminations are not driven on CX scores.  Additional training and management attention will be provided to teams and individuals that consistently produce low scores. 

Note that low scores may align with low performance, especially in sales or customer service roles.  Though, management will often be aware of performance issues before the CX measures can conclusively validate the claim, rather than a training or expertise gap.  

Example 2: CX should not be a performance measurement tool for bonus or salaries.  If used for in this manner, scores could lean positive for inconclusive results.

CX measures are a coaching and management tool. They assist managers in potentially identifying skill gaps and training opportunities. 

Teams need to review measures weekly, bi-weekly or monthly as a group, discuss the trends, impacts of changes and brainstorm improvements. Evaluating open comments from customers and look for recurring themes. The discussions take a turn when CX measures are reviewed with those in the process.

Awareness

As part of OI, the Organization Integration, promoting positive and negative measurements, customer stories and the organization CX strategy is essential.  

Examples of how to quickly communicate results building awareness:

• Ranking displaying top performers, top teams
• CX scores in a time series (We started with a monthly average score of 3.1 and 12-months later we have achieved a monthly average score 4.2.)
• Revenue producing CX measures for the past 90 days.
• Most improved CX scores month on month
• CX scores that require attention
• Tell the story of how the Company's Online Reputation improved by Improving CX

Promotion starts with the organization's online reputation, location reputation in the and the individual reputation of your salespeople. Manage these three distinctive groups actively for external consumption by consumers, customers, and the media. 

A company's associates that understand the experience a customer receives is communicated publicly representing the company as a whole. The idea that one person or experience may define the company is still true today. The service a customer receives at one location (of 20 locations) turns into comments such as "I tried [Company X] and they did a horrible job. I was on hold for 5 minutes, they could not give me an accurate price or call me back when they said they would, I will never use [Company X] again.

Win as a team, lose as a team. Nothing can demonstrate this more than the management, adoption, and implementation of a CX strategy. One person can affect the customer positively, more importantly, a team can produce an exceptional experience.