Best Practices

The journey to improve customer experience (CX) begins with identifying your business objectives, and recognizing the need to listen to your customers and analyze what they’re telling you. The steps forward from that starting point vary, but many organizations jump into comparing customer experience vendors right away.

Though researching is a critical step toward that ultimate goal, it should not be the first step you take. Let me explain why: By browsing the sites of various vendors, you get a great idea of what they have to offer you, but how do you know if they can fulfill your company’s needs?

The answer is you don’t!

This is why I am going to suggest an alternate first step for you. Before looking at vendors, it is pivotal to first plan your objectives. What does your company hope to gain with CX technology? What needs should be fulfilled? What areas of strength or weakness are you already aware of in your customer experience?

These questions should help to get you thinking, but I have also outlined three specific things you should do while planning your objectives.

Think Short and Long Term

Your ideal customer experience platform should be able to address all points on your business timeline, from the current state of your company and its immediate needs to your long-term goals. Outlining your big picture goals will help you to have your vision in mind when you look critically at potential CX technologies. This will also help you to determine which vendor best fits your company both now and down the line.

Include All Company Stakeholders

We are all familiar with the “it takes a village” saying, and more than likely, this is true of your company. When you are outlining your goals, be sure to include any decision makers, stakeholders, and influencers in the process. This will help you to gain a more comprehensive view of needs and requirements. Understanding expectations from all your company’s angles will help you to set clear requirements and guidelines for any CX vendor you choose.

Write It Up 

Once you have brainstormed, discussed, and specified your goals with your stakeholders, it’s time to put it all together. Consider creating a 1-2 page executive summary of your findings to use as a guide. This gives you something concrete to provide potential vendors as you research their solutions. From this document, they can more clearly communicate to you the areas of their program that will address your specific needs. Their response to this document will also give you a clear idea as to how the vendor will be to work with. If they respond with thoughtful questions and solutions, it is more than likely that they will prove to be an invested asset for your company in the future.

The CX journey is different for every organization, but planning objectives is a crucial step that will make selecting a customer experience platform that much easier.

So what are your next steps? If you would like more advice on where to go from here, check out our new resource, Customer Experience Buyer’s Guide: What to Know Before You Buy Software Promising to Improve the Customer Experience.

Download the full guide here.

Developing a customer experience (CX) plan that fits your organization is easier said than done. Navigating this new experience-based marketplace can be quite difficult, or even intimidating, but with the development of a purposeful CX plan it is very possible.

In Pearl-Plaza’s white paper, How to Transform Your CX Program: The Art of Possible, I cover some basic concepts that help business leaders make that happen. If you lump those concepts together, they really boil down to these two things:

1. Get the Right People Involved

The first step to developing a CX strategy is to have universal buy-in from internal and external stakeholders. This means that everyone is on the bus, and is in agreement with where the bus is going. If people don’t understand where they are going, or why they are going there, it becomes very difficult to implement a strategy.

CX leaders of the most successful companies find ways to inspire the decision makers within their organizations to incorporate customer experience as a part of the corporate culture. Not only does this top-down approach allow for a more unified front, it also allows for a more effective implementation.

As you implement this executive-sponsored plan, it’s important that you bring together influential stakeholders from different teams, and that the customer experience doesn’t fall into the lap of just one person or department. At Pearl-Plaza, we often advise our clients to create a CX “Special Forces” team with a variety of representatives, including dedicated leaders within the organization (not just figureheads) that are dedicated to making CX a way of life. It’s usually helpful to have representatives from operations, marketing, finance, HR, product, technology, and any other critical departments within your organization.

Successful CX strategy implementation also requires getting your hands dirty. Take the time to consider and experience first-hand what it is like to use your product or service, contact your customer support, search for your product, and use your website or mobile app. Encouraging others in your organization to do the same helps create a unique understanding and empathy for the customer—and a culture of customer experience stems from empathy. As you take the time to understand your business as your customers experience it, you can gather more information, which can be used to strategically drive major decisions and create positive impacts that lead to meaningful changes.

2. Get the Right Intelligence

CX leaders leverage many tools to gather information about the customer experience. The required tools and metrics vary based on the strategy, but the first thing to determine is what your organization wants to achieve. This end goal will be the north star that guides all other CX-related decisions and will help you know how to measure success.

Once you’ve identified what you want to accomplish, and how you will measure success, you’ll need a partner who can help you effectively execute on gathering CX intelligence. There are many Voice of Customer (VoC) vendors with various strengths and specialties, but few of them get the basics right. A good VoC vendor will always offer these five things as they help you gather the right intelligence:

• Multichannel Listening. Your customers want to share feedback, but they want to do it their way. A good CX partner will facilitate multiple types of surveys and feedback channels to allow for customers to share their opinions through mediums like voice, web, and video.
• Advanced analytics. Good analytics allow you to understand what’s driving customer behavior. Most vendors facilitate basic number crunching and scoring capabilities, allowing organizations to understand the “structured” data. However, much information is left on the table with “unstructured” data—comments, stories, etc. that aren’t easily categorized. Look for vendors with analytics advanced enough to allow you to capitalize on all of the information customers give you, instead of leaving something on the table for the competition to find.
• Flexibility. Strategic CX deployment is not one-size-fits-all. Each organization is different, with different clients and needs, which requires different approaches. When selecting a vendor, it’s critical to evaluate their ability to provide the flexibility to create the right solution while still allowing for advanced analytical capabilities that drive speed to insight. Vendors must have flexible platforms that are capable of accommodating your multi-client architecture and keeping the right people informed with accurate organizational reporting, regardless of complexity, while still handling changes in feedback mechanisms, channels, and methods—all without incurring high additional costs.
• Data integration. Rarely do CX strategies operate from one single program, so the ability to integrate across multiple systems—including multiple CRMs, social, transactional, financial, competitive, etc.—is important because it allows for deeper analysis and the surfacing of better insights. 
• Ongoing Support and Professional Services. CX strategies require ongoing maintenance. To accomplish your goals, you’ll need a team of knowledgeable, dedicated, strategically-minded consultants to help guide you to the best outcome. A VoC vendor who sells you and then disappears won’t give you long-term success.

To learn more about how to transform your CX program, take a look at the full white paper here.

We’ve all been there.

You login to any reporting app and waiting for you is a picturesque dashboard full of metrics colorfully displayed in pie charts, bar graphs, and heat maps. After several minutes of glancing through them, you realize the hard truth: You have no idea what you’re looking at, and can’t decipher what these charts and graphs are telling you.

How do you take action when you can’t make sense of the constant influx of customer experience (CX) data that’s pouring in? Here are four rules for uncovering insights in your CX dashboard.

1. Dashboards are a launch pad—use them that way.

Your dashboards give you a pulse on how your business is doing. They are diagnostic tools and are intended to be used that way. When something doesn’t look right, and you’re seeing downward trends, your dashboard is there to help you dive deeper into the data to find the cause.

A well-built dashboard allows you quickly see all your data at a high level and then easily dive in deeper to locate root cause and create action. A dashboard is your first step in navigating through your CX data, so keep it simple and use it as a guide to creating a great customer experience.

2. Don’t cram too much into one dashboard.

Each department and role has metrics that are relevant to them. Knowing which metrics you’re held accountable for can help you build a dashboard that works for you. With a proper dashboard built for your specific use case you’re able to control what you’re measuring and what you compare it against.

A dashboard can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution—each department or team should have their own that contains only their metrics. If you get too many metrics on a dashboard, you end up feeling overwhelmed and spend too much time looking for the ones that matter to you.

Your dashboards should be custom and purposefully built to meet not only your CX program, but your role within your organization.

3. Stop comparing apples and oranges.

One of the biggest downfalls of a dashboard is making a chart or graph just for the sake of making one. While they make look flashy, comparing metrics that aren’t comparable is a surefire way to clutter up your dashboard and leave you confused at what the data is trying to tell you.

For example, you don’t want to compare corporate locations to franchise locations. Both fall under the same organization, but measure things differently. This could lead to confusion and a misunderstanding of what the data is telling you. Instead you want to compare metrics that fall under the same category, and that have the same values or units.

4. Structured and unstructured data belong together.

A successful dashboard consists of a mix of perception- and performance-based metrics that are pulled from both structured and unstructured data. Having only one of these data sets only gives you a small piece of the CX puzzle.

In the past, structured data was all you had to compare. But now, with today’s technology and vast amount of CX data available, you can begin drawing insights from unstructured data in ways that can have a huge impact on your business. Bringing together all types of CX data—including transactional, financial, contact, and demographic—next to your typical Voice of Customer data can provide the next level of actionable insights your business needs.

Your customers don’t care how you measure and track their interactions with your brand—but they do care how you act upon the insights that they give to you.

It’s no secret that telecommunications companies have a difficult time pleasing their customers.

In fact, in a new study by Pearl-Plaza, Customer Experience in the Telecom Industry, we found that no line of service (internet, mobile, etc.) ever fully bounces back from the customer satisfaction levels of the pre-one-year honeymoon phase. In other words, after year one, satisfaction goes downhill and never recovers.

So why aren’t telecoms meeting customers’ long-term expectations?

I recently sat down with my good friend Graham Tutton, the VP of Customer Insights at Comcast, to discuss what telecoms like Comcast are doing—or should be doing—to improve the customer experience (CX).

Make CX a strategic priority.

Graham acknowledged that Comcast is the 800-pound gorilla in the room of the legacy cable business. With a stock price that has tripled since 2010, it’s been a big winner on Wall Street. Yet, while Comcast has been winning in many ways, the leadership team recognized the importance of improving its brand image around the customer experience.

In 2014, Graham and others started making a deliberate shift in strategy to focus on CX. Comcast has a Chief Experience Officer and board-level support for prioritizing this focus, which is a keystone for any telecom that wants to make a significant improvement for its customers.

With this support in place, the question was, “How do we get scientific and strategic about moving the needle on CX?”

Give customers more control through transparency.

Telecom customers are notoriously disloyal. Millennials, in particular, are very fickle and cost-conscious. Even more so, they are value conscious. Telecoms must have the rational table stakes in place (price, quality, reliability, etc.) before customers will even consider sticking around.

Comcast discovered its customer churn was strongly correlated to its Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS), so the company performed an analysis to see what drivers were impacting that score. As Comcast looked at various stages of the relationship, from awareness to purchase to onboarding, they asked questions like, “What are the drivers during the onboarding process?” or “What are the drivers when issues like billing come up?”

Comcast found when it gave customers more visibility into things like prices, speeds, etc. that the customers felt more in control. That transparency was key to building customer trust and longer-term relationships.

If telecoms can set expectations up front, communicating both the positive and the negative (e.g., rate increases and the timeline for promotions)) the customer feels like they have enough control to make educated choices. Gone are the days when companies can hike up prices and send the customer a notification in the mail. The more explicit telecoms are in managing expectations, the happier customers will be, and the less they will have to call in about down the road (saving the customer time and the company money).

Consequently, over the past year, Comcast has seen a massive decrease in call volume—to the tune of around 20 million fewer calls. That’s improvement.

However, as telecoms educate and become more transparent with their customers, their employees will be required to resolve more complex issues.

Empower your employees.

It’s impossible to talk about comprehensive CX improvement without including employee engagement and feedback.

Moving closer to a people-first culture is a mammoth task in any company, let alone one like Comcast with 130,000 individuals working in the organization. Comcast went about changing its hiring practices at every level of the organization, and have made real improvements on learning from its employees and acting upon employee feedback. In fact, the NPS for Comcast’s employee engagement is up 20 points on average.

While call center employees may not be privy to the strategic business of high-level executives, they should be informed enough to be able to talk relevantly to customers about their situation, as well as feel empowered to make choices that will resolve the issues that come up.

At the end of the day, customers want reliable service and competitive pricing from a company they can trust. Telecoms should not feel like an enemy, but a partner in technology for consumers. When issues arise—as they will in any industry—employees must be empowered to make things right in a timely manner.

When this employee empowerment is combined with a transparency that gives greater control to the customer, telecoms have a mutual ground for resolving roadblocks to customer retention and satisfaction.

If you would like to learn more about improving CX in the telecommunications industry, download our new study here.

Implementing a customer experience strategy can impact your business almost instantly, but the true benefit lies in the long-term results.

With CX, measuring short-term post-transactional surveys only shows you a glimpse into “how we are doing now.” While there is value in measuring these short-term, point-in-time surveys, they’re only giving you just that—a snapshot into the customer’s experience.

Instead, we want to look at the benefits of a long-term CX roadmap and how it allows you to broaden the scope and look beyond single interactions, giving you a more in-depth look at your customer’s experience.

Here are three reasons you should implement a long-term CX roadmap:

1. It will help you measure and track the ROI of your CX program.

Proving ROI, for some companies, can be one of the most difficult aspects of their CX strategy. Business leaders expect results, and they want to know if their investment in CX is paying off.

In order to track the ROI on your CX program, you’ll need to first set a benchmark. Having a Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) benchmark, for instance, will help you tie efforts to revenue.

This fundamental piece of your roadmap will help you create goals that are easy to track and achieve. Knowing where you fall now will help you gauge where you want to be in 3 months, 6 months, and even years from now.

2. You can visualize and implement quick wins and long-term fixes.

Improving your CX doesn’t happen overnight. Some improvements can be implemented quickly, while others may require changes that impact the business as a whole and take months, or even years to roll out.

Creating a roadmap that strategizes how to attack the long-term issues in the future gives you a guide for improving experiences and touchpoints that take more buy off or time to implement than some of the quicker, easier fixes. Having a list of quick wins and a roadmap gives everyone visibility into how your organization is prioritizing putting the customer first. It shows that as a business you’re listening to the feedback from not only the customer, but the employees that interact and shape the experience with your brand.

3. You will stay ahead of the always-changing landscape.

Your commitment to provide an excellent customer experience may not change, but your customers and the landscape they live in always will. New products, technologies, competitors, and increasing customer expectations mean that your strategy must be constantly evolving and improving. What is relevant today isn’t necessarily going to be relevant tomorrow.

As mentioned in Forrester’s recent report, “How to Build the Right CX Strategy,” there are both obvious reasons and more subtle cues that signal it’s time to revisit your CX strategy. When creating your long-term plan, it’s important to be flexible. Plan for the future but prepare for the unexpected. Allow your long-term CX roadmap to flex and grow with your business and customers. Make changes and improvements as you go by measuring, tracking, and predicting what your customers expect.

Transitioning from a short-term outlook to a long-term roadmap will help you better understand your customers and how they interact with your brand beyond a single transaction.

At Pearl-Plaza, our CX Architects are here to help you visualize and build a CX roadmap that will help you create longer customer life cycles and more repeat customers.

According to Bain & Company, leaders in customer loyalty achieve revenue growth of more than twice the market rate and enjoy, on average, a roughly 15% cost advantage over their competitors.

Sounds pretty good—but how do you get there?

I recently had the pleasure of hosting a webinar with Phil Sager from Bain & Company. Bain, as you know, invented the concept of Net Promoter® more than a decade ago to help business leaders gauge the loyalty of customer relationships. NPS has since evolved from a score to a management system, and has gained much-deserved popularity over the years.

Still, while many businesses start on the NPS journey, few of them actually succeed in becoming leaders in customer loyalty. Here are nine of the most common pitfalls, in no particular order, according to Bain:

1. The leadership team is not aligned and not committed.

It’s trendy to say you focus on customer experience, but often “implementation” is a fuzzy realm living in somebody else’s responsibility.

2. Metrics are not reliable, sufficient, nor trusted.

A whopping 88% of companies that are struggling to achieve success with their Net Promoter System do not have confidence in the reliability of their NPS data.

3. The case for change—head and heart—is missing.

The data will bring the “head,” but it’s up to you CX advocates to bring the “heart” by being able to tell compelling stories that inspire people to change and buy into NPS.

4. NPS is not tailored to day-to-day routines.

Beware of treating NPS as “more work” instead of “how we work.”

5. You focus on the score instead of behaviors.

This has been the anthem of Pearl-Plaza for years.

6. Incentives are linked to customer feedback too early.

If you tie compensation directly to your NPS, you will start polluting the quality of your data. Focus instead on outcome metrics.

7. There is a failure to prioritize and focus on initiatives to “move the needle.”

Roughly 70% of companies struggling to succeed with NPS do not have a systematic process to identify and act on initiatives. Remember, it’s what you do with the data that counts.

8. There is insufficient early momentum.

It’s important to establish trust early through training, support, and quick wins.

9. You’re not measuring or managing critical experiences with a cross-functional episodic lens.

In order to effectively design end-to-end experiences, Bain suggests creating owners who can own a specific experience from the top of the purchase funnel down to the difficult problem-resolution call when something goes wrong.

The root causes of most of these pitfalls are broken data, frontline learning issues, not fixing the executive-level obstacles, or not planning sufficiently for the journey. If you really want to tackle NPS, start there.

Better yet, start with watching the full webinar here.

A cloud of discouraging news has hung over the restaurant industry for several months now. NPD Group reported the number of restaurants in the U.S. has dropped to its lowest level in 10 years. In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, one third of U.S. adults indicated they are eating out less than they did just three months ago.

With fewer diners and the unpleasant news, brands are fighting for every dollar from the guest. A good place to start is elevating the guest experience. As the analyst firm Gartner declared: The customer or guest experience is “the new competitive battlefield.”

To help you navigate through this increasingly tricky battlefield, here are three keys to help you get the most out of your guest feedback and elevate the guest experience so you can win your unfair share of the market.

1. Focus on Stories, Not Scores

During a recent business trip, I had to miss my son’s first little league baseball game of the season. When I called home later that day, I asked him how he did. He proceeded to tell me he got a hit on the very first pitch of his at-bat and knocked the ball right back up the middle of the infield to get a single, and then his teammates managed to bring him home to score with a series of hits. His story was verified with the video my wife captured on her phone.

My son didn’t just recite his personal box score—2/3, 1R—when I asked how he did. He told me the story of the game, along with lots of detail about each at-bat. A box score wouldn’t have given me anywhere near the detail I needed to understand how the game had gone. It’s human nature to tell a story, rather than list off a series of numbers.

Your guests, like my son, have a story to tell—not just a series of ratings to share. Harnessing technology, you can capture rich data about your guests’ experiences. They’ll provide a “box score” by rating different aspects of the experience, from food quality, to staff friendliness, to overall satisfaction.

But the real value comes from the stories they’ll tell. A guest may rate the Quality of the Food a “3” but that doesn’t tell you much. You can infer the food wasn’t excellent or as good as the guest was expecting, but really not much beyond that.

Using artificial intelligence, today’s best feedback technologies can encourage guests to have a real-time conversation with brands—asking them to leave more detail to key into specific topics they mention. This gives the guest who rated the quality of the food a “3” the opportunity to tell you why. Understanding the why behind the score gives you and your staff specific direction on exactly where to focus improvements, as well as what guests love most about your brand.

We like to think of scores kind of like a compass or speedometer—pointing you in a general direction—with stories serving as more of a guidance system. You really need both to understand exactly where you are with your guests, whether you’re heading the right direction, and exactly where to go next.

2. Retain and Recover Guests

Earlier in my career, I worked as the general manager of a local barbecue restaurant. One Friday evening, I heard the words every GM dreads: “The phone’s for you. This guy is really mad.”

I picked up the phone and the conversation went something like this:

“You idiots forgot my barbecue sauce, I have two racks of ribs and no barbecue sauce! I don’t want to eat them without the sauce.”

“I’m really sorry, that shouldn’t have happened. There’s nothing worse than getting home and not having everything you need for you meal. We’d like to make this right. Can I bring you some sauce right now?”

“You would do that? We’re way out here, it’s probably too far.”

“Nope, we really want to make this right for you. Give me your address and I’ll get there as fast as I can.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m a pretty fast driver…”

The guest then gave me his address and I drove like lightning to get to his house. By the time I got there, he met me out on the front porch with a wad of cash for a tip and a smile on his face and thanked me for saving his night. In those few minutes between his call and my delivery, our restaurant had gone from the “idiots who forgot the sauce,” to the “restaurant that was willing to drive to his house.” And he wanted to give us more money, even though we messed up.

In nearly 14 years of working with customer feedback, we see this same trend across every industry we serve. If a brand responds quickly to a problem, resolving it with a high level of satisfaction, the customer is just as likely to return, and just as likely to promote the brand as if they had experienced no problem at all.

New York Times bestselling author Jay Baer has written a book about the importance of connecting with guests who had a bad experience called “Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers.” Baer says that one-third of all customer complaints go completely unanswered which is the worst possible thing you can do. He says, “No reply is actually a reply—it says we don’t care about you at all.”

Through a proper guest recovery process, you can actually turn these negative experiences into a positive result. Reaching out to guests and resolving their concern to their satisfaction is a great retention tool to actually drive business results.

And the effort pays off. Baer writes that, “a 5% increase in customer retention can increase your profits by 25% to 85%… Keeping a guest long term is much more cost effective than trying to find new guests.”

Reaching out does more than recover a single transaction. The value of a one-time rescue is multiplied over the lifetime of the relationship between guest and brand. Lifetime value is calculated by tracking the number of times they visit in a year, multiplying that number by the average per transaction spend, and then multiplying that number by the average number of years they’re a guest of your brand. Different demographic groups have different lifetime values. One large pizza chain estimated that the average lifetime value of a guest was around $10,000, and Starbucks says the lifetime value of one of their guests is over $14,000!

And value doesn’t stop there. Happy guests are also more likely to add even more value by influencing others to choose your brand.

The right technology will give you the ability to receive instant notifications when a guest requests follow up, automatically open and facilitate the successful management and closure of each case, and even check in with staff members to identify the root cause so you can prevent the problem from happening again.

3. Engage Your Employees

To your guests, your servers, cooks, and hosts are ambassadors of your brand.

Your employees are crucial to elevating the guest experience and creating more loyal guests. For many brands, the most talked-about aspect of their customer experience isn’t what went wrong. In fact, much of guest feedback is about the positive impact great staff had on their experience.

A few questions to ask yourself as you consider the role your frontline employees play in the guest experience:

• Do they know how important their role is?
• Do you have the right people in the right roles?
• Do they feel valued and appreciated?
• Are they receiving guest feedback about their performance—regarding both opportunities to improve, as well as appreciation?

The tried and true service profit chain model says that happy, engaged employees lead to happy, engaged guests, leading to increased revenue and profit.

However, what we’ve found is that this relationship is more reciprocal and bi-directional. The relationship between guests and employees is much more circular than linear. You can use the feedback and stories from your guests to help engage your employees. Consider the following comment left by a customer of a large restaurant chain:

“Everything was AWESOME!!! My food was hot, my server [NAME] was super nice and totally helped me out with my veggie burger. Plus she had a contagious smile the whole time, it really brightened up my day! I’m definitely [sic] impressed with the cleanliness of this [BRAND]. You guys rock and Thanks [NAME]!”

Now imagine if this story was shared with the employee. She would feel valued, appreciated, and motivated to continue to go above and beyond and create more of these “wow” moments with her guests. If this was shared with the rest of the team, they would be inspired to perform better as well.

Ensure your feedback partner has the analytics power to capture, understand, and instantly route notifications of these types of “wow” moments to targeted leaders in your business to ensure these positive behaviors are recognized and in a timely manner.

Using these types of stories from your guests to celebrate and recognize your team perpetuates a culture of positivity around guest feedback. Too often frontline employees look at guest feedback as punitive and damaging. And unfortunately some managers and leaders use it that way. Frontline employees should want to hear the guest stories whether positive or negative. Sharing the positive stories helps to create better dialogue and coaching moments between a frontline employee and their manager even when those negative stories come through.

The Result

Getting the most out of the feedback your guests provide will ultimately help your business thrive and succeed in both challenging and prosperous times. Study after study has shown brands that elevate the guest experience have higher stock prices, increased revenue, and reduced expenses. Temkin Group research shows even modest improvements in customer experience can be worth millions of dollars to restaurant brands.

So don’t wait! Begin elevating the guest experience—and their voice—at your restaurant now.

In a recent study by Convey and eft, researchers surveyed 200 retail supply chain executives about the role and importance of customer experience (CX) in the last leg of delivery and its impact on supply chain performance.

The study found that higher customer expectations are leading to new challenges in transparency, speed, and real-time communication between retailers and their customers. For retail supply chain executives, the main priority is now providing a consistently great customer experience, whether that be when shoppers receive packages or need to return them.

The study addressed four major CX issues that supply chain executives encounter:

• Understanding the importance of CX
• Struggling with technology that does not address CX needs
• Integrating CX into business operations
• Positively impacting both operations and CX

Understanding the Importance of CX

Retail supply chain executives seem to be catching on to just how important CX is to the survival of their business. Of the 200 retail executives surveyed, 83% said that customer experience is now an organization-wide initiative that they are feeling pressure to improve. In addition, 56% reported that CX measurements are becoming a key part of making operational decisions.

These high percentages are significant because they illustrate how retail supply chain executives want better CX, but the technology and success must carry through into operational improvement as well.

Struggling with Technology That Isn’t Addressing CX Needs

One of the biggest challenges for supply chain executives is equipping themselves with technology that is not only powerful, but that also helps address CX needs and improve the overall customer delivery experience. Only 3% of retailers said they have a current program that fully supports improving the customer experience. The overwhelming majority of supply chain executives said that their current programs do nothing to improve the delivery experience.

Integrating CX into Business Operations

In addition to improving the customer experience, supply chain executives said that they wanted to integrate customer experience into their operations. In fact, 71% of respondents said this was crucial or very important to their business. At only a percentage point below that (70%), executives said that it was crucial or very important to improve two-way communication between the brand and the customers regarding delivery expectations, package tracking, and resolution of delivery options.

And just a percentage point below that (69%), supply chain executives said that the ability to take dynamic and proactive action on customer experience issues was crucial or very important. These results illustrate how important it is to get voice of customer (VoC) technology in the hands of supply chain executives.

Positively Impacting Both Operations and CX

Supply chain executives may have accepted the need to integrate CX initiatives into their business, but they say reducing business costs and improving margins is still crucial (51%) or very important (28%).

Fortunately for customers, retail supply chains have recognized the need to provide great customer experiences throughout the entire purchase/return process. Unfortunately, the majority of these brands still need proof that CX has a positive impact financially and operationally on businesses, or at least need a nudge in the right direction.

To learn more about the ROI of CX initiatives download our new eBook, The Five Steps to an ROI-Focused CX Program.

Speed, convenience, and the ability to execute transactions accurately. These are well-accepted, core customer expectations every financial institution must meet. Yet any time money is involved, there’s a heightened level of emotion inherent in those expectations, providing brands with both new risks and opportunities.

In our recent CX Trends study, we asked more than 20,000 consumers and 10,000 brand representatives across 12 countries to weigh in on a variety of topics. The point of this annual study is to understand how these two groups feel about different aspects of customer experience. While the findings have broad applicability to a range of industries, the findings around emotion and personalization are particularly relevant for financial services brands.
Head vs. Heart

According to the analyst firm Forrester, emotion is now the No. 1 driver of customer loyalty—outpacing ease and effectiveness.

I remember the pride I felt when I got my first paycheck, riding my bike to the closest bank and making that first, albeit small, deposit. Back then, my options were limited to how far I was willing to pedal, and my youthful expectations were simple: I wanted a safe place to put my money. But even at that young age, much more than the practical was at play; there was the whole collection of emotions tied to starting the journey toward adulthood and self-sufficiency

In fact, there’s so much emotion attached to money, financial institutions must understand that when a customer opens an account, takes out a loan or purchases a policy, they bring strong, personal emotions around security, family, future, and even legacy. Customers want more than a transaction; they want to know their finances—their future—are safe. Sounds reasonable.

The CX Trends Report gave us a deeper look into the relationships between customer emotions and expectations. Past reports have revealed that customers are moving toward more of a relationship vs. transaction orientation with brands. This year’s report found that customers are both satisfied and loyal when brands simply deliver on what customers believe they’ve been promised. One Danish consumer summed up the verbatims around that finding: “They had what I was looking for.” In other words, customers, by and large, have very reasonable expectations.

But don’t take that as an excuse to deliver a mediocre customer experience. Because customers view interactions with brands more like relationships, and their expectations are reasonable, when those expectations are not met, strong negative emotions arise.

“Disappointed, inconsequential, belittled, insignificant, worthless.” —United States consumer

The three emotions customers associated most closely with bad customer experiences were disappointment, frustration, and disrespect. When asked that same question, brands tended to underestimate the downside. They ranked the much more neutral emotion of “unsure” nine points higher than consumers, and “anger” 10 points lower.
More than a Number

The other area this year’s trends study delved into was that of personalization. Our data scientists asked customers to rank the importance of personalization in three key journeys: advertising/marketing messages, support/service, and purchase. Across every market, customers ranked personalized support interactions as most important.

“When I call my bank I appreciate being recognized, as the telephone advisor knows my record, and that I don’t have to repeat myself. I feel like a valued customer.” —French consumer

And while support ranked highest, consumers also expressed appreciation for personalized advertising/marketing messages, as well as sales interactions—as long as the brand delivers real value in exchange for the customer providing their personal information.

In light of the study’s findings, following are five practices that financial services should consider in order to positively differentiate themselves and create high-value customer relationships:

Deliver the Basics

Of course you must deliver on the basics. Are your locations convenient? Do you make it fast and easy to receive service? Are your fees reasonable? Are online instructions simple to understand and your website easy to navigate? Is your staff knowledgeable? If you don’t get the basics right, the next four steps won’t matter.

Be Relevant

College students are too busy partying studying to worry about retirement and Roth IRAs. But they probably need a place to deposit a paycheck with ease (ideally on their phone without missing a tweet or leaving their dorm room). There’s no one-size-fits-all approach in financial marketing, so your messaging—and products—must be personalized and relevant to the audience(s) you’re trying to reach.

Make Consolidation Attractive

There was a time when every financial institution wanted to be seen as the expert in a given field, such as mortgages or wealth management. Now businesses want to be everything to everyone. Consolidating accounts, loans, and policies with a single company sounds nice in theory, but if the process is a hassle, and there aren’t significant advantages involved, who really benefits?

Know Your Niche

The insurance industry has been great about making brand promises and differentiators clear, and banks have a huge opportunity to follow suit. One company positions itself as the expert in identifying gaps in coverage and potential liability. Another says it pays out claims the fastest. Yet another promises to cover you under the broadest range of circumstances. So in an industry with much of the same old same old, what really sets you apart from the competition?

Be Human

Ultimately, brand loyalty is about relationships. Support is ranked as the No. 1 stop along the customer journey where customers want personalization. Yes, customers want processes that don’t require human intervention to be automated, but they also want situations that necessitate intervention to be quick, easy, and painless. And when something goes wrong, make it right—quickly—because there are few circumstances more stressful than having your financial security hanging in the balance.

In an industry often seen as cold and sterile, adding some personal touch can turn a pimply-faced teenager into a loyal power investor down the road. And it begins with trust. If you earn trust, make processes simple, interactions personalized, and meet customers’ reasonable expectations, then you won’t have to ask your customers for more business—they’ll bring it to you.

In January, Pearl-Plaza released the 2017 CX Trends Report. The report uncovered some valuable information about brand and consumer expectations—particularly when it comes to providing personalized support.

In the report we defined personalized support as, “When you reach out for help, the associate and/or the self-service channels already knows who you are (name, status, loyalty, VIP, etc.) and demonstrates strong knowledge of your recent interactions.”

In comparison to a personalized purchase process or advertising experience, an average of 45% of consumers worldwide ranked personalized support as their first priority. Consumers in North America and the United Kingdom ranked personalized support nearly 10 percentage points higher than the global average, while German consumers weighted the different types of personalization most equally. No matter the country, though, consumers put high value in unique, personalized experiences.

Traditionally, marketing has played the biggest role in personalizing the customer experience—for example, using personal information to recommend a new product or present consumers with a specific ad based on their interests and purchase history. Our research showed that although customers appreciate being recognized by name, they value personal interactions that demonstrate a brand is interested in more than upsell opportunities.

“Knowing my needs are far more important than knowing just my name or my status on a screen that they look at.” —American consumer

Fortunately, both consumers and brands agreed that advertising was the lowest priority for customer experience personalization. Many organizations still report marketing as the owner of the customer experience, though, so it’s particularly important for marketing leaders to work with customer support and operations leaders to provide that personalization in a much more coordinated way.

Here are three keys to personalizing support across your organization:

1. Gather quality customer data

Personalized experiences begin with quality, actionable customer data. In addition to gathering good data, businesses need to de-silo that information and share it across the organization. Employees at every level of an organization need all the information they can get to deliver a great customer experience.

2. Hire the right people

A large part of successful CX programs is making customers feel valued. One of the best ways to do that is by hiring employees who are invested in your brand and helping customers on a personal level. Personalized customer experiences create brand loyalty, bring in new customers, and drive revenue, but the most important thing your organization can do is build a team of individuals with the singular goal of making customers feel like they are an individual—not a number.

3. Empower employees

My colleague, Brennan Wilkie, recently had an experience where he purchased a bed for his daughter from an online retailer. He and his daughter were counting on the bed arriving at a specific time and date. While the bed arrived on time, the package was missing hardware crucial to assemblage. This oversight meant that the bed that Brennan’s daughter was looking forward to—and planning on—sleeping in would not be built that night.

Brennan called the online retailer’s support line and explained the situation to the customer service agent. Understanding the urgency, the agent apologized and offered to reimburse Brennan if he went to the nearest hardware store and purchased the necessary parts.

By empowering this agent to satisfy consumer needs by means outside of the normal process, this brand enabled Brennan to build the bed that night and make his daughter happy.

Personalized support is valued globally. Invest in creating more meaningful and personal experience for your consumers. In addition to valuing personalized support more than any other type of personalization, consumers have come to expect these types of experiences. Make sure your brand delivers it to them.

To learn more about customer experience in 2017, download the full CX Trends Report here.

The role of Chief Customer Officer or Chief Experience Officer is still relatively new, and enterprise businesses are struggling to understand the role itself, and the roadmap to success.

According to the Chief Customer Officer Council, only 35 of the Fortune 500 companies have a CCO at all, and the average tenure for CCOs is just just over 29 months. Those are some scary statistics for customer experience professionals—even more so considering the daunting role that a CCO must play in uniting all customer-centric initiatives across large, complex organizations and driving a mind-shift in the way every person on the team embraces the customer experience.

So where do you start?

A recent Forbes article, “Why Your Company Needs a Chief Customer Officer,” which was co-authored by McKinsey & Company, not only made the case that now is the time for businesses to add a CCO to the C-level executive team, but also provided a roadmap for success in the role. Considering that McKinsey’s research shows that “improving experiences along the customer journey—which is defined as a series of interactions with a brand to achieve something—can boost revenue by up to 15 percent and increase customer satisfaction by 20 percent, while at the same time lowering the cost of serving customers (through automation, for example) by as much as 20 percent,” we thought it would be valuable to examine their recommendations.

First, the article suggests that the role of the CCO is to ensure that everyone, from CEO to frontline employees, are aligned in their understanding of the customer experience. By bringing the customer to life through storytelling or immersive experiences, team members at all levels become more engaged and invested.

Pearl-Plaza’s Erich Dietz offered some suggestions on how to start this process in a white paper called How to Transform Your CX Program. Dietz asks, “When was the last time you used your own product or service? Took a call in your contact center? Visited your own website? Used your mobile app? Sat down with a customer to understand how they use and view your product? Listened to a frontline employee about the customer experience and how it could be improved?” Listening to customer stories is very powerful for people at all levels of the organization, and innovative feedback options like live video can further help bring the stories to life. “People thrive on connections with real people. For any narrative to speak to us, we must meet and believe in the characters of the story,” says Dave Carruthers of VoxPopMe.

The next recommendation is to include customers in the creation or service process. Of course, in order to do this you need to ensure that you have a myriad of ways to listen to your customers and engage them in your business in effective ways.

Next, harnessing the power of your employees is critical. According to McKinsey, “Nowhere is obsessing about customer experience more critical than for workers on the front lines.” But how do you collect feedback from thousands of sources, zero in on the actionable data, and then empower the organization to act? Voice of Employee programs are a good place to start and, when done properly, can elicit high-impact results. Dr. Paul Warner, Ph.D., [title] notes, “It’s no surprise that employees who are invested in the experience of their individual customers not only create a better experience but engender loyal brand advocates.”

Finally, data, data, data. It is critical that the CCO has visibility into a wide range of data sets, both structured and unstructured, from multiple sources that provide insights into every step of the customer journey. According to the Forbes article, “Having a 360-degree view of the customer paves the way for measuring customer satisfaction across all touchpoints along the customer journey, which McKinsey has found is 30 percent more predictive of overall customer satisfaction than for the quality of each individual interaction.”

But having the data is just the beginning. The CCO must also be able to identify trends and anomalies as well as specific customer experience issues that must be resolved case by case. Technology solutions like Pearl-Plaza are able to provide data and actionable insights in real-time for all of the journey touchpoints. Armed with that information, the CCO is empowered to drive change across the organization that impacts the business in positive ways.

Dietz says that data is also important because CCOs always need to keep the company’s strategic business objectives at the forefront of everything they do, rather than skipping those and just focusing on CX. “A mistake I have seen is when CCO’s disassociate themselves somewhat with the overarching corporate objectives and just tackle CX in a silo. It’s much more effective to stay focused on the corporate objectives, and then figure out how the CX team can have the greatest impact. Then you start working the issues across the organization all the way to the front lines—using data as your guide—to ensure that everyone in the organization is clear on how they can maximize their impact on the customer experience, and in turn how that impacts the overarching objectives. That’s a critical key to a CCO’s success.”

The Chief Customer Officer role is evolving and expanding, as is the practice of customer experience in general. With the right focus, strategy, and tools, CCOs will be better equipped to deliver results—and hopefully extend that 29-month average tenure!

Attracting a new customer costs five times as much as retaining an existing customer. This statistic gets thrown around quite a bit, but at this point, only 40% of companies have an equal focus on acquisition and retention. It is important to get new customers in the door, but it may be even more important to keep them around.

Relationships with customers are always a two-way street. If they are not mutually beneficial for both parties, they can quickly fade away. That’s why it’s vital for companies to not just maintain these relationships, but to also help them grow and evolve.

The three following strategies can be implemented to build relationships and help ensure that customers will stay with you.   

Capitalize on Complaints

Everyone likes to be complimented, but constructive criticism can be invaluable—not only for improving your business, but also for retaining disgruntled customers. In fact, if you resolve a complaint in the customer’s favor, that customer will do business with you again 70% of the time.

With Pearl-Plaza’s Resolve, customer concerns are flagged immediately and directed to the employee best suited to solve the issue. This allows businesses to not only rescue individual customers, but also understand root cause.

Surprise Your Customers

Whether it’s a kind email, small gift, or a simple act that goes above and beyond, surprise your customers in the best way possible.

A study from the Journal of Applied Social Psychology found that even a minor gesture could have a large effect. In a restaurant setting, when servers offered extra mints after the meal, they saw a 21% increase in their tips. If you go about exceeding expectations—even in the smallest way—you will stand out as a company that truly cares about its customers.   

Take Time to Really Understand Them

Make it a priority to gain a deeper understanding of who your customers are. Pearl-Plaza’s text analytics and various feedback channels can give you a chance to see customers as real people rather than just numbers. And if you know who your customers are, you’ll know what they want.