Best Practices

Most brands recognize that customer-listening programs add value to their overall experience. However, almost all struggle to move beyond the basics of satisfaction scores and net promoter scores (NPS).

This has left brands rescuing unhappy customers, rather than preventing negative experiences in the first place.

What does it take to pursue true customer experience (CX) transformation that provides value beyond metrics and triage? The key is to give new value to the voice of the customer.

Whatever a brand’s current level of commitment to learning more about consumers may be, all companies can benefit from an increase in the volume of finely tuned feedback they get from customers. Customer voices provide crucial business intelligence that makes it easier to improve every business unit and every employee across a company.

This shift in how brands include customers in success equations is no longer just a nice-to-have. It’s essential.

The Three C’s of a Great Customer Experience

In most cases, poor customer experiences are not the result of a lack of care or interest on a brand’s part. In fact, most organizations recognize, as Walker Information has predicted, that the customer experience will be their key differentiator by 2020. Nonetheless, companies struggle to determine what people like or dislike about their customer journeys (and to what degree they like or dislike those things). And they try to find ways to elevate insights from buzzwords into actionable next steps.

The companies that are winning with CX have established clear business disciplines around the endeavor and bring a customer-obsessed mentality to every decision-making conversation. To create pervasive change like this, here is a look at three factors that brands should consider before undergoing an organizational transformation: capacity, competence and capability — the three C’s of great customer experience.

Capacity

Capacity is an organization’s overall framework and what it is as an entity. Much like a container, an organization’s capacity defines clear boundaries — both where the company can find future success and what is off limits.

To think through capacity, stakeholders might ask questions such as these:

• What’s our ideal marketplace and business environment, and what do customer segments look like there?
• How will changing landscapes (political, economic, socio-cultural) impact our ideal marketplace?
• Do we have a documented brand identity? What are our brand promises?

Before tackling CX transformation, it’s important to get a read on your organization’s overall level of customer-centricity. This reveals where the business can drive and create growth with consumers and where it’s not following through on its promises. Interviewing a cross section of stakeholders on questions like these will quickly reveal an organization’s capacity. Employees should share a vision for who the company is, and mission statements and values should be common knowledge.

Competence

Competence includes the knowledge, skills, attributes, mindsets and behaviors an organization offers. In the world of CX, an organization’s competence directly relates to how well it can leverage these traits to create competitive CX advantages for users.

Here are some starter questions to determine competence:

• Do we have leaders committed to alleviating customer concerns and innovating CX strategies?
• Are our front-line employees armed with the skills required to meet 21st-century customer expectations?
• Can we respond to diverse client needs and preferences with a smart strategy every single time?

Without the right combination of competencies, it’s unlikely that organizations will achieve success with their intended customers. Stakeholders will find it much easier to drum up internal and external support when people trust what a brand brings to the table.

Capability

Capability focuses on what makes a brand unique, or what the brand is known for when it’s at its best. For most organizations, this boils down to the execution of internal processes and systems that help customers in ways that competitors cannot.

Uncovering capability starts with queries like these:

• Do we use any collective resources to achieve high performance in areas like CX? What about legal compliance? Sustainability?
• Are we clearly communicating our uniqueness to people?
• Does what makes us special now solve for future requirements as a company?

To clarify, capability is more so how people perceive an organization, while capacity is how an organization perceives itself. The more unique and high-performing a brand is, the greater its capability.

Taking stock of these three factors opens brands up to better CX transformation programs that are capable of responding to a myriad of customer expectations. Over time, brands can build upon where these characteristics converge. Expanding these three areas together promotes CX as a universal and complex business discipline that all departments should be eager to support.

Getting Started With CX Transformation

Once you have accessed the three C’s of great customer experience, it can feel daunting to turn the lessons learned into large-scale CX improvements. But there are many strategies brands can use to identify gaps and generate early enthusiasm around the initiative. They include thinking holistically, building awareness and promoting CX awareness.

• Thinking holistically. It’s important to make time for asking questions about CX. This means both assessing where team members are with CX and providing opportunities for people to raise their own concerns. Benchmarking current capabilities gives all employees the same springboard for tomorrow’s CX conversations and points organizations toward their next opportunities.
• Building awareness. Creating and socializing a CX transformation framework goes a long way toward enabling more employees to get on board with improvements. Adding a layer of CX consciousness encourages people to think in terms of their customers and moves conversations from conversions to experiences. Positive messaging from the top down positions CX as a responsibility all team members should be committed to, and may even pave the way for the emergence of new CX champions and ideas.
• Promoting CX narratives. Creating rituals and telling stories about CX successes evokes positive emotions at all levels of the business. People need to hear inspiring stories, whether they’re about overcoming a challenge or doing something really well the first time. Becoming a customer-centric organization also involves a simple showing-up factor. More brands are starting to talk about CX metrics and stories at front-line meetings and are developing new company narratives to include CX language.

What’s most important is coming together now, as an organization, around the goal of operating in more customer-centric ways. Making the right CX transformation cannot happen if stakeholders don’t first take a hard look at how customers are already experiencing a brand. Then companies can build upon these insights to develop CX strategies that delight customers and better highlight their unique capacities, competencies and capabilities.

For the past four years, Pearl-Plaza has conducted an annual study of CX trends. This yearly exercise has become a great opportunity to examine where brands and customers are aligned in their expectations, where there are disconnects, and what we can do to create more innovative and valuable customer experiences.

This year, we previewed the 2018 CX Trends Report with an on-demand webinar in partnership with CustomerThink.com. In the webinar, Brennan Wilkie, Pearl-Plaza’s SVP of CX Strategy, and I had the opportunity to discuss five trends for 2018 and what they mean for customer experience professionals.

An overarching theme of the report was memorable experiences — both good and bad — what goes into making them, and where brands and consumers sync and diverge.

As a part of our research, we asked consumers if they had a positive, memorable experience with a brand in the past year, and we asked brands if they had indeed created memorable experiences for their customers.

The results were both inspiring and also set a few alarm bells ringing. Approximately 68% of customers said that they had a positive, memorable experience, a fact that is probably music to the ears of anyone invested in the customer experience. The alarming news? Brands believed that they were creating memorable experiences 84% of the time.

While the confidence behind this statistic is admirable, it presents a few dangers from a long-term CX standpoint. There is an almost 20% difference between these two factors, which means that at least a portion of the time, brands believe customers leave with an indelible happy memory, when what they’re actually delivering may elicit a feeling more along the lines of “meh.”

So what’s the big deal? In today’s hyper-competitive environment, a satisfactory experience just isn’t good enough for long-term success. Memorable experiences are especially powerful because they are highly personal, grounded in relationship, and influence future behavior. When your customers feel an emotional tie to your brand, it impacts their future behavior; their relationship with you will inspire them to keep coming back.

This emotional aspect of a memorable experience increases the probability that if you invest in your customers, they will invest in you. This is really a story of good to great. “Good” will get you a bump in metrics, but great experiences are what keep customers coming back, spending more, and advocating on your behalf.   

The other problem with this nearly 20-point disconnect is that it indicates that brands aren’t fully tuned into to their customers. If they were truly listening, they would be a little less confident and a little more careful. Hubris is always a risky proposition because it prevents you from hearing the full story, and puts you in a defensive posture when less-than-rosy accounts emerge.  

In short, good doesn’t equal great, and 20 points isn’t really that close. While brands are accomplishing a lot, there are still many opportunities to understand customers even better. Brands that deliver positive, memorable experiences have identified why customers love them and what makes them special. In the age of the customer, this deliberate distinction is what will separate tomorrow’s leaders from brands that sputter and fail.

Since e-commerce sites have exploded onto to the retail scene, they have gained an incredible amount of traction. Online retailers such as Amazon and Zappos have been so popular that in the past few years, they have posed a serious threat to the success of brick-and-mortar locations.

It’s true, many customers today are skipping their trip to local stores and buying their everyday items online. Perhaps this is because of the convenience, but another major differentiator for online retailers is the generally superior customer experience. In fact, Pearl-Plaza’s recent Retail Trends Report stated that online-exclusive retailers boast the highest customer satisfaction score of 54%.

These numbers can definitely be intimidating, but should traditional retailers run for the hills or keep looking for ways to compete with these online giants? Luckily, there is another option: complement, don’t compete.

One of the key factors of a great customer experience is making sure customers have a unified experience with your brand. Normally we think about unification in the context of the buying process, making sure that the experience is consistent from greeting to check out, but this is also relevant when it comes to where your customers shop.

Whether they’re walking through the front door or opening up your home page, a customer should have a clear idea of who you are as a retailer. This means that it should be as easy for them to make a purchase in store as it is online.

With this philosophy in mind, I would argue that the introduction of online retailers has been good for brick-and-mortar locations in that it has inspired them to step up to the CX plate and thus, better their business. In fact, a recent study saw that in 2017, there were more new store openings than closings, and that store openings will likely exceed closures through 2021.

It’s clear from these numbers that physical locations aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, so it is more important that brands learn to unify their in-store and online experience so they complement one another.

Amazon is doing this exceptionally well. The brand is typically known as an online-only retailer that provides enviable customer experience and convenience, but this week, they will be making a major change. The retailer is opening their first brick-and-mortar location, Amazon Go, where shoppers can pick up ready-to-go meals, groceries, and chef-made meal kits. The best part? No check out. Simply open the app on your phone, pick up your items, and walk out the front door.

In opening a storefront, Amazon may be making a major change, but they are keeping their customer experience consistent; it still offers the convenience that the company is famous for (such as no lines, for example), but they aren’t sacrificing personable customer experience either: Amazon Go will be staffed with knowledgeable employees who can help customers and suggest new items.

There are many other great examples of how in-store and online experiences can complement one another to further brand success. This forward-thinking attitude can make the difference between providing an experience that is merely mediocre and one that is truly optimized for long-term loyalty.

To keep up with the latest CX developments and trends, check out Pearl-Plaza’s 2017 Retail Trends Report!

Every organization in the healthcare industry knows that there is a lot to gain when they improve their patient experience, but achieving this goal is easier said than done.

As with any goal, there are many obstacles and pitfalls that can greet you on the way to success. If you set out immediately with no plan of action, your path will undoubtedly be more difficult. That’s why I always suggest to clients, regardless of their industry, that they prepare heavily and intentionally before they launch their customer experience (CX) program.

A vital part of preparation is identifying which areas to focus on within your company. This can be done by reflecting on areas of concern that are already known to you, but it can also mean reassessing existing customer data for insights that may have yet to be surfaced.

This step can be time consuming, especially for the healthcare industry. In order to help you prepare for any new CX effort you may be launching, I am going to list six areas of patient experience that healthcare organizations and providers can focus on to provide their patients with valuable, meaningful experiences.

1. Quality of Care

This may seem like a given for anyone in the healthcare industry, but quality of care encompasses much more than ensuring a patient’s health. Where patients mostly utilize healthcare services when they are ill, they don’t just want to be treated and steered toward health, they want to be treated with respect and compassion.

As revealed in our latest eBook, research shows nurse and doctor empathy are two of the top three factors that matter most to patients, with procedure outcome coming in fourth place. This proves that when assessing their quality of care, healthcare organizations and providers need to consider not only the patient’s health outcomes, but also if the patient felt genuinely cared for.

2. Availability of Services

Another major area of concern for patient experience is how available healthcare services are for patients. If a patient is sick or otherwise in need of care, the last thing they want to hear is that the next available appointment is in weeks or even months. This is why is it crucial to be intentional when scheduling providers. Customer experience analytics can provide you with insights to help assess what times are most popular for patients to book appointments, making it easier to optimize scheduling to avoid frustration.

3. Environment and Facilities

Having a clean, comfortable environment can make a major difference to patients. Longer waiting times are common when waiting for healthcare appointments, so creating the best environment possible is vital. Something as simple as keeping reading materials or beverages in the waiting area can put them at ease and pave the way for positive experiences.

4. Safety and Infection Issues

This point closely relates to the previous area of focus, but it is important to emphasize cleanliness and adherence to safety precautions in the healthcare industry. Failure to keep surfaces clean and keep certain supplies stored appropriately can have serious consequences. Not only is there a higher risk of infection and other injuries, but the impression of uncleanliness can seriously affect a patient’s confidence in their healthcare provider.

5. Billing Cost

One of a patient’s biggest deterrents from scheduling an appointment with their healthcare provider is price. Even insured patients are afraid of being being over-billed for services rendered, and no matter how much they may need to see a professional, this fear can keep them from coming in at all. This is why it is especially important to be vigilant and purposeful when billing insurance companies. It can also be helpful to take the time to explain the billing to patients so they understand the necessity of each item on their bill, especially because keeping the patient informed is the second most important factor in positive patient experience.

6. Return Visits

Encouraging patients to return after a period of time for a follow-up appointment can help improve patient experience for multiple reasons. Firstly, it is a great way to ensure outcomes improvement and keep a close eye on any condition or recovery process. Secondly, it demonstrates to patients that you are invested in their health. This knowledge alone shows an excellent quality of care and can make a big difference in how the patient feels leaving their appointment.

Planning a CX program can be complicated, but when you have predetermined areas of focus, you are better armed with ideas on how to address each area. That being said, getting leadership to actually commit  to improve patient experience is half the battle. If you know any decision makers who are still on the fence, check out our newest eBook, Three Reasons Health Systems Should Invest in Improving Patient Experience.

It’s safe to say that New Year’s resolutions have become a popular cultural practice. It seems you can’t scroll through social media toward the end of December or at the beginning of January without seeing several commitments to be more active, healthy, or proactive in the new year.

I think the reason resolutions are so popular is that with the dawn of a new year comes the opportunity to be better than before, which often means we need to do things differently. Perhaps this is one reason why many businesses make major changes in the way they allocate their budgets each year.

If we’re judging by the latest research, it seems that the majority of CMOs are placing customer retention at the center of their New Year’s resolutions. According to Gartner’s 2017-2018 CMO Spend Survey CMOs are spending more on customer retention over customer acquisition by a ratio of 2 to 1. Spending on customer experience in order to retain existing customers is an incredibly wise investment as a 10% increase in customer retention results in a 30% increase in company value—and a 5% increase in customer retention increases profits by up to 125%.

These numbers don’t lie: Customer retention is profitable, so it’s no wonder that marketing budgets are putting more money into the analytics that encourage existing customers to keep coming back.

Gartner expands on the reasoning for this spending, explaining that the shift is “grounded in CMOs’ understanding that analytics is central to delivering customer experience, identifying, understanding and growing customers, and measuring and optimizing marketing performance.”

As a CX technology company, there are quite a few things about this latest research that excite us at Pearl-Plaza. Firstly, this shows that Forbes’ 2015 prediction that customer experience would become a vital part of marketing is coming into fruition. Secondly, it means that companies are taking to heart more and more the fact that a customer experience focus is a key driver of business impact. As businesses recognize this, we are seeing more brands than ever invest in CFM tools, like Pearl-Plaza, that don’t just collect VoC feedback but also provide advanced analytics, giving marketers insights as well as data so they can make informed business decisions.

With so many companies expanding their marketing budgets for advanced analytics, there is no doubt that they will be considering several customer experience solutions as possible investments. With so many options available, choosing a platform can seem like a daunting task, but it helps when you know what you’re looking for.

If your business resolutions for 2018 include optimizing customer experience, check out the “Customer Experience Buyer’s Guide: What to Know Before You Buy Software Promising to Improve the Customer Experience.”

Customer experience leaders in financial services (FS) need to create a frictionless experience for clients that doesn’t run the risk of being impersonal. Without this balance, FS providers can fail to create client loyalty, ultimately resulting in dissatisfied customers who are quick to take their business elsewhere.

With a successful balance of technology and personalization, providers will be well placed to outperform their competitors, both in terms of revenue and their ability to supply highly differentiated, individualized experiences.

THE CHALLENGE: CREATING A BALANCED EXPERIENCE

Financial services clients expect interactions to be seamless, timely, and integrated from beginning to end. For providers, this means constantly monitoring all touchpoints and channels and responding immediately around the clock.

The obvious strategy to meet this expectation would be through automation and new technology, but relying solely on this solution could be dangerous. Foregoing traditional, in-branch interaction could mean missing the opportunity to create a genuine interaction and relationship with clients.

Brennan Wilkie, our SVP of customer experience strategy, said, “Every interaction with a customer is a chance for a FS brand to surprise and delight — or a missed opportunity to do so. By tailoring the brand experience to each contextual user journey, FS can unlock the ability to enhance loyalty with customers, and because personalization is about establishing individualized brand relationships, early leaders tend to lock in customers, heightening the barriers for those that try to follow.”

Studies are also showing that clients are expecting their experiences to be as personal as they are frictionless. According to a Janrain Online Personal Experience study, over 74% of online consumers get frustrated when they are presented with content that is not relevant to them or their interests.

If this trend continues, financial institutions will continue to find it harder to attract, grow, and retain consumer business unless they take steps to engage customers in ways that can truly make their brand stand out.

THE APPROACH: EMBRACING NEW TECHNOLOGY

Financial services providers have begun to tap the potential of personalization by providing customers with the ability to download apps, watch research videos, and redeem individualized offers. Additionally, they have introduced click-to-chat features on their websites. These methods may not always take the form of another transaction or product, but they definitely succeed in enhancing relationship.

As mentioned in our recent global banks CX infographic, Avidia Bank launched “Cardless Cash,” which allows customers to draw money from ATMs and branches using their smartphones. To amplify the buzz, the bank hosted real-time ATM versus Cardless Cash battles on Periscope. This unusual tactic captured significant consumer attention, which allowed Avidia to identify and join the ensuing conversations on other social networks. For Cardless Cash, Avidia saw engagement rates as high as 10%, resulting in a 13% increase in adoption.

Another way FS providers are embracing technology is utilizing the rising popularity of virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri. Gareth Gaston, head of omnichannel banking at US Bank, said, “Voice technology is going to be central to the future of digital interaction. We’ve all become accustomed to speaking to our devices for simple things like getting directions to a restaurant or placing a call. Now, voice services such as Amazon Alexa are making it easy to check an account balance or hear a payment due date without picking up a phone or logging in to internet banking.”

THE BENEFIT: CLIENT LOYALTY

When account holders feel both that they can conveniently access their accounts via technology and that their financial services providers truly care about providing them with a positive experience, they are more likely to become loyal customers. Still, such a differentiated customer experience cannot happen on its own. It’s up to FS providers to create an environment and culture in which client relationships can be fostered and flourish.

It’s one of the most popular and controversial topics in retail today: Will automation and digital disruption push people and brick-and-mortar retailers out of the picture?

While there are many advocates for either side of the debate, here at Pearl-Plaza, we believe that the in-store experience is just as relevant today, despite the digital age we live in. In fact, in our recent Humans v. Robots webinar with CustomerThink.com, Brennan Wilke, senior vice president of customer experience at Pearl-Plaza, and Tyler Saxey, director of customer experience for Foot Locker, discussed the reasoning and research behind our opinion.

Based on findings from Pearl-Plaza’s 2017 Retail Trends Report, our presenters shared several great reasons while the in-store experience still plays an important role in the retail industry:

1. Immediate Gratification

For customers, one of the biggest draws to a physical store is instant gratification. They can walk through the doors, see the selection, grab something off the shelf, and buy it.

With an in-store purchase, customers can enjoy their new items the moment they walk out the door. This type of satisfaction is simply not possible for the digital-only customer, who needs to wait for shipping and processing even after the transaction is complete. For the eager customer, brick-and-mortar retailers are still the way to go.

2. Previous Good Experiences

Another advantage for physical retailers is that they can build upon previous positive experiences. If a customer has gone to a store and has had an employee go above and beyond for them, they are more likely to make the trip again. Why? Because their previous experience made them feel important and valued; who wouldn’t like that?

If retailers are able to empower their staff to provide good experiences for customers, they can essentially guarantee customer loyalty.

3. Perceived Quality

In our research for the 2017 Retail Trends Report, we found that retail customers tend to perceive the quality of in-store goods to be greater than that of items bought online. Even though the items may be the same and in the same condition, the ability for clients to see, touch, and hold the items in their hands assures the customer that the item they are buying is exactly what they want.

Online retailers can’t provide the same sort of assurance, so when customers are especially concerned with quality, they are more likely to make the trip to a physical retailer.

4. The Human Element

The final and most important reason why in store retailers have an edge in their industry might be the most obvious: their people. The fact of the matter is that as social beings, we still prefer and value quality, interpersonal interactions.

When a customer speaks with a sales associate, they get to check items off their shopping list and connect with someone who will help them find what they need. This gives a sales transaction a priceless social element, and as I stated previously, it’s those personal relationships and experiences that keep customers coming back for more.

In light of these key in store differentiators, it’s clear that brick-and-mortar locations still have their place in the retail industry. In this case, it is important not to solely focus your efforts on digital resources, but instead to think about how you can use technology to empower your people.

Every culture has its popular myths: Bigfoot, the abominable snowman… the list goes on. However, when we think of these mythical monsters, we think of stories that are believable but generally acknowledged to be untrue when examined closely.

In terms of myths, retail culture is no different. With rapidly changing technology and evolving customers, many myths about the future of retail have surfaced. In Pearl-Plaza’s 2017 Retail Trends Report, we were able to debunk a few of these retail myths and find the truths beneath them. Check them out below!

Myth No. 1: Convenience is King.

Fact: Convenience has its place, and it’s not always first.

Today’s customers favor instant gratification, so it’s no surprise that digital-exclusive retailers are performing the best in terms of customer satisfaction. If convenience was king, it would mean that these ecommerce giants would take the retail crown, but our data shows that brick-and-mortar retailers can still serve an important and distinct role through customer experience.

A physical location provides customers with the opportunity to touch and handle items before purchasing, something that is simply not possible for digital-exclusive retailers. For example, you wouldn’t want to buy a new pair of shoes without trying them on first; brick-and-mortar stores give you the opportunity to do just that.

Even more, consumers perceived product quality to be higher when they buy from a brick-and-mortar retailer, proving that while convenience is great, it isn’t everything.

Myth No. 2: Automation will replace employees.

Fact: Technology can enhance, but not replace, human interactions.

While automation may make it easier for customers to complete purchases, it is not capable of creating empathetic and positive customer experiences in the same way your employees are. Your employees are the face of your brand, an irreplaceable asset, so instead of pitting technology against them, retailers would be well advised to think of ways to use automation to support their employees.

Myth No. 3: Personalization means targeted campaigns.

Fact: Personalization must be authentic.

Targeted campaigns are great strategies, but personalized interactions generally mean more to customers than personalized messages; customers value moments more than advertisements. Brands must leverage sales and service touchpoints by enabling their employees to build relationships and deliver value to their customers. This effort will translate personalized marketing efforts into authentic and effective campaigns.

When thinking about the future of your retail CX efforts, don’t be tempted to change course because of these myths. Instead, stay focused on your customers and what they need, then go from there!

If you’d like more context on retail trends and the direction retail customer experience is heading, download the full 2017 Retail Trends Report!

Thanksgiving is almost here! That means a few different things to me—family, turkey, pie, more pie and of course, football!

I love watching football. I have season tickets to my alma mater. Is there a game on TV? I don’t care who’s playing—I’ll watch. It takes 3 to 4 hours to watch an entire football game, but surprisingly the ball is only in play for 11 minutes of that time! The average play lasts between 4 to 6 seconds.

Yet despite that fact, coaches and players spend countless hours preparing for those 11 minutes of truth. Even after the final play, they break down the film and assess what worked and what didn’t and then incorporate their analysis into the game plan for next week.

While it may seem absurd to think so much preparation and reaction goes into only 11 minutes, coaches and players understand something very important: because so much rides on those 11 minutes, the preparation and analysis has to be done. They can’t just show up and hope everything will work out.

Customer experience is no different. In reality, a customer might be in your store or restaurant for an hour or so, but your team only has a few moments to delight your customer. While those moments of truth are critical, the customer is won or lost long before those few service interactions.

This idea is what I call the intersection of customer service and customer experience. Bruce Jones, Senior Programming Director at the Disney Institute says it best:

“The key learning here is that customer experience moves us beyond the traditional definition of customer service—those individual moments when employees are providing direct service to customers. It is also about the bigger picture of what happens before and after these service interactions.”

An elevated customer experience requires a great deal of work both before and after the customer interacts with your brand. Here are three key elements for your brand to invest in so that you can empower your team to own the moments of customer service.

Employee-Customer Parity

To your customers, your frontline employees are your brand. The sales associate, the waitress, the cashier, the call center agent—they all represent your brand in their direct interactions with your customers.

I have heard several leading brands say something to the effect of “the customer experience cannot exceed the employee experience.”

Because your frontline employees are directly connected to your customers, take the time to listen to them and understand how engaged they are in the workplace.

According to Temkin Group’s 2017 Employee Engagement Benchmark Study, customer experience leaders have 60% more engaged employees.

Engaged employees have a heightened level of ownership such that they extend their best efforts for the success of the organization, its employees, and themselves. They intend to stay, they love their job, they’re inspired, and they advocate for the brand.

These are the employees your brand wants interacting with your customers.

It’s imperative to listen to your employees along the different touch points of their employment life cycle. Listening just once a year to your employees is not enough.

Your employees are an excellent source of insight into the customer experience. In fact, 66% of CX professionals said that employees are the top source of actionable insights about the customer experience.

At one restaurant brand, as servers would come to work for a weekend shift, it became a competition and race to grab the crab forks and stash them in your apron since there were only a limited number of these forks. The servers realized guests wouldn’t complain if they had a crab fork when they ordered crab but would be bothered if they had to use a regular fork. But if you weren’t able to seize the forks before another server did, your customers would suffer.

If this brand could have listened to the employees and understood this issue, they could have easily purchased more forks to ensure all their customers had the necessary utensils.

Forrester Research calls this type of feedback Voice of Employee which it defines as “any feedback from employees or partners that pertains to their ability to deliver great customer experience.”

Listening to your employees will provide you with a more holistic view of your customer experience and allow to take action to that will elevate both the employee and customer experiences.

All this investment is done before and after the customer visits so that your frontline employees are empowered to deliver on the moments of customer interaction.

Advanced Analytics

Most brands have an abundance of data, probably more than they know what to do with. What brands really need is better ways to understand all the data they have, especially all their customer experience data.

Gone are the days of a brand needing just a score—CSAT, OSAT, NPS. They need to know what to do to move the needle and improve those scores, ultimately driving revenue and profit.

Unstructured feedback or comments are the key to allowing brands to move beyond a score to really understand the story behind the score. Industry leading text analytics built on a natural language processor will allow you to quickly identify the stories and themes associated with your brands scores.

Text analytics enable your brand to move from “Customer satisfaction scores went down last quarter, we’ll work harder” to “Customer satisfaction scores went down last quarter due to being out of stock of key promotional products during the weekend. We will increase the inventory appropriately.”

A story is infinitely more valuable than a score.

Not only can advanced analytics give you the stories you need, but they can also monitor and detect anomalies and then alert your team on a regular basis to the impact for positive or negative. Being able to quickly sort through customer feedback and identify where, when, and why these issues are happening creates the opportunity to take corrective action and keep the issues from escalating.

Imagine being able predict the needs, wants, and actions of your customers. What if you could predict the point at which is customer is most likely to leave your brand and then proactively reach out to them and keep them loyal to your brand? The finance industry has used predictive analytics in forecasting for years. Now similar predictive models are a part of customer intelligence. These models can forecast risk, churn/attrition and much more. These predictive analytics can be applied to large customer segments or down to an individual customer.

In order to win the customer, you need analytics that will make sense of all your data and help you create a game plan that will lead to continued success.

Creating a Customer-Centric Culture

To be a truly customer-centric brand, customer experience should be a priority for the whole company. From the CEO down to the hourly employee. From the finance and legal department to the custodial team. You should be able to create a line of sight from every role in your company to the customer. Everyone’s role has an effect on the customer and they need to know that and be aware of it.

I know a brand that made the conscious decision several years ago that their customer metrics would be just as important to their brand as their financial and sales metrics. Customer metrics are discussed regularly at every level in every meeting. Rewards are given for both financial performance and customer experience performance.

As a result of this new mind set, this brand has seen tremendous improvement in customer experience metrics leading to sales increase, unit growth and higher stock price.

Creating such a culture starts with showing your organization what you can achieve when you focus on the customer. A simple but powerful business case can prove locations with elevated customer experience have higher unit sales. You can prove the lifetime value of a customer and why it’s important to keep them coming back to your brand because that guest is worth far more than their sale that day. You can illustrate the revenue at risk when guests tell you they’re not coming back because of a negative experience.

You should also celebrate your customer experience successes. Employees should be recognized for the difference they make with their customers. This recognition can take place regularly at individual locations and should take place at area, regional, divisional and even national levels. Customers are leaving you positive feedback about your team—use it to celebrate and recognize.

Also, don’t shy away from negative feedback, it’s a gift! Negative feedback provides opportunity to coach your team. You can also use the negative feedback to reach out to the customer and close the loop and let them know you’re listening and fixing the problem. A customer who has had a negative experience but was successfully recovered is actually more loyal to your brand!

Employees should be empowered and have the freedom to act in the best interest of the customer. They shouldn’t feel restricted by corporate rules and policies.

That being said, building a customer-centric culture is not easy.

‘‘Maintaining a culture is like raising a teenager,’’ says Ray Davis, President and CEO of Umpqua Bank, a Pacific-Northwest-based U.S. retail bank that’s consistently top rated for service. ‘‘You’re constantly checking in. What are you doing? Where are you going? Who are you hanging out with?”

Noted customer experience consultant Micah Solomon added, “And, sometimes, you have to use some tough love when that teenager is acting up in ways that don’t support the culture you’re working to build.”

Ultimately, a company with a customer-centric culture will allow your team to own the moments of service interaction with your customers and keep them coming back and spending more money.

As you continue to elevate the customer experience within your brand, remember that you only have a few moments to win a customer over, but you need hours, weeks, months, and even years to prepare for and to analyze those moments. You can do this by investing in and listening to your employees, using advanced analytics to understand trends, stories, and predict outcomes, and creating a customer-centric culture at all levels within your brand.

In my last few posts, I’ve recapped some lessons shared by Choctaw Nation and Discount Tire, two out of three clients who participated in Pearl-Plaza’s latest webinar. The third client participant was Tony Roma’s, and they had an equally valuable lesson to share for anyone focusing on CX: Stay focused on what matters to your consumer.

Though this may seem to be a basic component of CX (we all want to satisfy our customers), it can be a bit more complicated to maintain focus. Let me explain why. When we have a customer experience focus, we want to find out why customers choose our organization or what the differentiators are for our organization.

Pulling such insights from customer data can be a difficult process in itself, but an additional difficulty comes afterwards, when an organization can get distracted in a well-meaning attempt to offer more and more value to customers. But what if all that extra value isn’t focused on what your customer really wants? Then you’ve done all this work on areas that will not further your CX goals.

This is such a disappointing place to be, and I would venture to say that every professional wants to avoid wasting resources at all costs. Ultimately, keeping a consistent focus on what matters to your customers is vital to the effectiveness of your program.

In the Three Things I Wish I Would Have Known When Starting/Growing a CX Program webinar, the chief marketing officer for Romacorp, Inc., Jim Rogers, went over this issue, and shared with us a couple of the methods Tony Roma’s used to find out what matters to its customers and stay focused. I’ll be sharing those with you in my post today!

1. Streamline Questions and Standards

Consistency is key in customer experience, and Tony Roma’s stayed true to that principle with its efforts to streamline survey questions and standards company-wide. The goal of this method was to re-architect the program to focus on deeper customer understanding.As part of this process, decision makers made sure each question had a clear, focused purpose and was consistent across borders. This meant translating each question into the seven different languages they serve! They also ensured that they had solid standards for incentives, reporting, and follow-up all across the globe.

2. Re-Educate Globally

The next step was to re-educate the global organization on Tony Roma’s CX platform. They took measures to be sure that this education was consistent in every restaurant, everywhere. They made sure that all employees were aware of tool-specific standards and goals at the restaurant, country, and regional level. Additionally, employees knew that their results and responses to customer complaints were being monitored according to these standards.A few of the specific methods they used to get these points across were presentations at its global conference, sharing system results across the organization, and sending 24-, 48-, and 72-hour notices for customer complaints with follow-up from regional operations heads. This helped to increase employee focus and attention on customer experience and what really matters to their customers.

Customer experience is vital to any business, and it requires hard work and consistency. If you maintain focus and keep listening, all your hard work will pay off and customers will keep coming back for more.