Customer Experience Archives – Page 11 of 23

3 Reasons Human Expertise is Essential to Experience Improvement

A lot of companies and organizations have gotten a very specific idea of how experience programs and human expertise work into their collective minds these last 20 or so years. The impression is this: experience programs are fully autonomous solutions that can pretty much be set and forget. They can automatically gather data and use that information to solve your business challenges, build better relationships with customers, and help you achieve Experience Improvement (XI).

There’s a good reason this impression is so prevalent: it’s a pretty accurate description of a lot of the experience programs and vendors you’ll find out there. The catch, though, is that technology and data alone can’t actually address any of the factors I laid out in the preceding paragraph. There’s a gap between tech and outcomes that many vendors gloss over in their rush to provide reaction-based, purely DIY solutions, and that’s human expertise.

What follows are three reasons human expertise is vital to actually bridging that tech-outcome gap and creating Experience Improvement for your customers, employees, and marketplace:

Best Practices
Problems and Priorities
Marketplace Intel

Reason #1: Best Practices

When you boost your experience program with human expertise, you’ll have armed yourself with countless best technology practices. It’s true that technology has produced some extremely powerful tools, such as sentiment analysis, but you need human expertise and consultancy to help identify which sentiments are most relevant to your Experience Improvement goals.

In other words, even a tech engine needs a driver. Putting a consultant or thought leader in that seat will make a world of difference for your experience program’s effectiveness. Take time to consider which goals you need your experience program to help realize, design that program with the end in mind, and keep someone at the helm who can make sure your initiative doesn’t stray from the path.

Reason #2: Problems & Priorities

Another reason that fully autonomous experience solutions often fail the brands that use them is that they lack dynamism. They’re programmed with a specific set of parameters and will barge ahead even when problems arise or priorities shift. That’s another reason human expertise is invaluable in a CX setting; having someone handy who can identify problems when they arise or read new writing on the wall can feed that insight directly into your experience program, supercharging its effectiveness.

Even if some of the DIY experience tools out there allow users to tweak for factors like these, doing so without the aid of an experienced practitioner can still leave you open to mistakes. On the flip side, arming yourself with that expertise can make you aware of larger trends and deeper problems than a few cursory adjustments to program parameters can account for.

Reason #3: Marketplace Intel

There’s a market research element to human expertise that can help take your experience program (and your brand) to the very top of your vertical. Experience initiative success stems from a few places, like successfully closing the loop and implementing meaningful transformations, but it also comes from a deep knowledge of your brand’s marketplace landscape. This means understanding customer segments, knowing where to find unsolicited data, and identifying new and emerging trends.

A versatile and powerful Experience Improvement platform can eventually come to account for factors like these, but only when guided by human experience and insight. It takes that expertise to identify audience segments, unsolicited data sources, and more. These experts can then help pour that context and insight directly into your platform, allowing your experience team to furnish specifical, meaningful solutions to your business challenges. It’ll also enable you to do something no DIY program can do: create bold, human, and meaningful relationships with customers that will stand the tests of time and competition.

Creating Experiences, Not Just Numbers

How else can human expertise help shape Experience Improvement success, and how best can brands combine their tech with expertise to create better outcomes for customers, employees, and their marketplace position? To learn more, click here to read my point of view document. I go into greater detail on the nature of human expertise and how intersecting that with technology the right way will help you realize the goals outlined here.

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Creating Experiences, Not Just Numbers

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Written by Levi Roberts

Reading time 3 minutes

5 Simple Steps Retailers Can Take to Build Stronger Relationships with Customers

Customer loyalty has become more elusive in the past few years. As customers seem to shop solely based on the best deal, it can be difficult to build customer loyalty in retail, which leaves many brands wondering if customer loyalty is even worth the effort.

However challenging it may be for retailers, developing a loyal customer base is essential to maintaining an active, healthy brand. A loyal customer is valuable to retailers in a multitude of ways. Many studies show that repeat customers are likely to purchase more frequently, spend more money, and pay a premium for a product. In addition to generating more income from their own purchases, loyal customers are more likely to refer new customers to the brand, furthering the cycle of customer retention.

As a retailer, how do you build these types of relationships with your customers? Read below for our five best tips.

5 Ways to Build Customer Loyalty in Retail

Step #1: Personal Experience

Your frontline staff play a large role in converting a customer from an occasional shopper to a brand advocate. Train your employees to go above and beyond to provide your customers with helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable service to create an experience your customers will remember. Work toward a culture of centered on employee engagement and provide your staff with regular training, feedback, and incentives to encourage consistently excellent performance. Simply put, investing in employee engagement saves you money.

Step #2: Store Experience

Is your retail store an inviting place for customers to spend their time? If you design your store to provide an appealing experience, customers will be more likely to visit your store as an activity or a destination. Your store should be clean, attractive, and easy to navigate. In addition to the physical design and layout of your store, pay close attention to your inventory. Customers expect stores to be well-stocked with high-quality merchandise.

Remember that retail purchases are intertwined with a shopper’s life, image, and identity. Your store experience and aesthetics should affirm to customers that your brand is a good fit with their lifestyle and personal identity.

Step #3: Price and Value

Retailers often mistakenly think that customers will only buy the cheapest product available, regardless of the brand or retailer. While this may be true in some markets, many consumers are willing to pay more if they feel the price matches the product’s quality. Price your products so that the perceived value is high. Sales, coupons, and promotions can also help customers feel like your brand offers a good value.

Many customers will pay slightly more to shop at a store that provides a better experience and that treats their employees well. As you improve your brand’s personal and store experience, your perceived value will increase.

Step #4: Marketing and Communication

Once you’ve fine-tuned your brand experience and product pricing, you can begin to promote customer loyalty through marketing campaigns. Your marketing and communication efforts should positively reflect your brand. As you plan your marketing strategy, prioritize brand voice and consistency across all of your channels (e.g. social media, email marketing, online advertising, and in-store promotions). If you have customers who enthusiastically promote your brand online, engage with them and encourage their behavior.

Again, consider that loyal customers will consider purchases from your brand as an extension of their personality and lifestyle. Use this to your advantage as you build customer relationships through your marketing campaigns.

Step #5: Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are a great way to incentivize customers to visit your store more frequently. Discounts and promotions that are tied to a loyalty program can help customers feel that you value their business. The data generated by loyalty programs is also very valuable. When implemented correctly, you can use this data to help customers find products they’ve purchased in the past or return an item without the hassle of a receipt. On the retailer’s side, this data can also be used to learn more about customer purchasing habits and establish net promoter score. As always, use and protect customer data appropriately and with discretion.

As you harmonize the touchpoints of your retail brand, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by improved customer relationships and a stronger bottom line. Pearl-Plaza’s products are designed to help retailers create a positive brand experience and to cultivate lasting relationships. Learn more about our products and services for retailers.

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5 Ways to Build Customer Loyalty in Retail

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Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 3 minutes

3 Things You Can Do Right Now to Create More Inclusive Employee & Customer Experiences

Diversity and inclusion initiatives have become front and center for many organizations in recent years. It’s important for brands to create diverse and inclusive customer experiences (CX) and employee experiences (EX)—not ‘just’ because being more inclusive is the right thing to do, but also because organizations have a lot to gain from accommodating greater diversity in every experience they create.

Of course, an organization stating diversity and inclusion goals is a good start, but how can brands like yours translate such goals into tangible Experience Improvement (XI) strategies and tactics that create more inclusive customer experiences? There are many, many opportunities here, but the most important thing to do is to just get started.

So, here are three quick thoughts you should apply right now to create more inclusive employee and customer experiences.

3 Keys to Creating More Inclusive Customer Experiences

Key #1: Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes
Key #2: Engage New and All Audiences
Key #3: Apply What You’ve Learned

Key #1: Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes

It’s understandable for organizations to be intimidated by the prospect of making mistakes while attempting to accommodate and include new audiences. Such mistakes can quickly become viral via social media, review sites, and other tools, creating headaches both for brands and the customers (or employees) at the heart of such events.

Though this worry is certainly a valid concern, it’s better to accept that mistakes might be made and press forward with your diversity and inclusion efforts than to allow timidity to outright impede either. These are the growing pains of becoming more inclusive with your customer and employee experiences, and facing them head-on will also give your team an opportunity to consider how best to handle such mistakes and learn from them.

Experience shows that both customers and employees accept that mistakes inevitably occur and are a result of activity. Being passive is not an option when trying to create more inclusive customer experiences. Overcome the fear of making mistakes and concentrate on a transparent and authentic way to deal with them when they occur.

Key #2: Engage All Audiences

If you’re still concerned about how best to connect to audiences you haven’t consistently talked to before, this is the section for you. For many years now, the big idea behind CX and EX programs has been to simply gather as much feedback as possible from as many people as possible. However, before turning any listening posts on, you should sit down with your team and design (or reorient) your experience initiatives with your end goals in mind. You must ensure that you give all audiences you want to hear from the opportunity to provide feedback.

In this case, if your goal is to create more inclusive experiences, you should consider which audiences you need to reach out to and how to do so. This means doing some legwork to find out how those audiences communicate, what their preferences are, and bringing all of those insights to bear when meaningfully improving your experiences to accommodate diversity and inclusion.

Also, don’t forget: You need the right tool to collect feedback from all audiences as well as to disseminate that information to all members of your organization. Make sure you are using accessibility tools like screen readers, larger font sizes, higher contrasts, etc.

Key #3: Apply What You’ve Learned

You can and should apply the above mindset to any experience goal you have across the entirety of your business. Applying it here will give you the intelligence and landscape map you need to achieve Experience Improvement (XI) for new audiences.

However, intelligence and roadmaps are only half the battle; taking action is imperative to actually making your experiences more inclusive. The work is ceaseless and oftentimes difficult, but if your team is ready to continue making an effort, you can be assured that the audiences you need to reach will respond.

As you continue to take action on what those audiences tell you, you’ll be able to meaningfully transform your business and realize your goal of a more inclusive experience. Being more inclusive is an invaluable component of marketplace leadership, but it’s also what will set your organization apart from your competitors in your customers’ eyes. The result is a mutually beneficial, meaningfully improved experience that will demonstrate to all your organization’s commitment to diversity and inclusion as well as faster revenue growth and higher profitability.

Click here to learn more about the importance of diverse and inclusive experiences in my full-length point of view article. I take a closer look at the topics explored here and go over a few other best practices you might not have had the chance to read about elsewhere.

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3 Keys to Creating More Inclusive Customer Experiences

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

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Updated August 9, 2024

Written by Stephan Thun

Reading time 3 minutes

3 CX Goals that Create Experience Improvement, Not Just More Data

It’s a commonly held belief among many brands—and the customer experience (CX) vendors that partner with them—that all it takes to solve your business challenges and meet CX goals is to turn on as many listening posts as possible. The idea behind this approach is to gather a mountain of ‘big data’ and thus be armed with every possible piece of information about your customers, your employees, other audience segments, and all their preferences.

The truth, though, is that there’s a gap between data and business challenges that just having data isn’t enough to bridge. A lot of CX vendors and programs fail to account for this gap, and thus many of these initiatives fail to make a difference. The secret to making a difference? A principle called designing with the end in mind, and connecting your CX program to quantifiable goals before any listening posts are even activated. I’m going to take you through three such goals that will help your CX program be the best it can be. Those goals are:

CX Goal #1: Customer Retention
CX Goal #2: Cross-Selling/Upselling
CX Goal #3: Customer Acquisition

CX Goal #1: Customer Retention

Given how much more expensive it is to onboard new customers than to keep existing ones, customer retention is a goal that permeates most every department of most every organization. A lot of brands want to use their CX program to retain customers, but they usually end up gathering a mountain of data and then trying to manually carve insights about their existing audience out of it.

It turns out that using this approach means that you’re working backwards. Rather than try to gather actionable insights only after accruing data, it’s far better for brands to dedicate at least part of their program design phase to figuring out which goals they need to achieve for their customer base. Which audience segments do you need to listen to? What channels do they use? Building your program around these questions will end up saving not ‘just’ customers, but a great deal of time and effort on your part.

CX Goal #2: Cross-Selling/Upselling

Once you’ve established which audience segments and channels suit your business goals, you can dive a bit deeper by identifying cross-selling and upselling opportunities within your customer base. This work requires nuance, but you can use the same design-with-the-end-in-mind approach here as with retaining your customers to unveil new revenue sources without having to onboard new customers.

This goal ends up being something that a lot of brands overlook, but it should be a core driving ethos of your CX program. You should also make room within this goal for cross-shoppers and customers who transacted with you in the past but aren’t currently. With a well-designed CX program, the sky here is the limit.

CX Goal #3: Customer Acquisition

Acquiring new customers can be expensive, but everyone knows it’s a necessary goal to shoot for to sustain growth and market share. You can use the same audience segment and channel identification ethos here as with customer retention; the result will be the ability to find where new business lives and be there for it when your competitors can’t or won’t. In fact, researched properly, you can arm yourself with an idea of what these new customers will want before they themselves know!

Bridging The Gap

These three goals form a solid foundation for any customer experience program, and designing your program around them before activating your listening posts will enable you to actually bridge the gap between your big data and achieving Experience Improvement (XI). Knowing your audience and your marketplace landscape are integral parts of market experience (MX).

To learn more about how market experience shapes CX program goals and how best to get the lay of your marketplace landscape, click here to read my full-length PoV on using a combination of tech and market research to find and grow audience segments. Achieving an MX perspective takes time and effort, but the brands that master it are the masters of their verticals far more often than not.

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Bridging The Gap

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Written by Jessica Petrie

Reading time 3 minutes

Four Tips for Using Customer Data to Improve the E-Commerce Experience

E-commerce is one of the fastest growing industries of this decade. Thanks to COVID, digital roadmaps across industries have quickly accelerated. If you weren’t yet online, it didn’t take long for brands to adapt when brick and mortar businesses across Asia Pacific were forced to shut down in 2020 and 2021.

It’s not been easy for e-commerce brands. After a whirlwind of COVID-spurred digital transformation, rapid brand expansion, and supply chain woes, consumer expectations and their relationships with e-commerce brands have changed before our eyes. So what can these brands do to get ahead of customer expectations? The key is to dive into your customer data. And we’re here to help.

Tip #1: Rethink the Digital Customer Journey

Because of the rapid growth that businesses have undergone, e-commerce brands have not had an opportunity to slow down and evaluate the experience they are delivering. The acceleration of digital roadmaps during the pandemic has meant that many elements might have been half-baked. Now that the “new normal” is underway, e-commerce brands should rethink the digital customer journey.

Tip #2: Invest in Customer Care

A lot of businesses had to scale back their customer care teams during the pandemic because they couldn’t cope with the sheer amount of call volumes enquiring about updated delivery processes and updated policies. We saw in these times of crisis that much of customer care is related to the digital journey. When customers have an inquiry, you need to find ways for customers to self-serve or use technology to reduce the number of enquiries that need to involve your care team.

Tip #3: Upgrade Your Technology

Advanced technology is now available to intercept customers browsing on site, and ask them questions to understand their current experience. Pearl-Plaza’s Digital Intercept solution has the ability to capture rich data from logged in users when they’re taking a survey.

You can also integrate Pearl-Plaza’s Rapid Resolution Engine, which is designed to analyse customer verbatim in real time. The technology uses tags that are customised to your businesses to provide helpful links, ultimately resolving concern and complaints, or “solve in survey,” before customers have to call into the contact centre.

Tip #4: Collect All Pieces of Data Possible: Explicit + Implicit + Operational

Most brands are proficient at collecting explicit data like NPS scores and customer verbatim. But have you considered layering implicit data over the top of it? Implicit data points like customer sentiment, emotion, cursor movement, and more can help you paint a more accurate picture of the customer experience. As a final step, adding in operational data like customer value and segmentation will allow you to be really targeted to the best place to trigger a digital intercept along the customer journey.

For more on upgrading customer experiences in e-commerce, check out this eBook “4 Digital Quick Wins”

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by Simon Fraser

Reading time 2 minutes

Quality, Not Quantity: Strategic Customer Listening for Experience Improvement

For many years now, conventional wisdom has held that the best way to listen to as many customers as possible is to turn every customer listening post within your customer experience (CX) program on and simply capture all insights that come your way. This strategy makes a simple kind of sense on paper; if you’re listening to as many people as possible, you’re bound to hear something pertinent to your CX and organizational goals, right?

The answer to that question is more complicated than conventional wisdom would have you believe. While it’s true that this approach will gain you a lot of data, a large portion of it may be wholly irrelevant to the CX goals you’re trying to achieve. At the same time, you may miss out on highly relevant data when you focus only on customer listening posts while leaving other signals, such as behavioral and operational data, aside.

So, is there a better, more efficient way to find data pertinent to what you need your program to achieve? As it happens, the answer is yes, and we’re going to get into it right now!

Where the Drive for Data Came From

If there’s a more targeted approach to gathering the data and insights you need to achieve Experience Improvement (XI), why is the standard approach to simply gather as much data as possible? To answer this question, we need to remember that over the last 20 years, the word “data” has been seen by many organizations as a prescription for any business, technology, or marketplace problem. At the same time, the cost to capture and analyze data has also gone down significantly.

But don’t be under any illusions; just turning listening posts on and gathering as much data as possible does not translate directly to actionable business and experience solutions. Frankly, in most cases where CX programs are not focused and use all kinds of listening posts but rarely all relevant behavioral, operational, and contextual data, the resulting insights frequently leave brands with an endlessly tall mountain of white noise. That’s the state of affairs for far too many experience programs, and it’s why a lot of them fail.

A Better Approach

Rather than begin by flipping every light switch on and inhaling as much data as possible, brands should take a further step back when activating or refurbishing their experience program. They must, quite simply, design their program with their end goal in mind before any listening posts are even activated and before deciding which other data to ingest.

Taking time to design with the end in mind also allows you to consider which audiences are most relevant to which goals, as well as the approaches you need to take in order to connect to each one. This is a more targeted methodology than simply lying in wait for a large lake of data, and while it requires more initial legwork, the end result is a wealth of actionable intelligence that by and large curates itself.

Starting with clarity on intended outcomes and getting company-wide agreement on key performance indicators (KPI’s) gives your team concrete, quantifiable goals to connect your initiative to. It lays the basis for the management support and corporate buy-in you need to be successful.

Applying What You’ve Learned

Whether you’re intending to strengthen loyalty and grow your business with existing customers or to make efforts to win new ones, the approach I’ve laid out here makes all the difference when it comes not ‘just’ to ensuring the success of your CX program, but also creating Experience Improvement for your customers and employees that drives business outcomes. Patience and forethought will save you time that you’d otherwise spend attempting to connect data to business outcomes.

And, don’t forget to design your customer listening posts (and, consequently, your products and services) in an inclusive way. This is imperative not only from an ethical perspective, but also key to making your Experience Improvement initiatives truly effective from CX and EX standpoints.

Click here to read my full-length PoV on how customer listening with diversity and inclusion in mind can make the methodology I’ve detailed here even more beneficial for your customers, your employees, and your bottom line.

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Where the Drive for Data Came From A Better Approach Applying What You’ve Learned

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 3 minutes

3 Employee and Customer Experience Trends for Banks, Wealth Advisors, and Credit Unions in 2022

What is the future for employee and customer experience trends in banks, wealth advisory firms, and credit unions? Pearl-Plaza recently dove into the financial services industry’s 2022 outlook—and there’s a lot to unpack.

Through our dedicated Strategic Insights Team, we collected data from bank, wealth advisor, and credit union consumers and employees across North America. This year’s trends report has unearthed a few key discoveries that these businesses must pay attention to if they want to differentiate themselves in this competitive market.

When you have both customer and employee perspectives, it’s easier to rethink the workplace and how one experience affects the other. Let’s think through this together to improve finserv experiences for the long haul:

Employee and Customer Experience Trend #1: Digital Experiences and Personal Engagement is Vital to Improving Experiences

One of the first questions we asked customers and employees was, “what experiences are you looking forward to in the following industries [in 2022]?”

For Customers: Most banking customers responded with “tap-&-go or digital wallet” (Apple or Samsung). This hammers in a point this industry is all too aware of: digital transformation is a crucial element that all banks need to pay attention to as customer expectations evolve. And that extends to other types of financial services businesses as well, be it investment management or credit unions.

For Employees: On the other hand, employees have a unique perspective to add to this conversation. One stated that they would like:

“More time [spent] with customers around personal investments.”
— Financial Services Wealth Advisor

Of course, different firms operate with different goals in mind, but what’s important to take away here is how the customer experience is impacting the employee experience and vice versa. With this insight in mind, businesses across the financial services industry should include the employee perspective in their customer experience efforts. What do your bank tellers know about friction points in the in-branch experience? What improvements do your advisors think can be made in client sessions? The answers could lead to major improvements in the customer experience and to bottom line influencing factors like customer retention.

Employee and Customer Experience Trend #2: Focus on Both Digital and In-Person Interactions to Serve All Customers

We’ve all seen the articles claiming that the “in-branch experience is dead,” but that couldn’t be further from the truth. According to our data, there are those customers that prefer 100% self-service capabilities, but there are also those customers that rely on in-person interactions—and there are employees that find fulfillment in serving those customers.

When asked what their primary expectations for their experiences were, the majority of consumers voiced their desire for self-serve options, specifically with investments profiles, banking services, or credit union interactions. At the same time, employees also expressed at the same time that they want training to support customers better, whether that is in a contact center, over live chat, or in-branch.

To satisfy both employee and customer expectations for experiences, finserv businesses need to make sure they are focused on both digital and in-person interactions, and make sure they are consistent while they’re at it.

Employee and Customer Experience Trend #3: How to Optimize Talent Acquisition for Gen Z

Employee values tend to shift from generation to generation and it’s the responsibility for businesses to acknowledge those changes if they want to last. That’s why employers everywhere have been thinking more about Gen Z and how they’ll carve out a future for the workplace, and finserv businesses are no exception.

To help banks, investment advisors, and other finserv employers understand Gen Z, we leveraged our latest trends report to dive into Market Pulse data as well as indirect and inferred transactional data and put together a pros and cons profile for the most critical factors in recruiting a Gen Z employee specifically in the finserv industry. Check it out below!

Based on these findings, Gen Z seems likely to be attracted to a work setting that prioritizes instilling a sense of purpose in employees and supporting a collaborative work community, on top of, understandably, ensuring financial security.

There are many ways to foster these attributes in your company’s work culture, but one thing is for sure: as Gen Z grows more prominent in the workforce, it is vital that businesses shape work cultures according to Gen Z ideals if they wish to attract top talent.

Not only did Pearl-Plaza feature the financial services businesses like banks, wealth advisory firms, and credit unions in its newest Customer and Employee Experience Trends Report, but the research covers ten other industries as well! If you’d like to learn more about what’s happening in 2022’s experience realm, take a look at the full online version.

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 3 minutes

3 Challenges Utilities Brands Face When Aligning Strategy, Ops, and Services to CX Needs

Customer experience (CX) leaders from utilities brands are facing unprecedented challenges in 2022. Increased government regulation and new market entrants with unique service-based offerings are creating a disruptive wave of change that traditional utilities need to respond to. But here at Pearl-Plaza, we don’t like to merely dwell on obstacles and complexities. We like to provide you with strategies and solutions.

With that being said, Graham Tutton, Pearl-Plaza’s Global Head of Consumer Products, has put some thoughts together around some of the biggest challenges facing the utilities sector, and what customer experience leaders can do about these for our latest webinar. And to save you some time, we’ve taken those and compiled them into this quick article.

Let’s dive in!

Challenge #1: Disparate Data

Utilities companies typically have a lot of data spread across multiple silos across the business. The challenge is combining the operational, technical, financial, and even the metadata (like weather data) that is currently sitting in legacy systems or different departments, and is also aggregated with feedback data. Additionally, brands have not figured out how to tap into 85% of data—the unstructured kind—so they miss out on the bigger picture.

Solve the Challenge: Combine Data Sources

Many CX leaders in this space find it challenging to stitch together holistic customer feedback in one place, and know how to take action from it. At the end of the day, you need a single platform that can combine direct survey data from customers, but also indirect data (like social media reviews), and inferred data (like contact centre chat logs).

Challenge 2: Figuring Out Customer Trends

Because data is spread across the organisation, making sense of emerging customer trends is even harder. Businesses want to make the best decisions based on the available information. However, these decisions are often flawed because businesses do not have the ability to understand the data they’re looking at. Businesses cling to the easy insights floating at the top of their datasets, but often miss the deeper insights hidden behind unstructured data.

According to IDC, 85% of enterprise data is unstructured and is growing at a rate of 55% every year. With this rate of growth, businesses that fail to adapt miss out on the bigger picture and are making flawed decisions based on only a small percentage of the data available.

Solve the Challenge: Text Analytics to the Rescue

Luckily, text analytics capabilities are getting better and better each year! Businesses should leverage human-led, knowledge-based taxonomies by finding a partner that offers high accuracy and actionability, offering economies of scale from a wealth of knowledge gained in your industry, language and use case.

Challenge #3: Taking Action on Feedback

Some utilities brands find it tricky to know which actions to take after analysing their customer experience data. There are many reasons for this—most customer experience solutions require multi-language translation, human interpretation and maintenance, and continuous tuning of surveys. To make matters worse, because the process is so slow, the accuracy of the insights are impacted too. CX leaders are often stuck in the cycle of wading through data and less enabled to actually take action on it.

Solve the Challenge: Have a Roadmap From the Beginning

If you build your CX program around a roadmap (with clear checkpoints, of course), it will help you stay focused on your ultimate goals. You should be checking in with your roadmap monthly, and evaluating actions against the checkpoints every quarter. By constantly referring back to the original plan, it will help build your organisational culture around the customer, and this will definitely help with momentum of your program, taking you further than you could possibly go if you were shouldering the weight of the CX program alone.

To learn more, check out Graham’s full CX webinar designed just for utilities brands.

In this Post

Challenge #1: Disparate Data Challenge 2: Figuring Out Customer Trends Challenge #3: Taking Action on Feedback

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 3 minutes

How 3 CX Trends Compare from North America to Asia-Pacific in 2022

Earlier this year, we released a customer experience (CX) (and employee experience) trends report for both the North America and Asia-Pacific (APAC) regions. These new CX trends were based on indirect and inferred data, as well as surveys across several industries. And surprisingly, there were some standout similarities that connected the two seemingly disparate customer bases. In fact, Baby Boomers, Generation X and Y, and even the up and coming Gen Z, all have their voices heard in these data insights.

So what can we learn from a cross-continental comparison? If we investigate the CX climate in two vastly different regions, it can help bridge the expectation gaps that we have for this year. After all, issues like the pandemic are global occurrences, so how else can you make sense of such an event except by looking at that level of scale?

Pearl-Plaza invites you to think along with us about the bigger picture! Let’s scale up and dive into these CX Trends:

CX Trend #1: Consumer Comfort Level with COVID Safety Precautions

Yes, we know it’s been two years (going on the third), but COVID is still important to discuss. Safety concerns continue to vary throughout each region and they’ll certainly affect what consumers want in experiences from any brand. The question we decided was most crucial is whether consumers feel comfortable with the COVID-related safety measures put in place by various industries. Truthfully, if a customer doesn’t even feel safe to enter, it’s a safe bet you’re losing their business.

In ten APAC countries we discovered that 56-75% of consumers were comfortable with the safety precautions currently in place. Australia, Singapore, and Thailand were in the top, each with percentages higher than 70%.
But in Canada and the United States, only 51-61% of consumers were comfortable. This was found in nine different industries.

Obviously, the comparison isn’t one-to-one. But if about 2 in 3 consumers in APAC are comfortable, compared to NA’s 1 in 2, it’s worth figuring out what APAC businesses are doing differently.

CX Trend #2: The Impact of Social Media Influencers

Even with a consumer generation spanning seven decades, social media influencers are maintaining their, well, influence. Both APAC and NA regions match with 55% of consumers being somewhat or extremely likely to use influencer codes in 2022. And in APAC, there aren’t significant differences like you would expect between the four generations. Baby boomers are, predictably, at the lowest with 50% and Gen X and Y the highest with 68%.

1 of 2 consumers in each generation are likely to use influencer codes, which means discounts, discounts, and discounts are a key incentive this year. And they don’t just want a discount sign at the front of your store, but for you to tap into the influencer market and establish a strong social media presence.

CX Trend #3: New Loyalty Indicators & Drivers Are Emerging

What experience elements would most impact a consumer’s loyalty? Here’s what stakeholders expect industries to do to maintain their loyalty:

APAC:

NA:

A lot of consumer priorities align in each region and, as expected, new loyalty drivers centralize around integrating digital options into the buyer experience. Since the pandemic, digital experiences have risen in demand and moving forward, it’s becoming an increasingly essential component of the consumer experience. One of the biggest challenges digital experience expectations pose is that consumers still want their experiences to feel personalized. Connecting those features will be critical to consumer loyalty this year.

Capitalizing on CX Trends Across the Globe

Customer experience is an ever-changing field and looks differently depending on where you are on the map. But there’s always a few similar threads that consumers are pulling, and that’s what CX trends reports are all about: identifying the threads brands need to pull on to prepare for a successful year ahead.

Interested in the specifics? You can access the full APAC or NA trends report if you’d like to learn about the other trends that match or differ!

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Capitalizing on CX Trends Across the Globe

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 3 minutes

How to Maintain Your CX Program’s Effectiveness in Uncertain Times

It’s no joke to say that we live in uncertain times. We’re hopefully turning the page on a pandemic, but steep inflation and unrest both at home and abroad are making many customers nervous about what’s around the corner. Unfortunately, this attitude and the events precipitating it have a big impact on customer experience (CX), which means that CX professionals like you face the daunting task of keeping your CX program effective in the face of multiple challenges. As a perennially “glass half full” person. I prefer to see this “daunting task” as a great opportunity!

Where to start, though? Whether you’re running an existing program or looking to start a new initiative, what steps can you take to ensure that your effective CX program gets off on the right foot? Today’s discussion focuses on achieving that start and ensuring that your CX program will bring you business value that helps you stay ahead of the competition. More specifically, we’re going to cover the first two steps in our success improvement framework:

Step 1: Design
Step 2: Listen

Step 1: Design

Unfortunately, we see far too many clients start a CX program by just turning on some listening posts (social media, review sites, survey feedback, etc) and hoping for relevant insights to come to the surface. However, as the old adage goes, hope is not a plan. Listening is certainly an important part of the process, but if you want your CX program to truly succeed for you in uncertain times, it’s important to actually begin a step before hitting the lights and focus on a more foundational program element: design. I often tell my clients to design with the end in mind—it’s an approach aimed at helping you first understand what you need your CX program to accomplish in specific and quantifiable business terms, then keeping that guiding ethos front of mind as you execute the rest of your program.

So, what does the end goal look like for you? Do you need to pivot to new, post-pandemic messaging with a certain audience segment? Are you a finserv brand that needs to reassure clients rattled by inflation? Whatever the case, identifying your goals before you activate your CX program is critical to ensure your program is successful. It’s always better to begin with concrete, quantifiable objectives than to listen first and try to work backwards from there.

Step 2: Listen

Taking a step back to define your program’s goals makes the next step in the process, listening, a lot easier than trying to turn all your signal sources on first. When you design with the end in mind, you give yourself an opportunity not just to define your program’s goals, but also to identify the audience segments most relevant to those goals, as well as the channels that those individuals tend to prefer. The end result of all that legwork? Much better, much cleaner, and much more relevant data.

Now you’ve reached the point where you can actually turn your listening posts on, and with this target profile handy, you’ll begin to receive data that will contain much more effective and actionable insights. This is a foundational way to keep your CX program effective, and it’ll also help you get an idea of what messaging you need to issue and what actions you need to take to keep customers feeling happy and connected to in uncertain times. It’s critical to look beyond just the survey. I believe there are three data sources to “listen” to: direct data (from surveys), indirect data (from outside sources like social media) and inferred data (operational non-customer data that can be overlayed with the other sources).

The Next Level

To recap: it’s important to consider what you need your CX program to accomplish for your brand (especially in times like these), and to design your program with those end goals in mind before activating any listening posts. Using this strategy makes the listening stage of this process much easier, as you will have already set your program up to collect only the data most relevant to your organization’s goals and needs.

What comes after that, though? Once you’ve completed the design legwork and gathered this ultra-pertinent data, how best can you scour it for actionable insights and meaningfully transform your brand in a way customers will appreciate? To learn more, click here for my full-length point of view document on how to apply what you’ve listened for to effective transformation, especially as it pertains to the current inflation crisis.

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The Next Level

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by Jim Katzman

Reading time 3 minutes

International Women’s Day: 8 Tips for Women in Customer Experience Looking to Build Their Career

International Women’s Day 2022 is here! To mark the day, we asked some of our women in customer experience (CX) for the best career advice they’d like to share with our readers. Hopefully these ideas will help you take your career to the next level.

We asked our female CX leaders, “What advice do you have for female professionals starting their career in customer experience?”

Here’s what we heard:

Tip #1: Take Control of Your Career

Wing Poon, VoC & CX Strategy Lead at Medibank

“Restructuring has become a norm which you will encounter at some point in your career. Don’t feel you have to fit into or accept a role that is not what you wanted. Shape your role proactively by talking to your manager and review your career goals and skill set every year to see if you are still growing. If not, it might be time to find another role.”

Tip #2: Bring the Passion!

Trish Roberts, Voice of the Customer Programme Manager at New Zealand Post

“Bring your passion and care to the role. It’s been instrumental in driving engagement from stakeholders and continually connects me back to my reasons for building a career in this sector. Ultimately, my goal is to improve the customer and organisational experience. I also feel when you bring that fire and passion to everything you do in customer experience it makes it a truly exciting and fulfilling place to be!”

Tip #3: Take a Risk

Wing Poon, VOC & CX Strategy Lead at Medibank

“Don’t be afraid to apply for jobs even if your skill set doesn’t 100% fit the job description—because no one’s will perfectly fit!”

Tip #4: Know Your Worth

Wing Poon, VOC & CX Strategy Lead at Medibank

“Don’t be afraid to proactively ask for a promotion and a raise. Arm yourself with evidence of achievements and market salary information for negotiations.”

Tip #5: Take Opportunities When They Surface

Linda Broady, Customer Success Director at Pearl-Plaza APAC

“I discovered my passion for customer experience early in my career, but getting a foothold in the field meant taking on a couple of specialist and operational CX roles before ultimately landing my dream role as Head of CX. My passion for customer experience has since led me in other directions, enabling me to further broaden my experience and in my current role, share that experience with my clients.”

Tip #6: Be Human

Renee Jeffery, Senior Customer Experience Manager, ahm

“I believe the last two years, more than ever, have demanded we put the ‘human’ back into the corporate world. We have seen pets, family, and home space merge with our work space. So, my advice to anyone starting out in the CX space is to not shy away from bringing the human into your work. Customer experience (and work in general) is so much richer when we are all our authentic selves, always.”

Tip #7: Find Your Tribe

Trish Roberts, Voice of the Customer Programme Manager at New Zealand Post

“Surround yourself with interesting, creative and intelligent women, who lift each other up. I’m lucky to have worked with some incredibly collaborative and respected women over my career who I have learnt from and passed those skills on to others. When one of us succeeds, we all succeed.”

Tip #8: Bring Others Along the Journey

Morgan Jackson, Senior Customer Feedback Specialist, ACC

“Passion, resilience, relationships, and empathy are the four words that resonate with me as I reflect on my career in CX. Everyone I engaged with when establishing our VoC program advised us not to underestimate the culture change required to implement. If you are prepared to take the time to bring others on the journey with you, understand their challenges, explore solutions together this will result in better outcomes that enable your success long term.”

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 3 minutes

How Targeted Surveys Help Improve Your Customer Experience (CX)

One tool is practically synonymous with the customer experience (CX) industry: surveys. Since the inception of the industry, targeted customer experience surveys have been seen as a foundational listening and research tool that leverages strategic questions to collect data from a specific group of customers.

Sending out a targeted survey is the first step to improving customer experiences, employee experiences, and even the bottom line. Once a targeted survey has collected the desired data, a top-notch Experience Improvement platform mines that data using advanced analytics to uncover actionable insights. And once an action plan is made and carried out, businesses can improve their practices and processes in a way that helps them to acquire new customers and employees, retain existing ones, identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and eliminate extra costs.

All that starts with a targeted survey. But what are the best practices for creating a targeted survey? How do you get started? Well, that’s what we will break down today!

Picking Your Audience

The first step to a successful targeted survey? Selecting a target audience! Ask your team, “Who are we trying to appeal to? How do we want to improve their experience?” The audience in question should be one that is crucial to your strategy, so be sure to examine sales data, demographics, and other analytics to inform your decision.

For instance, let’s say that you are a fast casual restaurant looking to launch a new menu item in a specific region. Your target audience would then be customers from that region who are regulars at your restaurant. That would be helpful to gauging interest in your new sandwich combo!

You can also leverage other, more general surveys that ask broader questions in order to identify more specific populations to survey. Additionally, it’s possible that your company already has the data you need! Check other relevant data or research that may have already been done on your desired subject. If the insights you need are already in your possession, this can help you avoid the dreaded survey fatigue in your customers (and employees).

Four Principles for Building a Good Survey

At Pearl-Plaza, we often get questions like, “What is the best way to design a survey?”, “What questions should I include?”, and “What rating scales should I use?”. The quick answer to those questions is that it depends on both the type and the topic of the survey.

Principle #1: Design with the End in Mind

This principle is also referred to as the “Backward Research Process.” When you design with the end in mind, you must first think about the decisions you want to make and actions you want to take based on the information you collect.

Are you focused on increasing customer retention by identifying customers who had a poor experience? Do you want to “grade” your outlets or employees on their ability to serve customers? Do you want to assess which specific customer-handling processes are and are not working? The content of your survey should be guided by your answers to these questions. And since you’ve already identified your target audience, you’re ahead of the game!

Principle #2: Generate Hypotheses When Designing Your Survey

While designing the survey, it is often helpful to generate some hypotheses about how you think the results might turn out. This exercise can help you define what information you need to either collect or append to your survey data.

Principle #3: Ask the Right Questions

Don’t ask all the questions. Ask the right questions. Depending on your desired outcome, you might use a variation of these question types:

Multiple Choice Questions
Text Entry Questions
Quotas and Qualifications

Principle #4: Don’t Forget About The Survey Invitation

One of the most neglected parts of the survey design process is the survey invitation. Often, it is designed as an after-thought. You need to design your email invitation to maximize the likelihood that customers will receive it, notice it, open it, and click the survey link.

A well-designed, branded targeted survey experience is key!

Learn from the Data

You’ve zeroed in on your audience, chosen strategic questions, and sent out an optimized invitation—now the data is rolling in! This is the most exciting part of the process, because that feedback you’re receiving will be the basis of your next major improvements to the customer experience!

Your Experience Improvement (XI) tools (such as our Active Listening Studio) will be able to ingest that data, and not only reveal insights, but will pinpoint the moments that matter (or the interactions, channels, and touchpoints that most impact your business). Prioritizing those moments helps you to take swift action to improve not only experiences, but also your bottom line.

After you’ve taken these actions toward Experience Improvement, you can also send follow up surveys to identify the effectiveness of your improvements and fuel continuous efforts toward experience excellence.

How Pearl-Plaza’s Active Listening Studio Can Help

Pearl-Plaza’s Active Listening Studio is a one of a kind listening suite that gives you the control to gather feedback at every touchpoint, allowing customers to tell you what matters most to them without bombarding them with survey after survey. Active Listening Studio includes:

DIY Survey Creation
Our AI-powered Engagement Engine™
The Rapid Resolution Engine™
Our Eligibility Engine™
Social Monitoring
Multimedia Feedback

Leveraging these tools allows you to create a more effective targeted survey, optimize your listening strategy, and ultimately prove that you’ve improved experiences and your business. One of our global retail clients was even able to increase survey response rates by 37% and response length by 38%!

Want to learn more about how Pearl-Plaza can help you conduct a better targeted survey—and improve your customer experiences, employee experiences, and beyond? Contact our team today and we’d be happy to explore the right options for your business!

In this Post

Picking Your Audience Four Principles for Building a Good Survey Learn from the Data How Pearl-Plaza’s Active Listening Studio Can Help

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 4 minutes

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Build an Integrated CX Program

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Tip #1: Rethink the Digital Customer Journey

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Tip #3: Upgrade Your Technology

Tip #4: Collect All Pieces of Data Possible: Explicit + Implicit + Operational

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Employee and Customer Experience Trend #1: Digital Experiences and Personal Engagement is Vital to Improving Experiences

Employee and Customer Experience Trend #2: Focus on Both Digital and In-Person Interactions to Serve All Customers

Employee and Customer Experience Trend #3: How to Optimize Talent Acquisition for Gen Z

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Challenge #1: Disparate Data

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Challenge 2: Figuring Out Customer Trends

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Challenge #3: Taking Action on Feedback

Solve the Challenge: Have a Roadmap From the Beginning

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Capitalizing on CX Trends Across the Globe

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