Utilities Brands CX

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.

CX Program 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:

  1. Step 1: Design
  2. 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.

Women in Customer Experience

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.”

Targeted Survey Helps Improve 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.

Email Targeted Survey Invitation
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!

Customer Experience Governance

Whether you’re just getting started on your customer experience (CX) initiative or hitting pause to see how things are going, the term “customer experience governance” is probably something you hear your team bring up all the time. You probably also already know that customer experience governance refers to the system that sends insights to where they need to go and that holds certain team members accountable for different aspects of your initiative.

But which governance style works best for you? No two organizations are the same, which means that a governance style that works for another brand’s CX program may not be your organization’s cup of tea! We’ve got you covered, though—here’s three different customer experience governance approaches you can take a look at as you evaluate your program.

Three Ways to Approach CX Governance 

  1. Approach #1: Directive
  2. Approach #2: Consensus-Based
  3. Approach #3: Dispersed

Customer Experience Governance Approach #1: Directive

This one’s pretty self-explanatory, and ideal for companies that are highly centralized. Simply put, a directive governance approach is a top-down model that gives the same parameters and goals to every piece of your CX program in every region your company has a foot in. This model makes room for some localization, but espouses a direct-line approach from one team and clear sponsorship from at least one member of the executive team.

The advantage to a setup like this, especially if your initiative sounds like what we’ve laid out, is that all program abilities are managed as one function and the team at the heart of it all is highly collaborative. This can make it easier for your team to roll out improvements and quickly hand initiative changes down across multiple facets of your program. On the flip side, though, the folks implementing those changes on the ground may disengage if they feel too far removed from this centralized decision-making process. 

Customer Experience Governance Approach #2: Consensus-Based

This governance style is a bit more loosey-goosey compared to the directive approach. Rather than rely strictly on a single, centralized team, the consensus-based approach gives regional teams greater autonomy. Whereas the directive approach we talked about earlier is great for brands whose regional operations are more or less the same, the consensus-based style is ideal for organizations whose regional teams work in much more varied conditions.

You probably already see where this is going when it comes to advantages and disadvantages—on one hand, this style is great for making regional teams feel included and for gaining on-the-ground insights that make your program better! But, by the same token, decentralizing decision-making power can result in lengthier deliberations, knowledge gaps, and the chance that some regional teams stray a bit too far from the path. Still, it’s a style well-worth considering if that different regional ops environment sounds like your organization.

Customer Experience Governance Approach #3: Local

This one’s on the opposite end of our spectrum from the directive approach, and encourages local/regional teams to take up the lion’s share of CX responsibilities. A central team may still exist somewhere in the initiative hierarchy, but with this style, its main task is mostly to share data, tools, and coaching. The heavy lifting, the action-taking, is left to groups and individuals outside of that team.

If your brand consists of, say, locally owned and operated franchises, or simply has a history of reduced central control, you might find this style most to your liking. It can enable franchisees and regional managers to turn their locations into CX powerhouses that are each very tailored to the areas they serve. However, this also creates the danger of program and experience inconsistency, both of which risk leaving customers confused and disengaged if they frequent multiple locales. Making group decisions is also, of course, more difficult with an approach this decentralized.

Decisions, Decisions

So, which of these sounds most like your organization, or most like the setup that would be great for a new or refurbished CX program? If you’re still on the fence and want to learn more, click here to see our new infographic on the subject, with more details and considerations for each customer experience governance approach. Customer experience governance is a challenge at the best of times, but if you can find the approach that works best for you, you’ll be well on your way to achieving continuous Experience Improvement (XI).

CX Team

Oftentimes, the c-suite and the customer experience (CX) or customer success team live on the same planet, but almost in separate countries—they simply speak different languages. The former is interested in counting dollars and profitability and the latter with measuring metrics. So how should a CX practitioner go about bridging that gap in communication? How can you take the invaluable insights your CX team is discovering and translate it into meaning that executives will understand and act on? 

We know that customer experience can be a tough sell—after all, your business has so many priorities! Proving that your CX program has direct ROI and impact on your bottom line can be nebulous at best. But when your CX team has the c-suite’s backing, many organizational walls are broken and it becomes easier to demonstrate the insurmountable value that a successful CX program produces for a business. To help your brand along, here are three essential tips to close the gap between the C-Suite and CX teams.

Tip #1: Break Down Metrics

Customer experience metrics are core to any CX program—whether it’s NPS, CSAT, CES, etc. The challenge is how do you present those metrics in a way that makes executives regard them as crucial data points? At Pearl-Plaza, we start with an approach we like to call the “Solving for X:” take your executives through your business objectives and what you’re truly trying to solve for customers. Then put it under categories like customer acquisition, customer retention, cross-sell and up-sell, cross-savings, etc. By parsing out the problems your team is solving for, you can show executives how they map onto the customer journey. And eventually, how those metrics directly inform the important touchpoints in that journey.

Tip #2: Tell Stories

Beyond all the data, numbers, and statistics, there’s a human customer at the heart of your CX program. So how do you get executives to see and empathize with the customers they don’t interact with on a daily basis? Stories, stories, stories. It can be a customer story, verbatims, videos, etc., but the point is that storytelling connects humans together—and it can do the same with your customers and executives.

And it doesn’t have to stop at just customers. Employees play a significant role as customer experience providers, especially as frontline ones. Getting executives to understand a day in the life of frontline employees or customers can shift their perspective on how your program is adding value to the company. It’s easy to latch onto numbers as concrete evidence, but stories can make the numbers come alive.

Tip #3: Use Small, Real Money Examples

When you’re presenting a business case, the goal shouldn’t be complexity. Even the most simple of cases can prove to be a persuasive argument. For example, let’s say there’s a rental car business that sells at airports. What if we could save one customer per month at each of the top airport rental locations? If you multiply that customer by ten and then by hundred, that’s millions of dollars of value saved. So asking small questions like that can be a huge game changer in how your executives understand the value in a successful customer journey.

Building a Strong CX Foundation with the C-Suite

Luckily, your relationship with executives is an ongoing one. Which means there will be countless meetings and presentations, and most importantly chances to learn to speak in the C-Suite language. Each conversation is an opportunity for your CX team to prove that CX value and business value is one and the same. So don’t be devastated if it takes a few swings. Fail and adjust your strategy for the next meeting.

And when you’re looking for a boost of confidence and CX expertise, watch this webinar: Eric Smuda (Principal, CX Strategy & Enablement) speaks on Translating CX Value into the C-Suite’s Language.

Text Analysis Software

When it comes to experience programs, text analytics software has been revolutionising data interpretation since the capability arrived on the scene. I’m Siobhan May Jones, one of Pearl-Plaza’s Customer Success Directors, and over my career, I’ve seen this transition up close.

One of my first jobs whilst studying at university was manually coding thousands of verbatims about pet food. While this was great financially because I got paid by the hour, it wasn’t a good use of time by today’s standards. Over the next five years, I worked in the market research industry and found that too many tasks are manual process-rich, as well as subject to human error. It has taken years of discipline to rewire my brain from manual work to working with experts and tools to achieve the right goal. 

Let me give you an example—let’s say you need to understand what customers are saying about your employees each month. Your goal is to track which employees you need to support, and which ones need to be celebrated. 

You have two options:

 1) Download a raw extract of the verbatim and read through it month by month, gain an understanding of what customers are saying, then talk to the team about it. 

 2) Use natural language processing tools to visualise where and why these comments are showing excellence or areas requiring improvement.

It’s not really a choice between these two options, as the first scenario has you spending hours clicking buttons and cleaning or filtering data, while the second forces you to make an action plan. 

So how can you optimise your text analytics software and, ultimately, strengthen your customer experience (CX) program? I have three tips for you:

Tip #1: Confirm You’re Using the Latest and Greatest Software 

Before taking any action with text analytics, we recommend chatting with experts in your field to make sure you have the latest tools, processes, software, and overall capability. Your text analytics software should have these four features:

Scalability

A solution that supports all of the countries and languages your customers work and buy in—at an acceptable level of quality and price.

Quality

Your text analytics solution must be able to surface important trends and patterns based on individual comments and the sentiments behind them.

Actionability

You need a layer of sophisticated analytics that can add tags and themes on a granular level, uncover sentiment, assign categories, identify intent, spot legal issues, and pick up on possible customer churn.

Speed

A solution with real-time analysis, reporting and action. This is specifically relevant when considering translations for global companies.

If your text analytics software is missing any of these features, you’ll be starting at a disadvantage. Here at Pearl-Plaza, we’re constantly innovating based on clients’ specific needs to ensure we’re helping reduce processes and increase action. 

Tip #2: Keep Your Goal Front of Mind When Processing Customer Feedback

When you designed your customer experience program, you no doubt started with a goal in mind. And when it comes to processing thousands of unstructured pieces of customer feedback, it can be easy to lose sight of the original goal. 

We recommend being honest and clear with your team (and yourself) about what your primary goal is, then using the right approach for that goal. Are you looking to add qualitative information to bring life to your metrics, trying to understand what makes customers angry or frustrated, or are you looking to track a recent frontline training initiative and see if customers noticed enough to talk about it? 

Alternatively, are you looking to set up alerts based on topics (regardless of the many possible typos)? Text analytics is a powerful tool that will help you with any of the above goals.  

Tip #3: Be On The Lookout For New Updates

When it comes to text analytics software, there will always be new updates, new features, and new opportunities. We recommend adding a biannual calendar note to yourself to proactively identify how text analytics software is changing over time. By being open to change and by constantly onboarding new features, you have a real opportunity to stay ahead of the competition by keeping focus on continuous Experience Improvement (XI). 

For more information on text analytics, check out this eBook!

Blended Experience

In 2022, modern retailers will face many challenges as the industry continues to recover from the global pandemic. During the unpredictable lockdown, retail brands were forced to transform their in-person experiences to digital ones. And now, according to our most recent EX & CX Retail Trends research, both customers and employees expect a blended experience.

But what does the term “blended experience” really mean? Well, it’s essentially bringing the digital experience to the in-store experience. Hence, “blended”. Still not getting the gist of it? Then let’s take a look at three concrete examples we’ve discovered based on data our Strategic Insights Team collected from consumers and employees across North America. Here’s what people are truly expecting:

Blended Experience #1: Buy Online, Pick Up Instore

It’s no surprise that being able to buy products online is an expectation, but customers also want options on how to receive said product. During quarantine, retail stores often offered same-day home delivery, curbside pick up, and buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS). The question is, which of these will last? 

For employees, curbside and delivery have proven expensive to operate and don’t drive sales like in-store traffic does (especially if retail employees are working commission).  Meanwhile, because delivery is no longer considered a free necessity, and because curbside pick-up times aren’t as flexible, customers are less impressed with these options. So, BOPIS is a compromise: customers get to easily buy products online and receive their items relatively quickly, while employees get to engage with customers in-store while avoiding the obstacles those pickup types present.

Blended Experience #2: Pick Up, Walk Out (Automatic Payment)

After a long two years, customers and employees are used to a contactless experience and find it convenient for reasons beyond COVID. Additionally, with grocery stores continuing to capitalize on self-checkout experiences and innovations like Amazon Go’s Just Walk Out technology, more customers are expecting the retail industry to follow suit. Simply removing checkout lines can save retail stores over $37.7 billion and allow customers to shop without the hindrance of wasting time waiting in line.

Blended Experience #3: Virtual Try-On

Augmented reality in retail blew up during the pandemic. And, with the many social media filters that younger customers use daily, it’s no wonder that virtual try-on capability has emerged as a top expectation. Of course, customers would rather not wait to change in a stall or travel all the way to a store, but the real kicker is that virtual try-on actually minimizes a lot of risk for them.

One of the greatest barriers for online retail experiences is the reality that customers can’t really try on what they buy. With a virtual feature like this, customers get a visual sense of how the items they’re eyeing could fit in their lives, without ever having to leave home. After a virtual try-on experience, customers are reassured that their purchases truly suit their desires, reducing the chance of returns.

The In-Store Experience of the Future

It’s clear that, when it comes to retail, customers want a blend of digital and in-person experiences, not just one or the other. Both types of experiences have their pros and cons, and it’s our job as experience professionals to deliver an integrated interaction that brings forth each of their valuable qualities. Hopefully, these examples can help your brand take a second look at the experience you’re currently providing customers and spark meaningful Experience Improvement (XI) this year.

But this dynamic doesn’t stop at just blended experiences. The retail world is being impacted by changes in feedback methods, the influence of social media, and the Gen Z perspective. There are many opportunities beyond blended experiences for retail stores to meet customer needs, which you can learn more about in our new eBook: EX & CX Trends: What Retail Brands Need to Know in 2022.

Regulatory Compliance

Companies are investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) to save money and time—especially those in industries who have to constantly deal with regulatory compliance documents. After all, who wants to sift through endless amounts of tables and lists? Those working in legal, medical, or financial sectors are often all too familiar with this infamous struggle. And considering this, it makes sense that PwC predicts AI could contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy in the near future. Busy work, laborious practices, and the humdrum of paperwork are not the most ideal job duty for any employee. This poses an important question: is AI powerful enough so that no employee will ever have to touch a regulatory compliance document again?

To help you answer that question, here are the top three things you need to consider:

Consideration #1: What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Fundamentally, we should think of artificial intelligence as a tool rather than a replacement for human expertise. AI doesn’t accomplish anything without a proper wielder to fully comprehend how to use it. Therefore, it’s key to rethink your AI strategy. Ask yourself, how are you approaching AI? 

Let’s first take a look at the problem at hand. Regulatory compliance documents require an extreme attention to detail due to their naturally complex text structure. That’s why traditional text analytics don’t necessarily do the trick. Essentially, what you want AI to do is to read, check, and extract data from a document that’s written and filled out by humans. 

The thing is these documents aren’t standardized, resulting in arbitrary changes in format and other elements. This puts AI in a tough situation. As a technology that functions through learning from examples, how can it learn if the examples change unpredictably?

Consideration #2: AI Cannot Succeed Alone

That doesn’t mean you should totally scrap AI, it just needs a little help. In the case of regulatory compliance, AI cannot succeed alone, but it can be a core part of your success. To tackle regulatory compliance documents, you need a combination of three technologies: 

  • Semi-Structured Data Parsing
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Machine Learning and AI

Each of these technologies supply needed functions, such as extracting text, understanding the meaning of a text, pattern recognition and response, etc. But with all these helpful aids, the human eye still remains the most reliable. Technology may not be able to totally replace humans in this context, but it can certainly provide a solution that mitigates the heavy burden of regulatory compliance.

Consideration #3: Designing an Effective and Personal AI Strategy

It’s likely that your specific industry and country encounters problems other companies outside of your field or location don’t. In that way, making sure that your AI implementation covers all bases in the documents you process can feel like a solo battle. And that’s why you need to invest in a platform that will allow for the customization your brand needs. Regulatory compliance documents vary depending on the business setting and thus have unique requirements for AI to fulfill.

Wrapping It Up

So the short answer is no, in this case AI cannot fully replace humans in regulatory compliance. But it can certainly aid businesses in working more efficiently and effectively. Rather than approaching this as AI or humans, one or the other, it should instead be AI for humans. Many AI for compliance tools fail to provide useful solutions because they don’t understand this complex relationship.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to sharpen your approach to AI for regulatory compliance, read the full white paper where we also include specific case examples!

Customer Experience Governance

The term “customer experience (CX) program” refers to an immensely broad concept. But at the same time, a “customer experience program” encompasses countless daily actions and processes. How do you keep track of all your efforts? And what do you need to do to keep them going? That’s where a customer experience governance foundation comes in—and more specifically, where this governance checklist we put together for you becomes the most useful.

Think of it as the ultimate cheat sheet you need to ensure that your program is meeting all the standards it needs to make an impact. If you are able to cross off all the elements, you’ll be able to put in place the right framework—allowing your organization to continuously match your customers’ needs. Additionally, you’ll bring everyone together towards a consistent company mission. To help you start off your own CX governance checklist, let’s take a look at three must-haves:

Must-Have #1: Defined CX Leaders

Customer experience governance begins with a dedicated council to support your ongoing program’s initiatives and efforts. The key here is inviting a diverse range of stakeholders to the larger CX conversation. What should each team contribute and receive so that the program is distributing significant value across the board? 

Not only is enabling leaders important to understanding the needs of the business and customers, but it also establishes a successful foundation for cross-business communication. The worst you can do for your program is to set it in a silo where no one is being heard. Customer experience improvement should be a company-wide investment because it can make a company-wide impact.

Must-Have #2: CX Program’s Rules and Regulations

Without rules and regulations, your CX governance structure will collapse. Clearly mapping out your program’s goals, outcomes, KPIs, etc. on a realistic timeframe sets you up for success. Teams across the business will be more enthusiastic and determined to overcome challenges if they’re directly involved in the planning process. Rather than someone from the outside demanding that a team meet certain KPIs by a certain time; it’s more likely that employees will be able to deliver on those requests through the support and understanding of their manager’s personal engagement with the program. And that’s how a healthy CX culture can be cultivated in the workplace—with a healthy customer experience governance foundation.

Must-Have #3: Ongoing Inspiration for Teammates Across the Company

Oftentimes, there needs to be an even greater push to drive a CX program to the forefront of your business initiatives. For that to happen, you need to broadcast what your program is, the value it produces based on concrete data or customer stories, and how it’s working wonders for customers. The more teams on board with your program will help sustain it in the long run and produce greater results. 

There are endless ways to share customer experience with and inspire your teammates—whether it’s an elevator pitch presentation of why a CX program matters or sending consistent updates of how the program is making impactful changes among your customer base. You might need to think a little creatively as each industry operates differently. But there are no shortage of avenues to reach the employees who would support your cause through and through.

Now a Customer Experience governance checklist isn’t a static one. It calls for continuous revision, additions, and hopefully completions! So this isn’t the end. There are probably countless boxes you can think of right now that need to be filled. Get a headstart adding to your checklist today by reading the full white paper where we give an in-depth look at what will make your program stick.

Deprioritising Customer Experience

It’s no secret that the Head Of Operations and the Head Of Customer Experience often have differing priorities. This happens because each party, due to their experience, sees the business through a different lens. In fact, COVID-19 has further encouraged most businesses to prioritise a more operational lens, decreasing their focus on the customer experience. As things begin to open up, however, this lack of emphasis on creating positive customer experiences could prove to be problematic as the care a company has put into CX initiatives during this pandemic will surely affect their business post-pandemic.

My name is Justin Rehayem, Head of APAC Solution Designer at Pearl-Plaza, and I’ve seen this first-hand. To be clear, I do not believe that businesses prioritising operations over customer experience the past few years means that they do not care about the customer experience. However, decreasing CX initiatives in the short term can truly cause some long term effects, especially when it comes to customer churn. 

We can’t change the past, but what we can do is learn from it. When future times of crisis present themselves (as they’re sure to do) we as CX professionals can carry forward this lesson: that both operations and customer experience need to be prioritised in order to make it through hard times. 

Balancing Operations and Customer Experience: A Case Study

To get a better look at this concept, let’s analyse a policy at an ANZ airline.

First, some context for our international readers. New Zealand’s international border remains closed to the world until at least April 30th 2022, with arrivals having to undergo a 14 day hotel quarantine. In April 2021 however, New Zealand entered into a quarantine free travel agreement with Australia leading to a surge of flight bookings throughout 2021 and into 2022. Unfortunately, due to the rise of the Delta variant, this quarantine free travel agreement was short lived. With quarantine back on the table, as you would expect, airlines had to cancel their international flights and offer credits or refunds to their customers. 

But what about domestic flights within New Zealand? You would expect those to be converted into a credit as well since the international visitors cannot enter the country and board the plane. Well, not all airlines agree. Some airlines took a stance that since domestic borders are open, and since the domestic flight can take off, then ‘normal fare rules apply.’

An operations leader might view this situation as the customer’s fault since the international visitor chose not to purchase a flexi fare. Therefore, they should not be entitled to a credit, and must pay the change fee of $50 if they wish to move their flight.

What complicates the policy above is the fact that now there is no certainty when New Zealand’s international borders will open quarantine free, what with the rise of the Omicron variant and nations reverting back to lockdown measures. So what does an international visitor do? Do they change their flight to a future date and pay $50? And risk paying another $50 if the borders are not opened, or just forfeit their airline ticket all together?

Whatever they choose, I can tell you with certainty that when customers have a negative experience, they develop a negative perception of the brand. And this negative perception doesn’t stop with one person, research indicates that an individual’s negative experience with a brand is shared with at least five other people. 

A customer-focused policy will view the long term impact this policy can have on a customer’s lifetime value and compare it against the financial impact that a customer centric policy will have on the business. This must be at the root of their reasoning as they advocate for the customer, showing the financial impact of both operations-focused and customer-focused policies side by side. Why? Numbers are the universal cross-functional language spoken by the CEO, CFO, and COO. 

What Is the Financial Impact of Customer Churn?

As an example, let’s quantify the possible financial impact to an airline with a less customer-focused policy.

You probably will have gathered by now that I am one of those unlucky customers that have been impacted by the policy having lost $260 on two economy tickets. My partner and I fly at least twice a year to visit family, and you probably can guess by now that I won’t be flying with an airline that doesn’t have customer-focused policies in place. And at $600 a return flight per person, that equates to $2400 in lost revenue per year I choose to fly with a competitor. 

Remember how I said that an individual’s negative experience with a brand is shared with at least five other people? Well in my case that number is around 100—since I have around 100 international guests flying overseas for my wedding. With airline tickets so competitively priced, who do you think they will be flying with? So assuming that all my guests follow through on their promise to book a customer-focused airline, then that’s already $60,000 in lost revenue. 

So what did this airline gain from deprioritising the customer experience? In my specific circumstances, they may have gained back my forfeited economy flights for $260, but they also forfeited $62,400 in lost revenue over the next 12 months. If the business had offered its international visitors a flight credit for their domestic flight, what would they have lost? The answer is not much, especially compared to the cost of a disgruntled customer.

Wrapping Up: Customer Churn Is Always Costly to Businesses

It’s important for businesses to take into account customer stories like this one when designing policies. A policy focusing that deprioritises customer experience has the potential to cost your business big time when it comes to recurring revenue.  

To learn more about customer churn and its impact to your business, check out this article, “Understanding the “Why” Behind Customer Churn”

Non-Purchaser Feedback

When it comes to collecting feedback, of course we want to hear what our actual customers have to say about their experience. But, what about those individuals who have yet to make a purchase? Without a transaction, these non-purchasers won’t receive an invitation to take a survey—but, their experience is just as important to listen to and understand. In fact, non-purchaser feedback can offer you additional perspective that you wouldn’t get otherwise.

Non-purchaser feedback is valuable for many reasons—it can help point your brand to the reasons why customers might not be completing transactions as well as help you discover critical experience gaps in the customer journey

Here are three customer experience (CX) solutions you can use to connect with and understand the experience of non-purchasers:

Solution #1: Use a Digital Intercept on Your Website

One of the most prominent solutions is to use digital intercepts on your website. An example of this is Foot Locker—this retail brand uses an ‘always on’ listening tab on their homepage that collects feedback from both customers and non-purchasers. 


When it comes to connecting with customers that haven’t completed a purchase, digital intercepts are a creative solution for collecting feedback. For example, Foot Locker uses a web survey that pops up in an iframe after customers browse for more than five minutes, if they abandon their cart items, or if they return using the same IP address multiple times without completing a transaction. 

These are all opportunities to engage with your customers and better understand their experience, allowing you to better inform your business on what actions need to be taken to improve these experiences—and improve conversation rates.  

Solution #2: Encourage Employees to Invite Non-Purchasers to Participate 

Because the employee experience (EX) is tied so closely to the customer experience (CX), of course we recommend to involve your frontline staff as much as possible in your overall CX program. These employees can be your greatest asset when it comes to connecting with non-purchasers. 

Many retailers use posters throughout the store to encourage feedback, and others will hand out QR codes on cards to shoppers if they leave empty handed. Simply asking staff to promote the feedback program to both customers and non-purchasers will boost the volume of feedback and insights for your business, and help you understand more about the in-store experience gaps and opportunities to improve. 

Having a CX program that incorporates the voice of employee is a modern day ‘must’. Make sure you have an easily accessible channel for your employees to share the feedback that they are hearing from customers each day. It is far too valuable to ignore! 

Solution #3: Consolidate Your Solicited Customer Feedback with Your Unsolicited Social Feedback

Let’s face it, 80% or more of the customer feedback you’ll collect will come from customers, people that have made one or many purchases from your brand. A channel that is already rich in non-purchaser feedback is social. There are loads of reviews that exist today about your brand, about your website, or about the in-store experience that a non-purchaser has already shared. If you are reading and acting on these already, that’s terrific. 

The next step is then to consolidate all this rich non-purchaser feedback into your broader CX program. Having all your feedback in one location improves your level of understanding, broadens the range of customers you’ll hear from and leads to much clearer decision making across the whole of your business.

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