You’re sitting down to carve out the newest survey in your customer experience (CX) program. You know what touchpoint you’re examining, what you’re hoping to learn, and what questions you’re going to ask. Now it’s time to settle on the survey rating scale you’ll use.
Unsure of which scale to choose? I’m Kiri Burgess, a Senior CX Consultant at Pearl-Plaza APAC. Together, with our Director of Marketing Sciences, Sharon Allberg, in this post we’ll share with you a collection of best practice tips for using rating scales in your customer surveys
What Is a Survey Rating Scale?
If you’ve ever put together a customer survey, you will no doubt have used a rating scale as an option for respondents.
Survey rating scales are a way to ask a “closed question” to survey respondents, and collect valuable input in a quantitative way. Here’s an example:
There are a number of important considerations when using rating scales including:
Number of scale points
Anchoring of scale points
Midpoints
Colors and images
The choice of which survey rating scale to use can be perplexing. And while academic research is vast, it’s not always relevant to market or customer experience research, which can leave a number of unanswered questions.
Whatever scale you choose, the aim with a survey rating scale is to limit individual interpretation and ambiguity. In an ideal world, you want all respondents to view a scale in the same way.
Having reviewed scale literature and our own internal research; then overlaid client and research experience, here are five tips for survey rating scale success:
Here Are Five Pro Tips for Survey Rating Scale Success
Tip #1: Longer Scales Typically Reveal More Actionable Insight
There is not a great deal of evidence on the difference in performance between shorter (i.e. 5 point) or longer (i.e. 10 point) scales from a respondent point of view—but the advantage of a longer scale is you’ll get greater differentiation in response. Responses will be more spread out due to having a longer scale. This typically results in stronger driver analysis revealing more actionable insight.
Tip #2: Keep Survey Rating Scales as Consistent as Possible
If you can, decide on a rating scale size and stick with it throughout your survey. Greater scale consistency will not only make it easier for respondents but it also makes it easier to communicate what a good result looks like to the business as all questions will calculate ‘good’ the same way with the same scale points. We understand that this isn’t always straight forward so if you do change your scale in your survey, that’s okay. Our advice would be not to chop and change scale lengths multiple times which will cause respondents confusion and fatigue.
Tip #3: Label Your Scales Appropriately
How to best label your scale will depend on the scale length. For shorter 5 point scales, we recommend labeling each scale point for clarity. However, this isn’t an easy task for longer 10 or 11 point scales as you quickly run out of space (particularly on mobile devices!). Therefore for longer scales, we recommend labeling the end points only. Whatever scale you go for, labels should only be attached to the appropriate single scale point.
Tip #4: When It Comes to Mid Points, Assess On a Case-by-Case Basis
Researchers like to include mid points for respondents who are undecided.
There is some evidence that neutral respondents will answer randomly if they don’t have a neutral option to pick; however, this point-of-view comes from the world of public policy research. Therefore, at Pearl-Plaza we recommend a case-by-case approach and to include a midpoint if it makes sense. With satisfaction or agreement scales, it is more common to use a midpoint.
Tip #5: Avoid Scale Colors and Images
Research has shown that coloring scales (even shades of gray) or adding images or icons (including smiley faces) is not recommended, as this leads to scales being inconsistently interpreted by respondents. Examples include colors being an issue for those who are color blind; and images, icons and smiley faces having different meaning for everyone, particularly those who are neurodiverse (which is estimated at 15-20% of the population).
There you have it—five best practices to help you avoid bias, optimise your surveys, and collect the most actionable insights possible. To learn more about best practice surveys, check out this paper on Transactional Customer Experience Survey Best Practices.
Cross-selling and upselling have formed the bedrock of brand aspirations for their existing customer base for a long time now. For several years, it was also one of four economic pillars (along with customer acquisition, customer retention, and lowering cost to serve) my colleagues and I used to frame customer experience (CX) programs for our clients. Using these pillars allows companies to spell their programs out in financial terms, which is essential to quantifying their impact and gathering support.
While cross-selling and upselling existing clientele is certainly important, there’s actually a much more holistic (and ambitious) way to approach new business opportunities within your customer base: drive customer lifetime value (CLV). Focusing on driving customer lifetime value won’t ‘just’ help with identifying upselling opportunities—it will facilitate and create deeper human connections with customers and ensure mutually beneficial relationships built on Experience Improvement (XI). Let’s take a closer look.
Casting a Wider Net
Keeping customers around for as long as possible to sell them as much as possible is a great aspiration, but as I’m sure you’re aware, it’s much easier said than done. However, I’ve been advising companies on this very topic for a long time, and while it’s not simple, what follows are a few best practices that can help you continuously and consistently achieve that goal in ways that are mutually beneficial to you and your clients.
First, if you haven’t already, expand the data sources that you use to understand what your customers are saying and how they perceive you. Many of the brands I’ve worked with for a long time are slowly coming to the realization that they cannot stick solely to surveys or another singular data source to get customer insights and input. And, while surveys will continue to be important, they only give you part of the picture. Expanding your data repertoire to such sources as purchasing data, location-tracking data, web searches, social media, and online reviews is a must.
Next, it’s vital to take the long view when looking at your customer relationships. This may seem like an obvious tip, but you might be surprised at how many brands get caught up in the lure of “what can I sell you today?” without considering what seeds to plant for even more success tomorrow. Equally important is to understand how your competitors view this dynamic and what, if anything, they’re also doing to be proactive when it comes to building lifetime value.
Letting Customers Tell Success Stories
If there’s one thing I loved doing when I was on the client side as a CX program owner, it was telling stories. I can speak from experience when I say that letting customers do the success storytelling is an amazingly powerful way to build lifetime value with them. Good storytelling can bring numbers to life, further personalize customers’ experiences, and it gets attention because customers and even employees generally relate more to stories told by, well, other customers.
Executives and program stakeholders love customer-told success stories too. Letting customers do the talking helped me gain mindshare, helped me secure budget, and created the sponsorship that I needed to help make my program better. This strategy also helps executives feel a human connection to your CX program; they love to hear stories about how the organization created a meaningfully improved experience for another person.
The Customer Lifetime Value Journey
The tips I’ve outlined here will help you start (or jump-start) your customer lifetime value journey, but how do you keep the ball rolling? What other methods out there can brands and organizations leverage to go beyond ‘just’ cross-selling and upselling?
You can find all of that and more by clicking here and reading my latest point of view article on customer lifetime value. You’ll learn what else your organization needs to do to create Experience Improvement and a more human connection to your existing customers!
CX operations, or customer experience operations, are all about the systems, automation, and lines of communication that make possible a unified, cross-functional approach to improving customer experience. Do you need a customer experience manager dedicated to managing this effort? Let’s find out.
Getting customers to fall in love with your company requires understanding the entire customer journey—so you can deliver a seamless experience at every touchpoint.
That’s not too tall an order if you are a young startup with only a handful of employees, all focused on customer experience (CX). After all, in those early stages, they have no choice but to study every step in the journey. By nature, a startup is all about the big picture.
However, as your company begins to scale, you may face the same challenges as large enterprises. CX efforts then become more specialized, and that’s when silos begin to form. Before you know it, you’ve got different departments using separate technologies and focusing on different metrics—fragmenting your understanding of the customer experience.
That’s when it’s time to consider hiring or appointing a CX manager. At this point, you need someone who can break down those silos, unify your tech stack, and unite your directors, VPs, and business units in the ultimate goal of creating a friction-free, productive, and delightful customer experience—from onboarding to renewal and advocacy.
What Is a Customer Experience Manager (CX Manager) ?
In order to understand what a CX Manager does—and why the role is so vital as companies scale—let’s picture a growing SaaS company, for example, that is considering adding this role. They’ve got a sales team focused on enterprise sales, a customer success team that largely spends its time making onboarding simple and straightforward, and a customer support team that’s available to fix problems. And of course, they’ve got a product team constantly working to improve their software with customers in mind.
Obviously, they have plenty of other departments, and each affects the customer experience to varying degrees (e.g., marketing, finance), but let’s focus on these four for the point of illustration. Each department has its own set of metrics, uses its own software, and focuses its attention on one specific leg of the customer journey.
The issue? You’ve got four different departments using different technology to record different metrics and measure their own aspect of the customer journey. It’s like the old story about the blind men who discover an elephant in the forest. They each know only one part of the elephant—the part they can touch—so nobody can agree what an elephant is actually like. After all, they’re each focused on a different body part (the trunk, the body, the leg, the tail).
The role of a CX manager is to determine, implement, and refine the CX technology and vision required to see the entire customer journey from the customer’s perspective.
This role determines the best way to collect, analyze, and act on voice of customer data at key touchpoints across the customer journey.
Determine how, technically, to monitor sentiment at critical touchpoints. For example, what system “knows” when a user is “onboarded”? How can that data be used to trigger a request for feedback? In what customer experience management platform?
Facilitate close-the-loop action. Enable stakeholders to respond to customer feedback quickly by moving feedback into the systems they use everyday.
Democratize insight and action. This can mean creating CX dashboards that provide stakeholders with the ability to monitor and research what they care about. And, more importantly, to understand what actions they need to take in order to improve the over all customer experience.
So, What Does a CX Manager in Action Look Like?
The Salesforce Solution Architect and Senior Application Engineer who holds the cross-functional CX technology vision at Glassdoor shares, “The Pearl-Plaza platform allows our Support team to segment feedback by agent and other relevant business drivers to uncover insights that contribute to optimizing our support function, and it can also reveal bottlenecks that are best addressed by improving product features or design.”
Define a single source of truth for the voice of the customer (VoC). This can include determining where data will be aggregated into a single VoC feedback hub for research into and across journey points.
Work with vendors and cross-functional stakeholders to implement the technology vision. Often this happens in a phased project approach, touchpoint by touchpoint.
Keep the focus on the big picture—to understand that the elephant is more than the trunk, the body, the leg, or the tail.
Try as they might, individual departments have a hard time seeing the big picture since they’re so specialized (and are rarely incentivized by big picture metrics). That’s where the CX Ops manager or CX manager enters the picture.
What Kind of Background Should a CX Manager Have?
We’ve seen a wide range of candidates succeed in the role of CX manager—from Salesforce Administrators to Senior Sales Ops professionals to Customer Success or Customer Experience/VoC leaders. Even marketing folks have successfully led CX ops efforts.
It makes sense that good CX people would come from different backgrounds, since this role is about as cross-functional as it gets. What we can tell you is that there are certain qualities and skill sets, rather than specific career trajectories, that predict success in this role.
4 Qualities to Look for in a CX Manager
Quality #1: Diplomacy and Negotiation Skills
The person heading up CXOps must have some serious interpersonal skills, able to balance all the stakeholders’ needs and drives with the overarching goals and available resources. They’ll need to convince a range of departments—not just the customer-facing ones—just how vital these efforts are to the long term success of the company.
They will lead team meetings, communicate strategies, and move projects forward while holding everyone to a timeline (including executives). On top of that, they must be able to obtain a clear mandate and buy-in from their C-suite sponsors (or the head of CX, at the very least). In other words, they must possess both empathy and assertiveness in spades.
Quality #2: Deep Understanding of How the Tech Stack Works as a System
Your various technology platforms (Zendesk, Pearl-Plaza, Gainsight, Salesforce, Slack, Segment, etc.) need to work together as a system. Otherwise, your information silos stay intact and your customer journey remains fragmented.
On top of that, they’ll need to find the gaps in your current capabilities and identify solutions to fill them. Sometimes this involves purchasing entirely new systems, other times it’s simply a matter of integrating what you’re currently working with. Usually, it’s a bit of both.
Quality #3: Project Management Mastery
Your Customer Experience Operations Manager will need some serious project management chops, including the ability to plan out timelines and budgets end-to-end (and get everybody to stick to them). They also need to know how to purchase from vendors without using an RFP.
Quality #4: A Strong Understanding of Procurement
“Let’s spend more money on systems just because we can!” Said no executive, ever.
Executives have grown wary of new B2B software that promises to solve all their problems, and middle-management is rarely overjoyed at the prospect of retraining staff on new platforms. That said, sometimes the current systems don’t cut it, and it’s up to the CX ops manager to understand the tradeoffs when evaluating new technology and delivering an integrated system that gets the job done.
Use Case: What a Fully-Integrated CX Initiative Looks Like
Every integrated CX initiative will look different depending on your existing technology, current integrations, and where you are in your growth cycle. That said, the following is a bird’s eye view of a solid CX initiative, and it should help get you started.
We’ll assume you have created a customer journey map and can tell your CX ops manager the make-or-break touchpoints that you want to optimize. You’ll also be responsible for forming a cross-functional team of stakeholders that are committed to improving the journey and to supporting the efforts of the CX manager.
Technology Needs Assessment
The CX ops manager should meet with each stakeholder team to understand:
The technology they are using today
Their CX data needs. This goes beyond metrics. It includes the customer data each team needs to make data segmentation and analysis useful. For example, support may need to associate customer satisfaction (CSAT) feedback with an agent. Success might need to know the user’s account, role, or pricing plan. Product may want to know how long a survey respondent has been a platform user.
Gather Voice-of-the-Customer (VOC) data (examples)
Relationship data: Gather Net Promoter Score (NPS) data in-app or via email, or wherever you interact with customers.
Onboarding data: Calculate Customer Effort Score (CES) from surveys following the WalkMe onboarding tour (via Segment event data or Salesforce workflows)
Customer satisfaction data: Conduct CSAT surveys after Zendesk or Service Cloud case closures.
Product satisfaction data: Collect PSAT data after feature use (in-app) and after closing the loop on customer service interactions (in chat or via email)
Support tickets: The content of support inquiries is a source of VOC.
Reviews: What are customers saying about your on Capterra or G2?
Brand or user surveys: Any open-ended feedback from lengthy surveys.
Addressing Customer Pain Points and Closing the Loop
Strengthen the front line: Make it easy for teams to respond directly to customers by getting survey responses into the systems they live in. Populate the data in real time. For example, send Pearl-Plaza survey responses to contact and account records in Salesforce for the sales team, to Intercom for Support, to Gainsight for Success or to Slack for the product team.
Leverage your happiest customers: Send review and referral requests to promoters via Marketo, HubSpot, or another customer communication platform like Intercom
Big Picture Analysis
Create a roadmap: Allow qualitative feedback to drive your plan for CX improvement. Use it to understand the why behind the metrics, prioritize projects by predicting the potential impact on customer lifetime value. Build text analytics dashboards and reports that are customized for each team (support, success, Product, etc.) in your CXM platform. (Hint: Pearl-Plaza can do this!)
Centralize your data: Build a central voice of customer (VoC) repository for deep analysis. This can mean augmenting customer journey feedback with support ticket content, online reviews, and brand surveys.
Integrate CX into business analysis: Export metrics and metadata to the company’s data lake/business intelligence tool.
Note: It’s absolutely vital to use a CX management platform that integrates smoothly with new and existing systems.
The Value of Executive Buy-in and Support
As you can see, the success of your integration efforts will rest largely on the shoulders of your new CX manager, who will have their finger on the pulse of the entire customer experience. They’ll connect departments that normally go days or weeks without interacting, so in order to set them up for success, they’ll need support from senior management.
Why is that so important? It’s all about in-group bias. It’s human nature to think of the world in terms of “us” vs. them,” or “our department” vs. “their department.” This potentially puts CX ops at odds with, well… literally every department they encounter—unless the executive sponsor puts those worried minds at ease.
With executive buy-in and support, the CX ops Manager will have the authority and credibility they need to suggest the (sometimes) sweeping changes that would otherwise produce fear and resentment in those who have grown comfortable in their silo. A supportive c-suite executive can assure skeptics that this is the natural evolution of their efforts to serve customers at every stage in the journey. In turn, this paves the way for long term growth and success for the organization as a whole.Customer Experience Operations leaders chose Pearl-Plaza for customer experience management. Book a consultative demo today.
It’s been a crazy year for customer experience (CX), hasn’t it? Customers are factoring all sorts of new challenges and preferences into their brand decisions, and lots of companies have been busily playing catch up!
As we take off for the holidays (and hopefully get a chance to catch a relaxing break!) It’s normal to look toward the new year and wonder what’s next. Well, at Pearl-Plaza, knowing what’s next is in our DNA, and we’ve put together some of this year’s tip-top webinars to share what we’re seeing and help you make 2023 your best CX year yet!
4 Must-Watch CX Webinars
Webinar #1: Designing, Actioning, and Proving an ROI-Focused CX Program
ROI has always been a hot topic in the CX world, and it only got hotter in 2022. A lot of organizations struggle to link their CX efforts to ROI, which makes securing additional support and funding very difficult. In this first webinar, experts Jim Katzman and Eric Smuda take a look at this common, fundamental CX challenge and pour decades of experience into helping you overcome it. The webinar dives into:
The state of experience ROI & how we can bridge the gap
Webinar #2: Leveraging Customer Data to Craft Seamless, Differentiated Experiences In-Store and Online
Data was another big topic in 2022, and we can already tell it’s going to blow up even bigger next year. As we often say, data is as much an art as it is a science. Having data is great, but finding ways to sort through the noise to find actionable insights is what’s going to create actual Experience Improvement (XI).
We got two of our very own CX gurus, Radi Hindawi and David van Brocklin, to spill the beans on this data journey and how everyone, brands and customers, can get the most out of it, including:
How democratizing your data for an integrated view of experience creates consistency
How to increase organizational intelligence across your different stakeholders (from frontline to c-suite)
How can you increase loyalty and advocacy in this constantly changing market?
Webinar #3: Digital Acceleration: How to Start the Next Digital Trend
Being a trendsetter in your marketplace isn’t just fun; it helps your customers have meaningful experiences and helps you stay at the top! We put together a webinar on how organizations can create trends, not just follow them, and the insights from experts Radi Hindawi and Chris Chan made it a hit!
To give a quick recap, Radi and Chris talked about how digital transformation should no longer be the goal for companies; just a baseline. They then dove into the four steps that every brand should take to become a trendsetter in their verticals.
Want to see what those steps are? You can watch and find out here!
Webinar #4: Everything You Wanted to Know About CX ROI But Were Afraid to Ask
Like we said up top, ROI was a big topic this year. So big that we couldn’t confine it to one webinar!
After wrapping up our first ROI webinar of the year, we knew there was still a lot of ground to cover when it came to this important topic. We also saw an opportunity to collaborate with our close friends at Forrester Analytics and invited one of their top researchers, Judy Weader, to share her research on the subject. She and our very own Jim Katzman teamed up to discuss:
How brands are proving the value and ROI of CX and why it should matter to you
The steps you can take today that will set you and your program up for success
What it takes to shift from just sending surveys to being truly customer centric
The art of designing digital experiences that make a difference today
These webinars cover important topics and will help you reach your experience goals in the new year. We had a lot of fun making them and hope that you’ll get a similar experience from watching them. Once you’re done, we have other resources you should check out as you consider your experience goals and how to keep owning the moments that matter. Happy Holidays!
Digital experience trends are the new road maps of modern day business. Are you still using a paper map to direct you when you’re driving to work? Of course not, you’re using your smartphone that tells you where you are, when to turn, and if there is an accident up ahead.
Think of digital experience trends being the new maps application in your business. You aren’t waiting until the end of the year to get a mailed report containing consumer trends for the past year (hopefully), but rather you need to be keeping up with your consumers in real time. Identifying digital experience trends will help you adapt your business to get ahead of your consumer, not behind them.
It’s no understatement that you—along with every other business for that matter—are operating completely differently than you did in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way that businesses, well, do business. It has also changed the way that your customers interact with you.
Whether it be a customer, prospect, or non-buyer, every piece of the customer journey looks differently today than it did before the pandemic, particularly when it comes to the digital experience. Businesses have been forced into being digital-first. If you didn’t already have a digital presence, you were forced to adopt one, seemingly overnight. And post-COVID, if you haven’t already built a digital experience strategy, we hate to break it to you, but you’re already behind the buck.
Today’s customers aren’t going to be wooed by you just having digital options—they want you to supply truly innovative digital experiences. In other words, you don’t want to follow the digital experience trends, you want to be able to create them so your customers follow you. To help you out, our experts have pulled together a plan to help you mine the data that is going to help you uncover, and take advantage of new digital trends. Tune in below!
3 Steps to Start the Next Digital Experience Trend
Build a Strong Foundation with Integrated Experience
Strategize New Customer, Employee, & Non-Buyer Signals
Don’t Settle for Snapshots—Aim for Actionable Intelligence
Step #1: Build a Strong Foundation with an Integrated CX Approach
Your customers are talking about your business across multiple different channels. Whether it be directly to you (via surveys) or indirectly (through review sites, social media, and the like), your customers are creating signals throughout their journey. However, most CX platforms are still primarily focused on surveys and traditional metrics (in blue in the figure below).
In order to be successful, it is important to have a CX vendor that enables you to do more than take a traditional approach to feedback. We refer to our modern approach to experience as an Integrated CX approach.
As you can see in the figure below, Integrated CX takes into account all the new signals customers are sending and houses them in one place, the Pearl-Plaza XI Platform. Having a central location for all your customer data helps create a clearer, more consistent picture of the customer journey, empowering you to make more informed, data-backed business decisions in the future.
Step #2: Strategize New Customer, Employee, & Non-Buyer Signals
Gathering data in today’s business environment is easier than ever before. But, the challenge lies in gathering data and linking it to meaningful business KPIs such as customer loyalty, customer acquisition, or generally proving program ROI.
Below, you can see a graphic that illustrates the different feedback signals available today, and how they can be funneled into the XI Platform, then, leveraging the expertise of our Strategic Services Team and AI-Driven technology, you can go from just tracking metrics and scoreboard watching to using that data to uncover actionable insights that create meaningful improvement.
Step #3: Don’t Settle for Snapshots—Aim for Actionable Intelligence
When you export data out of a platform to analyze it, it is already somewhat outdated. Especially when considering the rapid evolution of social-based interactions, even data from the previous quarter might not accurately reflect how your customers are behaving.
In order to get a better understanding of how your customers work, what they are looking for, and what the next digital trend might be, you need to be getting your data in real time in order to keep up with the fast-paced digital landscape and start the next digital experience trend.
Sounds like a fairytale? Well, to prove to you that it’s possible to have always-on, real-time insights, we leveraged the XI Platform to pull over 120,000 data points across the retail industry over the course of seven days using Pearl-Plaza’s Integrated CX approach. From this data, we unearthed the following three actionable insights that you can use going forward:
1 of 3 emerging customers are more likely to interact with you through social signals, than traditional surveys
60% of those customers have purchased/adopted a new product or offering via a social signal
1 of 2 customers are likely to select a brand that offers a “one-stop” solution, with additional incentives and features (such as buy now, pay later)
Once you have these insights, you are able to empower teams across your business to make informed business decisions and implement customer-pleasing digital experience trends. And once you act on the intelligence, you’ll be able to point back to your experience program as the catalyst to success.
Thinking Outside the Survey
Don’t feel pressured to do things the way they have always been done. As a matter of fact, if the history of social channels have shown us anything, it’s that you need to be willing to try something different in order to succeed.
You’ll never fully understand your customers by just sending them surveys. But, if you interact with them through various social channels, you may be able to get a clearer picture of who they are, and what they want from you.
Want to learn more about understanding your customers, and how to kickstart the next digital trend? Watch the full presentation here!
In our recent blog, we discussed how you can improve your customer experience (CX) strategy in five simple steps. Customer experience often relates to the long-term relationship between customers and the companies they do business with. It reflects the summary of experiences at different points along the customer journey—such as considering doing business with a brand, making a purchase and becoming a customer, receiving additional services, having issues resolved, etc—and includes multiple channels: phone, in-person, email, and so on. These various interactions along the customer lifecycle—and, more specifically, those that have the most impact on the business—are what we like to call “Moments That Matter” (MTM) in customer experience.
But are there some moments that matter more than others in the overall customer experience? And if so, how do we assess their importance?
Five Questions to Address
What Are “Moments That Matter?”
How Are “Moments That Matter” Determined?
How Are “Moments That Matter” Measured?
How Is the Importance of Each “Moment That Matters” assessed?
Why Does the Technology You Use to Understand These Moments Matter?
Question #1: What Are “Moments That Matter?”
In the past couple of decades, it has become more clear that consumers are after more than just the “product” they purchase. Their choice to support a brand is more than just rational decision-making; it’s about emotions, too. Today’s organizations realize this; so, they try to continuously improve the way in which they deliver those experiences.
For example, many organizations measure call center experiences as a part of their CX program, which is a smart move. Service and support is a key element that defines customer experience, and it frequently generates memorable moments. But is the call center interaction all that matters for the customer?
“Moments That Matter” are the specific interactions—like a particularly superior or terrible call center experience—that trigger customers’ feelings and leave lasting impressions. These are the specific experiences that stand out more than others and impact the customers’ long-term opinions about the organization overall. Additionally, they can likely lead to a make-or-break decision about their future relationship with the organization.
Question #2: How Are “Moments That Matter” Determined?
A key step to identifying the “Moments That Matter” is understanding the customers’ journey throughout their relationship with the organization, from consideration and researching the product or service they need all the way through using said product or service.
Mapping this journey starts with the organization’s knowledge of its key customer touchpoints. Next, customers provide feedback and further input to pinpoints those touchpoints most important to them. They also provide context about their best and worst experiences, wins, and pain points. This mapping helps brands focus on the key “Moments That Matter,” because, in reality, not every touchpoint and every experience is as impactful as others in creating healthy and long-lasting relationships.
Question #3: How Are “Moments That Matter” Measured?
After understanding what “Moments That Matter” are, the next step is to measure the brand’s performance at each of those moments. This is typically done using a survey format that first asks customers to evaluate their overall experience with the company. Then, it should ask which MTMs they have experienced and evaluate those they are familiar with. It may also be effective to rate some MTMs on a battery of actional deep-dive attributes.
Question #4: How Is the Importance of Each “Moment That Matters” Assessed?
There are two general ways to assess the importance of each MTM:
Ask how important each MTM is (so-called “stated importance”), or
Mathematically derive importance from each MTM’s ratings and the overall experience with the company (“derived importance”).
Derived importance has an advantage in that it does not require additional questions and simply uses respondents’ evaluation of each MTM they experienced. In general, the rating for each MTM is aligned with the overall experience rating, and the MTM that best follows the overall experience rating is therefore the most important. This type of analysis is called “driver analysis.” At Pearl-Plaza, we use a technique called True Driver Analysis, which surpasses other approaches in quality of results.
Question #5: Why Does the Approach You Use to Understand These Moments Matter?
Different statistical approaches can be used to conduct a driver analysis and assess the importance of each MTM: correlation analysis, regression analysis, structural equation modeling, and partial least squares, to name a few. The results of these approaches, however, may be biased in the presence of a strong relationship among the MTMs themselves (called “multicollinearity”).
For this reason, Pearl-Plaza uses True Driver Analysis, which is a technique designed specifically to avoid this type of bias and to assess the “true” relative impact of each MTM on an overall outcome metric. As an output of True Driver Analysis, organizations can identify the key Moments That Matter, focus their efforts, and be able to improve customer experience, loyalty, and ultimately, the bottom line.
A Visual of Pearl-Plaza Driver Analysis
With continuous experience improvement being a key enabler of happier customers and long-lasting customer relationships, it is most critical to identify and focus on the Moments That Matter in every experience delivered.
To read more about a proven strategy for continuously improving experiences across your brand in five steps—as well as the brands who have found success with it—check out this article for free today!
Earlier this year, Pearl-Plaza hosted an XI Forum with two incredible speakers—both of whom run experience programs for franchisees. Steve Grossrieder, CEO of JAX Tyres & Auto, and Jess Gill, Chief Customer Officer for Craveable Brands, know exactly what it takes to keep franchisees inspired, and make sure experience programs stick across the organization.
Here Are Your Questions Answered by the VoF Experts:
Expert #1:Steve Grossrieder, CEO and Managing Director at JAX Tyres & Auto
Q: Your NPS at the franchise level is incredible. How do you train staff in the franchises to instill customer experience in all that they do, maximizing sales?
A: We hold best practice and networking sessions in each region with small groups of franchisees to discuss CX best practice and to show our main pain points and how to implement simple procedures to improve these. We also develop CX action plans for all stores under 75 NPS on a monthly basis which shows their detractor feedback analyzed, how they compare to the network and potential actions based on their individual insights to improve their NPS. Additionally, our service proposition is centered around our JAX inspection report—we focus our franchisees on this proposition to deliver our consumer promise to peace of mind driving and our sales naturally translate from identifying customer vehicle issues through the inspection process which is transparent and customer centric.
Q: How and what do you share with franchisees from a CX scoring perspective, and how frequently?
All franchisees have access to their stores individual CX results including their stores NPS, channel performance, monthly comparison trend (compared to the network), as well as text analytics split by promoter, passive and detractor. They also have a case management section which shows customers who have asked to be contacted showing the JAX SLA time to review and resolve with the aim to retain their customers.
Additionally, we share the monthly CX results via a monthly report and internal newsletter showing the ten highest and ten lowest scoring stores, top complaint trends and insights for that month as well as tips and best practices to implement to ensure a consistent experience across the network. We also have multiple digital screens displaying our CX results throughout head office (updated hourly) and our monthly NPS and a selection of customer feedback is displayed on our website and intranet for consumer and franchisee transparency.
Q: Please share more on how you managed to show a clear link between CX improvement and ROI or sales improvement? It’s often a challenge in many industries.
A: Initially this was a challenge; however we have been able to establish (with historical data) the clear link between a higher than average network NPS and the gross profit that these stores make above the network average. We now have clear examples of stores increasing their NPS and their increase in gross profit follows on with a two to three month lag period. NPS has now become a key gross profit lead indicator which we have demonstrated multiple times across the business and now do it store by store to promote culture change and customer centricity.
Expert #2: : Jess Gill, Chief Customer Officer at Craveable Brands (Oporto, Chicken Treat, Red Rooster)
Q: Which channels does Craveable Brands use to capture customer feedback?
A: We use QR codes, email to loyalty customers, Digital Intercept (an Pearl-Plaza application on the XI Platform empowering brands to capture real-time data from their website visitors) and customer panels.
Q: How do you win back your customer? How do you capture it? How do you let your customer know that your company is implementing their feedback?
A: We win back customers by training staff (in person) that it is okay to own up to errors and to make them right, running our case management program. As for any feedback for the head office, that gets directed to the right people—for example, we made changes based on feedback to bring back our old nugget recipe, and we went back to each of those customers to let them know.
Q: How do you consider feedback through third party apps such as Menulog, Deliveroo, etc?
A: Craveable Brands’ post-transaction survey asks about delivery partner feedback to feed back to them. The feedback collected by delivery partners remains separate from our VoC program today though we look to integrate to have one view down the track.
Shep Hyken, a well-known customer service consultant, recently shared that 42% of people would rather clean a toilet than call customer support. This statistic actually didn’t surprise me given how often support experiences leave much to be desired.
This got me thinking: Why is that the case when none of us would claim to enjoy cleaning a toilet!? And I decided that the reluctance to call customer support came down to three factors:
Control
Time to task completion
And likelihood things are done right the first time
Let’s take a closer look at each of these factors—and how organizations can address them in their customer support initiatives!
3 Factors Impacting the Customer Support Experience
Factor #1: Control
Since I am the one cleaning the toilet, I have control over when and how the job is done and how well it is done. That is not often the case in the support experience.
Yes, more companies and brands are trying to shift the customer service experience to a self-serve one, where the person needing support can find their own answers via the company’s internet site, user forums, or at worst a chat session. But let’s be honest, these moves are not being done to put the customer in control of the experience; they are being done to save the company money by shifting the experience to lower cost channels and reducing the labor costs in the call center.
Unfortunately, because these self-serve support initiatives are motivated by a cost-savings lens and not a customer experience one, they are often not executed very well. People can’t find the answer they need online, or the answer doesn’t make sense or completely solve their problem. And chatbots are often effective at solving very simple queries, but not complex ones.
The other reality is that consumers want to interact with a live person. According to CDP.com, 64% of consumers say access to live people would significantly improve customer experience. So while shifting the support burden to the consumer or low-cost (non-human) channels may save the company money, it is not engendering customer loyalty when that is not how the consumer wants to interact with your company.
Factor #2: Time to Completion
As mentioned, no one enjoys cleaning a toilet, but if we are honest, it takes no more than a couple minutes, less than 10 for even the dirtiest of them. But how many customer-support experiences take only a few minutes?
It often takes you at least a few minutes to get through the automated phone tree, only to be told your hold time is much longer than a few minutes! While some brands are now using automated callbacks that adds some convenience in that you don’t have to actually wait on hold (ironically being told how important your call is over and over and over again), how likely is it that you get a call back when it is convenient for you? It’s more likely that you have moved on to other tasks only to be interrupted by that call.
Factor #3: Getting Things Done Right the First Time
Finally, we arrive at the last factor: first-call resolution (as call center leaders call it). I want you to think back to your last few call center interactions: What percentage of the time is your issue really resolved on the first call, with no transfers and no additional hold time?
Too often the first agent you speak with is either brand new and not trained properly, or the company’s knowledge base does not provide them quick access to the answer to your issue, or they are not empowered to resolve your issue without “supervisor approval” or a transfer to a manager.
There are several problems with how most companies measure first call resolution:
It is not measuring total effort to resolution. Most likely, you have already searched the website or FAQs or user forums and possibly tried the chatbot before getting to a live agent. So it is measuring the call, but not measuring customer time and effort.
If it is measured based on agent data entry, it is not measuring consumer confidence that the issue was resolved and it is making that judgment likely well before the customer has experienced the solution and feels confident it is resolved.
If it is measured based on survey responses, it is not representative of the total customer base, but only those customers who completed the follow-up survey, a small percentage of the customers who contacted customer support.
My colleagues at Pearl-Plaza often hear me say “every call to the call center is a broken customer experience somewhere upstream.” Given that, your call center is your safety net and last chance to “save” the customer and ensure a continued relationship and extended lifetime value.
Yet, too many companies see their call center as only a cost and something that can be managed or minimized by reducing headcount and shifting to lower cost channels. This is a financially driven, inside-out view of customer support and not an outside-in, customer-centric approach.
If companies truly want to reduce the cost associated with customer support, learn from these calls and fix the upstream issues that are creating the need for the calls in the first place.
Many companies underestimate the value of customer trust and loyalty when it comes to driving higher revenue growth. It might sound counterintuitive, but convincing existing customers to return is more important than gaining new ones. This is because the cost of finding new customers is far higher than the cost of selling to existing customers. In fact, returning customers spend 67% more than first-time buyers.
It’s clear that executives need to put customer loyalty at the center of their company’s values, but how do you actually go about doing building customer trust and loyalty? Let’s jump right in!
3 Ways to Build Customer Trust and Customer Loyalty
Create Personalized Experiences to Build Trust
Go the Extra Mile to Listen and Understand
Quality, Quality, Quality
Action #1: Create Personalized Experiences to Build Trust
Throughout the customer journey, your brand should meet customers where they are. The more personal you make the customer experience, the more trust you’ll cultivate.
For instance, in the pre-purchase stage, in-store employees should have substantial knowledge about products and understand what customers need. Employees should be trained to create positive interactions from the beginning all the way up to the final moment of purchase. Asking small questions like if a customer found everything they needed—and stepping in if they didn’t—can make a huge impact. Little actions like that help add a nice personal touch to a customer’s experience—and lead to a stronger level of trust!
Action #2: Go the Extra Mile to Listen and Understand
Trust often leads to loyalty, but your brand has to make the first move. To cement a longstanding relationship of trust, your business needs to show loyalty to customers first.
An effective approach here would be to engage with and respond to customers, because engaged customers are more likely to promote your company than unengaged customers. Actively responding to customer questions, comments, and complaints can grow loyalty by putting a human voice to a brand.
One best practice for engaging with customers in this way is to design an open communication and feedback channel. Of course, we recommend utilizing not just a help center as a method to reach out, but any adequate resource, from employees on the front line to digital surveys. Additionally, you should look to other indirect forms of feedback to understand your customers such as review site data and social media mentions.
Action #3: Quality, Quality, Quality
At the end of the day, even if their customer experience was amazing, if the product doesn’t meet a customer’s expectations, all that work you did to build trust and loyalty is in vain. Customers expect value for what they pay for and no amount of sales gimmicks can hide the truth of your product, so it’s key to know customers’ expectations and develop your product/service to meet or exceed that. After all, loyal customers are coming back for a quality purchase; the positive customer experience is an additional element encouraging that return.
Your customer experience platform is essential to identifying friction points and remedying them to improve customer trust and customer loyalty. We discussed in the section above how it’s important to keep tabs on what your customers are saying about their experience. Once you’ve collected all this feedback data across every channel, you can leverage your customer experience (CX) platform to analyze all that customer feedback and identify the areas in your business that need some attention. Check out this video below to learn how global banking giant, Virgin Money, worked with Pearl-Plaza to understand the most impactful moments in the customer journey.
Now that you’ve learned how to build customer trust and loyalty, read our eBook to learn about how that trust and loyalty can drive cross-sell and upsell opportunities!
If you are an organization with thousands of customers, surveying your entire customer base can seem like a daunting task. The likelihood of all of your customers (whether they number in the thousands or in the hundreds) answering a survey is slim to none. But, customer feedback is critical to driving Experience Improvement and growing your CX program. So, with such slim odds, how are you supposed to trust the customer feedback you do get?
Simple random sampling is the perfect solution to this problem. Sampling methods such as simple random sampling allow businesses to get the data they need to make decisions without having to go through any unnecessary work. The goal of using simple random sampling is to get a small group that is unbiased representative of a larger population.
What is Simple Random Sampling and Why Is It Important?
A simple random sample is a selection of participants from a population. What makes this sampling method different is that each participant has an equal probability of being selected.
Simple random sampling is important for many reasons. First, the subgroups from your population will be unbiased. Since they were chosen at random, they do not have any predisposed bias as participants, and they do not suffer from researcher bias.
It is also important because these unbiased groups allow businesses to get data that is reflective of the entire population, without actually having to survey the entire population.
What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Simple Random Sampling?
Many businesses prefer simple random sampling for its simplicity and lack of bias. It is also the easiest form of sampling. You don’t need to be a data analyst in order to perform this sampling method; and the data you receive can be applied to the whole population.
The biggest disadvantage to be aware of is researcher bias. Researcher bias occurs when the researcher conducting the sampling selects participants to be in a subgroup based on their personal biases. This can be easily avoided by including multiple forms of random selection in your sampling.
How Do You Perform Simple Random Sampling?
Simple random sampling is the perfect tool for a company looking to get an idea of how its entire customer base feels about a certain subject. Let’s say that you work for a nationwide retailer, and are interested in finding out how your loyalty members feel about a new selection of loyalty perks that you are considering to develop.
You could go into the database that has a list of all of your loyalty members or, in this case, the list of your population. After assigning each member a number, you could use a random number generator to randomly select the number of participants you have chosen for your sample size.
This subgroup of members, chosen at random, can now be surveyed. Their responses can be analyzed and can also be viewed as being representative of your entire member base.
Sampling With Pearl-Plaza
If you’re interested in understanding your customer base without having to survey each and every customer, then simple random sampling may be your answer. But understanding that data, what it means, and what to do with it moving forward can be difficult.
Pearl-Plaza, the leader in people-oriented text analytics, can help. Built on industry-recognized metrics and real-time intelligence, Pearl-Plaza provides the tools and support you need to find hidden insights in your data. For more information on data gathering and analysis, visit our Learning Hub and look at how our data studios can be beneficial to your business.
Imagine if you were still operating your business in the same way you were in 2019. Total nightmare, right? Your customer experience (CX) program, like your business, needs to be able to grow and evolve to prove a return on investment. If you’re like the majority of CX practitioners (CX Network’s “Global State of CX” report shows that it is the second highest concern for CX practitioners), you likely have quite a few ROI questions.
In our over two decades of experience helping the world’s best brands positively impact their bottom line with Experience Improvement, we’ve heard quite a few of these ROI questions, and have determined the strategies at the heart of a profitable program. In order to achieve true ROI, you need to take an integrated approach to experience by breaking down data silos and creating one ecosystem of data.
All of your customer data needs to exist in one place, where it can be accessed from anywhere in the organization, meaning that the game changing insights you need to acquire new customers, keep the old ones, expand customer lifetime value, and cut inefficient or costly processes are all in one place.
Pearl-Plaza recently held a webinar with representatives from Forrester, an independent market research firm, to give you the answers you need about your top CX ROI questions. Pearl-Plaza’s Principal CX Strategist Jim Katzman and Forrester’s Senior Analyst Judy Weader discuss showing the value of your CX program, designing digital experiences that make your business stand out, and setting your brand up for success. Let’s dive in!
Your Top 3 ROI Questions
ROI Question #1: Why Is Showing the Value of Customer Experience So Difficult?
Showing the value of your CX program can be a daunting task. How are you supposed to link improving experiences back to financial gain? Well, the truth is, most CX professionals don’t know the right mechanics they need to perform in order to show ROI through their CX program.
In order to showcase the ROI of your CX program, there are going to be calculations involved. But, don’t be intimidated by that. It isn’t as complicated as it may seem.
Let’s take a look at a call center for an example. At every call center, there is an average cost per call. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say our call center has an average cost per call of $5. If this call center receives 100 calls per day about an identified pain point (let’s say it’s a confusing process), you would be able to take that customer feedback and turn it into an actionable insight which would clarify the process, thus relieving the pain point.
By taking action, you may be able to turn 100 calls per day into 80 calls per day. 20 less calls per day at $5 average cost per call is a $100 of daily savings. Just like that, we have proved that having a CX program that creates actionable insights provides a return on investment to the organization.
Showing the value of your CX program is easiest when you are able to turn actions into numbers. By making decisions based on customer data, are you increasing revenue? Decreasing costs?
ROI Question #2: How Are Business Designing Digital Experiences That Make a Difference?
When developing a digital product or service, it’s important to think about the context that your offering will be used in. Think of your favorite airline, or an airline that has developed a “good” mobile application. The reason these apps succeed are because they were designed with the knowledge that when you check-in for a flight, you aren’t going to haul out your computer. These airlines knew it would be easier and more convenient for their customers to be able to check-in for a flight when they were on the go.
When you develop your products and services around your end customer, you’ll be able to create digital experiences that enrich peoples’ lives and generate more adoption, engagement, and advocacy.
When designing and developing your products, you also need to remember to design for accessibility. If you aren’t thinking about accessibility in your products, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. There are over a billion people in the world that are disabled. Whether it be different font sizes, text-to-speech options, or modified touchscreen shortcuts, designing for accessibility is something that needs to be done throughout the design process. It is not something that can be bolted on after the launch date.
ROI Question #3: What Three Things I Can Do to Set My CX Program Up for Success?
Have a Good CX Vision
The optimal CX vision for your organization should be derived from your brand vision. Your brand vision should answer the question “What do I want my brand to be for the market?” Consequently, your CX vision should answer the question “What do I want my CX program to be for my customers in order to support my brand vision?”
Build Out a CX Strategy
Developing a CX strategy can seem like a long, intimidating process. But, it is important to remember that the goal of your CX strategy is to bring your CX vision to life. If we take one more step back, your CX vision should reflect your brand vision. So, at its core, your CX strategy should align with your business goals in order to bring that brand vision to life. Using your business goals as a base, you will be able to develop an effective, focused CX strategy. Your motto should be to “design with the end in mind.”
Align Your Priorities
You want to make decisions that are grounded in customer understanding and current business initiatives. When thinking about which initiatives to go after first, take a moment to think. What matters most to the business? What are the goals that your business is trying to achieve now versus what they hope to achieve later? By prioritizing your CX initiatives with your business goals, you will create an effective CX program.
Moving Forward
As you look forward and adopt these principles into your own ROI strategy, don’t stress about being perfect. CX programs are ongoing, ever-changing, and constantly evolving assets to your business. There is no set “right” way to utilize your CX program.
Our recommendation? Start with a quick win—a straightforward project you can measure the success of.
An ROI Example from an Pearl-Plaza Client
A few years ago, one of our clients, a national chain restaurant, was looking for a new way to get in touch with their customers. They already had an internal assessment system that was used as a comprehensive assessment of performance in front- and back-of-house operations and policies related to Food Safety, company standards, and guest experience (e.g., quality, order accuracy, speed of service, staff friendliness, cleanliness, and team engagement).
With more than 13,000 of these assessments completed each year, the results helped drive continuous improvement in quality, operations, and brand standards—but they lacked a view into the guest perspective.
This company chose Pearl-Plaza as its CX optimization partner based on its ability to interface audit data with CX data. By bringing audit and guest feedback data together, Pearl-Plaza’s prescriptive analytics automatically generated two improvement priorities for each location. The integration model takes into consideration both guest experience and audit score, and creates priorities tied to the greatest return on investment: where this organization should put more time, energy, and effort.
After implementing these data-driven improvements using the Pearl-Plaza and internal audit correlated system, the organization’s restaurants saw a significant increase in all key metrics in just eight months:
34% in OSAT
33% in Friendliness
22% in Product Quality
22% in Cleanliness and Facility
19% in Speed of Service
12% in “Make it Right” (if an order had a mistake, was it corrected?)
3% in Order Accuracy
By focusing on just two improvement priorities at each location, this organization was able to completely transform its relationship with its customers. Starting with small, measurable initiatives is a great way to kickstart your CX program. These small initiatives might even have results that expand further across the organization than you would expect.
If you want to learn more about extracting ROI from your CX program, watch the full webinar here!
If you’ve ever heard the terms “CX” or “customer experience” before, you probably know that they and similar phrases refer to organizations’ attempts to scour every interaction for feedback and insights. You might also know that customer experience is generally considered to be a more specific subset of user experience (UX). But how do those organizations design CX programs? What goes into deciding which interactions to scrutinize, the goals formed around that work, and so much more? If you’re curious about CX design and how organizations wield it, you’ve come to the right place!
Today’s discussion breaks down the wider universe of CX design, but we’re also going to talk about the best ways for organizations to leverage this discipline. Many brands consider merely “managing” experiences to be the finish line of CX design, but there’s a lot more that organizations can accomplish, including genuine Experience Improvement (XI). Let’s get into it!
What Is CX Design?
The idea of CX design was relatively simple for many years. Basically, when an organization’s leadership decided to engage in customer experience design, they would deploy surveys (sometimes physically) for customers to fill out and hand back. We’ve all seen the little surveys that sometimes pop up after buying a sandwich, getting a car serviced, visiting a retailer, and the like. For a long time, this was considered cutting-edge CX technology and a valuable means of soliciting feedback. Other methods, like mystery shopping, were often used as well.
However, as technology has grown more sophisticated, so too has our understanding of not just how to manage customer experience, but how to improve it. Our understanding of what customers truly seek in experiences has broadened as well, and so the job of a CX designer (and the role of CX strategy in general) became more about understanding customers’ minds, not just getting their feedback. It became about optimizing journey touchpoints to delight customers and nurture relationships!
Unfortunately, even though technology and new learnings have made CX design so much more powerful than in years past, many organizations seem content to use it to gather numbers and react to problems only as they arise. This principle is reflected in how these companies’ programs are designed; CX teams don’t deploy to fix a problem until it’s been submitted by a customer, and discussions on program progress are centered around how today’s metrics compare to yesterday’s.
The issue with this sort of CX design is that while it can give you a superficial temperature reading of how customers like your brand… that’s about all you’re getting from it. Organizations that take this tack with their CX design miss opportunities to, yes, fix glaring flaws, but also meaningfully improve experiences and get to know their customers on a more human level. That is where the true power of CX design comes into play, and the brands that wield it are, more often than not, at the top of their vertical because of it.
What Does the CX Design Process Look Like?
If CX design can really help organizations achieve such dramatic transformations and high goals, what’s the first step toward actually doing that?
As we mentioned earlier, many brands start their CX design process by looking at a handful of channels their customers might use to communicate (contact centers, social media, etc.) and deciding to pay more attention to those channels. However, while going about CX design this way might net you a few insights here and there, it’s actually much more effective to design with the end in mind.
In other words, before you even turn any of your listening posts on, take some time to consider which goals you actually want to achieve with your CX program. The sky’s the limit, too! Don’t be afraid to stake out some truly ambitious goals in your design. Experience programs can be used to achieve some pretty amazing things.
What those things are depends on what your business needs. For example, if your customers are churning a lot more than you’d like, you can build your CX design around better customer retention. Or, perhaps you’d like to use your experience program to improve workplace culture or get a better sense of what’s going on in the marketplace around your organization.
Whatever your Experience Improvement goal is, just having that as a guiding ethos will make a world of difference for your CX design. However, while your goal should be aspirational, it also needs to be quantifiable—to revisit the churn example, make sure that you tie a specific percentage or number to your goal. That will further define the finish line you want your CX program to help you cross, and it will also make your initiative’s value more tangible and therefore more visible!
Why Is CX Design Important?
Once organizations establish the goal(s) they want to achieve with their CX design and attach some sort of target number to it, it’s time to take the next step and consider which CX tools to use. This is another reason why setting a goal before doing anything else is so helpful, because it helps you determine not just which tools and channels to focus on, but also which groups of customers.
For example, if you see a chance to improve new customer acquisition, it doesn’t make sense to deploy tools geared for that goal toward all of your customer segments. Rather, you can free yourself and your CX design to focus all your efforts towards new customers. And if you have the bandwidth for additional CX goals, you can deploy your remaining tools where they most make sense. This more deliberate and thoughtful approach to design goes a long way toward achieving those goals!
This approach will also help you find and listen to the channels most relevant to your CX goals. To revisit the customer acquisition example, a CX team that sets that goal might research the areas where new customers most talk about your brand, then set up surveys and other listening tools there to capture that customer intelligence at its most organic. The team will have honed in on the channel most relevant to its goals and successfully filtered out noise from customer segments that are less relevant to those goals.
You don’t have to be a CX expert to know that brands and organizations love data. In fact, some companies love data so much that they gather it just for the sake of having it! Having data is certainly important, of course, but much like the CX metrics we talked about earlier, just having it won’t create Experience Improvement for your customers. The only way to do that is to actually take that data and mine it for valuable insights.
Data hygiene is yet another area that conventional CX design struggles with. A lot of programs are designed to gather lots of data very efficiently, but that creates a whole new challenge for the people running that program—namely, how much time does it take to sift through a mountain of data? What insights should CX teams look for and which ones should they disregard? And how can those teams make progress finding insights when their program is gathering data from every corner at every moment?
This is yet another reason why a deliberate, more targeted approach to CX design is the way to go. If you build your CX programs around very specific goals, the data you gather will be much more specific as well. Your data mountain will be smaller and more manageable, and your CX team won’t have to go near as far to find the insights most helpful to their goals.
One final note about data is that it doesn’t have to come from the CX team alone. Pulling other employees and groups into your CX design process can help you get a complete, 360-degree picture of your customer, further cementing both your goals and your future success. Including others also lets them know that, no matter how far away their job may be from the front lines, their work still matters and is relevant to creating a great experience for customers.
Realizing Experience Improvement Through CX Design
This is the hardest part of customer experience design, but it’s also what the process that we’ve been talking about is designed to simplify for you, your CX team, and your entire brand. You’ve used this CX design process to learn what you need to change to create Experience Improvement for your customers; now it’s time to reach out to the right teams and work together to actually make those alignments.
Once you do, continue to track and quantify those changes. Quantifiable goals are like receipts for a CX program; they give you something to prove its worth when you go back to the board for additional funding (as a quick aside, if you hear any positive customer stories that come about as a result of your changes, save those too! Execs love them). Some changes take a while to blossom, but they’ll be worth the wait once they come through.
Ultimately, what is the point of great CX design? A stronger bottom line for your brand? Yes. Eliminating problems with your journey touchpoints? Absolutely! But there’s an even more ambitious goal that comes about as a result of great CX design, and that’s true Experience Improvement. In this context, Experience Improvement doesn’t just refer to individual interactions better and fixing journey touchpoints (though those are certainly important). It means aligning brand and CX design to achieve seamless experiences. It means understanding who your customers are on a deeply fundamental, human level.
Once organizations achieve that close-up understanding of their customers and thus a close bond with them, there’s almost nothing that can break that relationship. Customers who feel understood as human beings, not just clients, won’t ditch you for a competitor. They’ll evangelize your brand to anyone who will listen. And it’ll all be thanks to your stellar CX design and the Experience Improvement opportunities it created!
We hope that this conversation has given you more insights into what CX design is and how fundamentally it can transform your experiences and brand ecosystem. If you want to learn more about how Experience Improvement can help your organization, feel free to download this e-book!
We’re always up for chatting about all things experience, and our mission is to help you own the moments that matter.
