Thought Leadership

Pearl-Plaza’s Senior Director, Client Services for EMEA Simon Fraser spoke at the Future of Utilities conference in London last week where leaders from the UK and EU gathered to discuss the challenges and opportunities the sector faces today and into the future.

A primary theme of the event is building strong relationships with customers. Fraser addressed the attendees in a presentation titled “Optimise your customer experience: five steps to achieve both relationship and business objectives.”

Q: What challenges does the UK/EU utilities sector face when it comes to customer experience (CX)?

A: The main challenge is that they’re perceived to be lagging behind other industries, having come to CX later than other industries. Over the past decade, the brands in highly competitive consumer sectors like retail and hospitality have pushed each other to offer exceptional customer experiences that were unheard of just a few short years ago. While the utilities sector is now starting to foster its own competitive environment, they don’t have the luxury of competing only against each other; consumer expectations have shifted overall expectations enough that even industries with minimal competitive ties are held to a higher standard.

At this point, even enterprises that have more similarities to the utilities companies—banks and telecoms for example—have a few years’ head start on them. So, in short, the challenge is needing to accelerate their CX maturity and leapfrog some of the early phases that the pioneering industries pushed through. That can be taken as a positive, as well, though. If they can look beyond just the processes and journeys they and their competitors are offering to learn from top consumer companies, they can absolutely make up the ground and start winning on loyalty.

Q: What is behind these challenges?

A: First off, the complexity of a utilities company—the number of moving parts, the infrastructure involved, the elements outside of their control—slows down pace of change, even if the desired changes are already decided. Another challenge for the utilities sector is what I’d call a true “first-world problem”: Customers are conditioned to take their services for granted. Heating, cooling, electricity—those are all things that are expected to simply work, so they are only really thought about when something has gone wrong.

Consequently, customer experience is definitely still largely done in a reactive manner. Additionally, there haven’t been the breakthroughs or novelties to make it top of mind for most consumers—though the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart home technologies are starting to change that a little bit.

Q: What are you seeing in the way of customer experience innovation from this group?

A: While it might not be properly termed “innovation” at this point, what I’m seeing from the utilities sector is the beginnings of bringing all stakeholders together around the customer. Again, with their complex structures, these companies have a silo challenge that fights against a consistent experience. Also, the area where they are starting to modernise is with their online presence. Those companies that have moved meter reading online and are allowing customers greater access into their energy consumption through websites and mobile apps are starting to show customers there is some new quality being added.

Q: What is the most important advice you would give utilities executives in achieving success in their customer experience initiatives?

A: The starting point for making needed changes is simply talking about the customer at the highest levels. Top executive leaders need to be changing the lens by making it a talking point. That is definitely the first thing. Secondly, they need to turn up the volume of those conversations publicly. They must do a better job promoting the changes they’re making. Even when utilities companies have made advances or done things for the communities they support, they have done a poor job of getting press. As they make more changes in their strategies, they will get much more goodwill from them if they can get the word out about their efforts to listen to customers and better serve them.

For example, during some flooding last winter, a number of different companies came together to help communities quickly solve the problems. The narrative, however, wasn’t presented widely or as a customer-centric effort. Rather, it fell into their challenging category of being an expected civic duty.

Our business revolves around listening. Specifically, it revolves around empowering business organizations to listen to their customers on a scale and in a manner that drives improvement. And, as much as large-scale listening methods can start to sound like just “cold technology”—comment boxes, voice transcription, text analytics, mobile alerts, real-time reports, experience data—these methods still boil down to the same “warm listening” that courses through our human senses.

Cues for Communication

As the product team at Pearl-Plaza works to model our accelerated listening solutions after the social and one-on-one interactions we experience in our private lives, it’s caused me to ponder the fundamental principles of the listening I do daily. I’ve thought about how involved my other senses can be (and should be) in listening. For instance, it’s amazing how important visual cues from the listener are to everyday conversation.

While thinking about this, my mind has returned to a phrase common in—but not exclusive to—my childhood: “Pay attention!” We’ve all had that message sent ringing in our ears at some point, haven’t we? It happens when someone is speaking—a school teacher, perhaps—and our eyes or minds or both have wandered, leaving our ears deaf to their words. As a child, this usually happens simply due to a short attention span, whereas, as adults… well, I guess it’s the same.

The point is, it’s extremely important to those with whom you converse that you show you’re listening, that you pay attention. I’m so impressed with my colleagues for understanding this as they’ve built those cues into our platform, especially through Active Listening™. Tons of credit to our developers and product marketers for investing time into that authentic layer of listening, so that our clients can listen on a large scale to their customers in a way that shows they are, indeed, paying attention, and creating the reciprocal relationship that consumers crave.

Our newly released 2016 CX Trends Report: Trending Positively Toward Personalization and Transparency goes more in depth on the nature of today’s consumers and the ways in which they expect companies to show they are paying attention.

In the Moment

In this age of technology, if we remember the fundamentals of listening and paying attention, we can use our mobile devices and cool tech to converse in a way that informs, instructs, and connects—rather than distracts.

A year and a half ago, we gave our company the name “Pearl-Plaza” to remind us of that very thing. If you are spending time with a friend, put your attention on that friend. If you are sharing the road with other drivers, put your attention on them. If you are helping a customer, put your attention on that customer. Or flip that last one: If you’re the customer asking for help, put some real attention on the employee helping you.

There’s really no end to the people we share moments with, and in every moment the principle remains the same: Pay attention.

A Rare Breed

A good leader can change an organization. A great leader can change history. Because leaders throughout history have had—and continue to have—such great influence over those around them, it’s not all that shocking that the qualities and traits of great leaders have been studied quite vigorously in the past few decades in an attempt to uncover the secrets behind history’s most influential leaders.

In one such study called “Follower-Focused Leadership: Effect of Follower Self-Concepts and Self-Determination on Organizational Citizenship Behavior,” Michelle Vondey investigates transformational leadership, which focuses on empowering individuals to work for the best interests of the organization. In her study, Vondey breaks down transformational leadership into these five characteristics.

The 5 Characteristics of Transformational Leadership

Communicate a Clear Vision

Effective leaders know what they want and understand the necessary steps to achieve their goals. By communicating these goals with every member of the organization, expectations are set and a game plan can be more clearly defined.

Explain How Vision Can Be Achieved

Once the vision for the business is defined, good leaders put together a detailed plan of action and share it with each member of the organization. A step-by-step plan helps everyone involved develop more effective processes and create clear expectations for each department of the organization.

Show Confidence in Both Vision and Followers

You’ve heard it time and time again: Confidence is contagious. And, you know what? It’s true. Good leaders show confidence in their vision and in the people executing it. That confidence leads to more confidence and ultimately results in achieving a collective goal.

Lead by Example

Every leader worth their weight in gold has followers. The thing about followers, though, is that they perform better with examples to follow. Good leaders don’t tell followers that they’re committed to the vision; they show it.

Here’s an example of Walt Disney showing off some of his magical leader abilities:

“Walt Disney used to walk through Disneyland [and] if he happened to see a piece of paper on the ground, he would stoop down to pick it up. He called this ‘Stooping to Excellence.’ He knew that as he walked through the park, all of the employees were watching him. He had to demonstrate excellence. He had to demonstrate that he wasn’t beyond picking up trash off of the ground.”

—Shep Hyken, The Customer Focus

Empower Followers to Work toward Vision Achievement

Achieving a common goal is a noble cause, but it presents challenges of all sorts. To address these challenges, followers must be empowered to do what they need to do to achieve the vision of their leader.

Follow the Leader… to Customer Centricity

The right tools and technology certainly help to improve an organization’s customer experience, but a great leader makes all the difference. According to our recent report, company leaders that set a positive example for their employees are the number one critical driver of customer experience (CX) success. (Read more about the 5 critical drivers of B2B CX success in our blog.)

By leading by example and empowering employees to do their best work—and rewarding them for it—good leaders create an effective, customer-centric business.

5 Sources of Actionable Insight Every B2B Organization Needs to Tap

In a previous blog entry, “Mind Your Q’s: The Two Types of Actionable Information,” we discussed the differences between quantitative and qualitative information. In this entry, we’re going to talk about the top sources of actionable insights that every business-to-business (B2B) organization needs to tap.

Five sources stood out from our recent report done in partnership with CustomerThink. Unsurprisingly, the best sources of actionable insights come from both qualitative and quantitative customer feedback.

Quantitative Customer Feedback

Employees

Sixty-six percent of respondents chose “Employees” as the top source for actionable insights. These results suggest that the ready availability of employee-based insights may trump direct customer feedback in driving change.

Structured Feedback

Traditional, structured surveys are “traditional” for a reason. They are a proven method for gathering actionable customer feedback.

Qualitative Customer Feedback

Survey Comments

Open-ended customer comments are one of the highest rated sources of actionable insights because they provide customers with the freedom to share their brand experience—free of constraints.

Interviews (In-Person, Phone)

Having a true conversation with a customer (you know, the kind where one human converses with another) is a great way to uncover actionable insights. Technology is advancing at a breakneck pace, but nothing beats human interaction.

Customer Emails & Other Non-Survey Text

Sometimes the most actionable customer information doesn’t come from a survey. It comes in the form of an email or some other non-survey text. Through the power of text analytics, valuable insights can be gleaned from practically any customer communication.

Make the Most of Your Customer Feedback

Although the voice of your customers is always valuable, not all sources of feedback are created equal. Tap into these top-rated sources of structured and unstructured customer information and make the most of your feedback.

Although collecting a sufficient amount of customer feedback poses its own challenge, actually mining actionable insights out of that customer information creates the largest obstacle for organizations to overcome.

To be actionable, customer information needs to be either qualitative or quantitative—or both. According to our recent report with CustomerThink, “Gaining a Competitive Edge by Optimizing B2B Customer Experience,” businesses reported that qualitative and quantitative information were equally effective at motivating their organizations to act on customer feedback.

To better understand how these types of information are valuable to your organization’s customer experience, let’s take a look at how they’re defined.

Qualitative Information

Qualitative
Unstructured data; relating to, measuring, or measured by the quality of something rather than its quantity (e.g. customer comments, email, audio recordings, stories, etc.)

Qualitative information plays a crucial role in your organization’s ability to understand the significance of a particular customer touchpoint. For many brands, qualitative insights are broken down into three parts: doing, thinking, and feeling. In the context of the customer journey, “doing” represents the journey, “thinking” questions strategy, and “feeling” covers the range of emotions and responses associated with your brand’s customer experience (e.g. frustration, satisfaction, confusion).

Quantitative Information

Quantitative 
Hard data; relating to, measuring, or measured by the quantity of something rather than its quality (e.g. customer satisfaction/loyalty ratings, retention statistics, etc.)

Quantitative information provides statistical significance for each touchpoint of the customer journey. This information varies from your organization’s voice of the customer (VoC) data to web traffic reports. Quantitative information can be used to help brands focus on specific parts of the customer journey as well as highlight correlations between aspects of the customer experience such as “engagement” and “type of interaction.”

By surveying business leaders from various industries, we learned that the majority of organizations put equal value in both qualitative and quantitative customer information.

• Qualitative Information (26%)
• Quantitative Information (23%)
• Equally Effective (51%)

Respondents said that quantitative data was valuable in “proving the case” that their organization needed to make operational changes to its customer experience program. This type of data is particularly useful for promoting change within companies that make business decisions based on facts.

Qualitative information, on the other hand, was viewed by respondents as more effective at provoking emotional commitments from each member of the organization and promoting a better, more customer-centric experience.

Learn how your organization can make better use of its qualitative and quantitative customer information by reading the report we completed in partnership with CustomerThink.

In a B2B landscape where 9 out of 10 managers rate “fostering long-term relationships” as one of their top three priorities for their CX initiatives, it’s no wonder the best benefits support the long view. Our recent study conducted with CustomerThink, “Gaining a Competitive Edge by Optimizing B2B Customer Experience” highlights the forward-looking benefits brands are seeing the most.

Take a look at the top hits to see what’s really resulting from B2B customer experience efforts:

Improved Customer Satisfaction

The top benefit attributed to CX initiatives was fairly predictable, but it’s still encouraging with 73% of the pool stating they have seen this benefit. For your program, this one should be a staple. If you’re not improving customer satisfaction with your CX program, there’s a good chance your program is broken—unless your customer satisfaction is already maxed out (not likely, but possible).

Improved Employee Engagement

This second-rated benefit is a bit more surprising and equally encouraging. We’ve written before about this oft-overlooked flip side of Voice of Customer (VoC) and CX efforts. If you’re looking for ways to get the most from your CX initiative, we recommend joining 64% of fellow B2B brands in finding ways to put customers’ positive comments into employees’ hands.

Improved Customer Retention

This is quite possibly the clearest, traditional ROI-type benefit that CX initiatives are called upon to deliver. It’s also a byproduct of the benefits mentioned above. Naturally, improved customer satisfaction and employee engagement should lead to improved customer retention, which is where the loyalty and advocacy gains come in. It’s a shame to see even a 12% gap between this benefit and “improved customer satisfaction,” since the two go hand in hand.

Achieved Competitive Differentiation

A hard thing to track scientifically, this big-picture benefit is a very tangible element at play. More than just creating a good experience for your customers, to achieve competitive differentiation, it’s crucial to create the right experience. Creating a unique experience is key to a seamless brand experience, and it looks like 61% of B2B brands are on that path.

Other benefits are out there, some discussed in our report, some still waiting to be discovered and taken mainstream by intrepid practitioners. One thing is clear, though: Those who apply their VoC actively and purposefully will reap business benefits. Even the lowest-ranking benefit in our report was claimed by 35% of businesses and is of great worth: reducing operational costs.

Customer experience (CX) programs take more than good fortune to succeed. In fact, luck usually doesn’t factor in at all. In CustomerThink’s recent report, “Gaining a Competitive Edge by Optimizing B2B Customer Experience,” researchers found that certain CX practices give B2B organizations a significant competitive advantage.

We’ve curated the top five practices based on the differentiation between CX leaders and laggards.* Read on for a description of how these practices have allowed brands to set themselves apart from the competition.

* Rating Scale: 1 = Not at all effective, 3 = Somewhat effective, and 5 = Highly effective

Lead by Example

Unsurprisingly, good leadership is the number one critical driver of customer experience success. Customer experience starts at the top of your organization and trickles down to the location level. Every member of your organization must be committed to providing each customer with a positive and memorable experience.

Identify the “Moments of Truth”

By creating unique identifiers—or “moments of truth”—for each customer, your brand can produce a seamless and consistently great experience across every customer touchpoint. These identifiers enable brands from every industry to sidestep the pains of manually tying together customer interactions with disparate databases.

Design with the Customer in Mind

The wants, needs, and expectations of the customer should influence every decision your brand makes. Smart brands factor the customer into every company equation. Intelligent organizations align company culture with company goals.

Share Customer Feedback

With so much riding on every customer interaction, your brand can’t afford to leave its frontline employees hanging out to dry. Collaboration and data sharing across all departments and levels of management are a necessity for taking effective action on customer insights and creating a consistent experience across every customer touchpoint.

Give Employees the Tools They Need

Data silos are the enemy of CX success. Without actionable customer information, your employees won’t be able to create the effective Voice of the Customer (VoC) program your brand desires. One way brands are focusing less on data collection and analysis and devoting more time and resources to brand strategy is through the adoption of an automated VoC program. In addition to saving your brand valuable time, a VoC program also enables you to act on customer insights in real time and better meet customer expectations.

Set your brand apart from the competition by making these five CX initiatives the cornerstones of your organization’s VoC program.

* CustomerThink asked respondents to rate their organization’s effectiveness with each CX practice. These initiatives were determined through prior research, industry expert interviews, and sponsor input. “Leaders” are defined as those with measurable benefits or a competitive advantage. “Laggards” are defined as everyone else.

Benchmark studies are interesting animals. The primary take-away most brands look for are the ranking to find out where they sit on the competitive battlefield, and especially how they’re faring in the blood feuds against their chief nemeses.

Pearl-Plaza recently completed its 2015 Retail Benchmark Study, which contained a high-level view of the competitive landscape (those brands that are winning and those that are losing in the customer experience space). We also discovered a few additional findings that take us deeper into the minds and hearts of the buying public in this continually evolving Age of the Customer.

First, a little bit about our methodology: Pearl-Plaza maintains a healthy panel of North American consumers. For this study, we received feedback from more than 20,000 of them about how they felt about the top 100 retail brands. We weighted the sample to reflect the most current census distributions. We also measured the data against our proprietary Pearl-Plaza Index of Customer Experience (InCX), a new metric that combines Overall Satisfaction, Likely to Revisit and Likely to Recommend rankings. For this study, we asked consumers about their in-store experiences only.

Following are the top five insights uncovered by our study:

#1: Putting Their Money Where Their Mouths Are

This is the inaugural benchmark study for our new InCX Index, and it synched up nicely with our original hypothesis: Brands that scored in the top box for Overall Satisfaction and Likely to Recommend also scored the highest percentage—72—in Likely to Revisit. On the other hand, the brands that ranked in the bottom tier in OSAT and Likely to Recommend registered just 10 percent on the Likely to Revisit question. To sum it up: If customers are happy enough to recommend you to their friends, you can bet they’ll be back.

#2: Following the Crowd

Brands within the same segments tend to have similar strengths and weaknesses. For example, most Big Box stores excel at having products on hand, but not so great at staff availability. Shoe retailers score high on the quality of their products and services but can’t seem to stay well stocked.

#3: Friendliness Doesn’t Matter, Except When It Does

Friendliness is almost universally accepted as a critical metric for all consumer brands. However, our study found that high marks in Staff Friendliness did not tend to impact customer’s overall satisfaction, their willingness to recommend, or their likelihood to return. On the other hand, retailers that scored low on this metric got pummeled. Why? Because the customer experience bar has risen. Consumers view Friendliness as a hygiene factor. You won’t get extra points for doing it well, but your brand will suffer if you can’t get this very basic element right.

#4: Venus vs. Mars

When it comes to retail, gender—apparently—does matter. For example, men have much stronger opinions about store atmosphere than women, voicing both approval and disapproval much more frequently and strongly than women. When it comes to Big Box stores, women care a lot about products being in stock, while men care most about store layout. As much as we would like data to support our assumptions that there are no differences in the attitudes of male and female consumers, we find common themes within genders—males and females do seem to be from different planets when it comes to what makes them want to refer and revisit.

#5: Value Ain’t What It Used to Be

When we used to ask customers about value, the most common understanding of that word had to do with perceived fairness in what they received for what they paid. Over the years, “value” has come to mean much more than a simple exchange of goods or services and money. Our Retail Benchmark study found that brands with the highest ratings in variety and selection also performed better overall. On the other end of the spectrum, not having staff available erodes value perception.

Wrapping It Up

While brands tease out individual elements of the Customer Experience into discrete parts with names like Staff Interaction, Product in Stock, and Store Atmosphere, consumers do not. Each element—as well as every interaction customers have with retail brands (from the direct market messages we send to the visual impact of a store to the greetings they receive to the ease of paying—is a piece of the experience mosaic.

Depending on which segment you’re in, and which customer demographic you want to please, these pieces may be weighted differently. The key is in understanding your customers, what they expect, what they love, and what you give them that no other brand can. Simply scoring high on the individual parts of the Customer Experience helps, but unless brands are willing to understand that their relationships with consumers are much larger than the sum of their parts, they will remain in the middle of the pack.

The great brands of today and into the future will understand how they’re doing against their direct competitors, but they’ll spend most of their time understanding how and why their customers feel the way they do.

As a “one-two punch” to win competitive battles, the vast majority of B2B companies are pursuing excellence in their solution offerings and the experiences they provide. That second punch of improving the customer experience is a key competitive strategy, but as shown in a recent study with B2B leaders, there is a lot of room for CX programs to more clearly deliver valuable business benefits.

In the same study, 65% of companies with CX initiatives in place said their company “delivers excellent customer experiences,” and 62% reported that their CX program had improved business performance. However, when asked to rate the overall status of their CX initiative, just 24% of respondents reported clear success as either (1) measurable benefits or (2) gaining a competitive edge.

When asked what’s holding the other 76% back, this is what respondents said:

Lack of time, too busy with current departmental jobs » 50%

Half of the business leaders in this study reported that employees simply lacked the time to devote to CX activities because they were busy with their current jobs. This was reflected in numerous interviews, where CX leaders said that unless CX becomes a part of employee jobs, or personnel is hired for this distinct purpose, it’s very difficult to move forward.

Can’t measure ROI due to data/analytics challenges » 40%

The customer experience is notoriously challenging to sum up in simple figures, but areas where it directly ties to the bottom line have been identified. Numerous case studies outline the key pieces of CX-based ROI: Optimizing single transaction amounts in ways that strengthen future revenue streams and increase operational efficiencies. This blog article gives one starting point for building a business case and starting to define value.

CX goals and strategy not defined » 38%

Ultimately, CX program practitioners must define success clearly and uniquely for their own organizations. Simply put, if you don’t define what success looks like and/or can’t measure whether you’ve achieved it, you’re not likely to view your CX program as a winner.

Lack of people with the right skills » 37%

In this blog article’s alter ego, “5 Critical B2B Drivers that Ensure CX Success,” we stop short of showing the 6th critical driver as measured by gap, which is a shame, since it’s actually the #1 overall score for leaders . We’ll share it with you here: Scoring a 4.33 out of 5 on average was the CX practice of “Train employees to deliver great experiences.” If you want people with the right skills, you’ll need to train them.

Lack of cooperation across the organization (silos) » 37%

This suggests that CX leadership must dedicate their energies to uniting the organization to think about the impact of the end-to-end customer experience. 47% of B2B leaders said that a chief customer/experience officer would be beneficial. Other CustomerThink research has found much the same thing: A chief customer officer would facilitate cross-department coordination and get support from the CEO and the Board.

On top of our Voice of Customer (VoC) technology, Pearl-Plaza supports a consumer insights panel and a team of data scientists who conduct regular research on a range of customer experience topics.

We recently completed a study asking 644 North American consumers to rank six emerging elements of customer experience in order of importance. We also asked 131 customer experience professionals the same questions. In their responses, not only did we see where alignment and disconnects exist between brands and their buyers, we also found several surprising insights into what tips the scales on customer engagement and loyalty.

The Elements We Explored

• Mobile first: Ensuring 24/7 mobile support for customers
• More reliable online reviews
• Personalized experience: Brands using customer information to personalize messages and promotions
• Shorter surveys, more listening: Fewer set questions, more options for customers to share experiences in their own words
• Feeling trumps function: Relationships and customer experience will reign over function, price, and selection
• Transparency: Keeping customers informed on how their feedback is being used.

Biggest Disconnects

Consumers ranked “Reliable Online Reviews” #2 in importance, while brands relegated this element to last place at #6. But not all brands were on board. While one in four did rank it last, one in five executives actually placed this in the #1 position.

At first glance, we thought the split would have come between businesses that serve consumers and business-to-business companies. Upon further examination of the data, however, we found that this was not the case. This means that even in industries where online reviews have a big impact on choice and loyalty, some brands don’t consider them an important part of their customers’ experiences.

Our Take: Regardless of the business you’re in, consider and care for your online audiences. They are more connected, more vocal, and generally more engaged with your brand and their peers than other customer segments.

On the Same Page

Consumers and brands ranked “Shorter Surveys, More Listening,” #1 and #2 respectively. What we found particularly interesting is that consumers did not express a lack of interest in giving feedback. What they don’t like are long-form surveys that focus on what the company wants to know versus what they want to share. We saw phrases like: “fast and easy to complete, with relevant questions that relate,” and “ability to leave as short or as long a review as I want.”

Our Take: It’s worth the time it takes to design more considered, customer-centric questions. Keep the scoring to a minimum, and take advantage of online forums and open-ended comments to give customers their own sharing spaces.

The Value of Value

The most powerful findings came, not surprisingly, by looking at the rankings alongside the consumers’ verbatim comments. The short story: customers want to feel valued by the brands they support. One in three consumers explicitly included words and phrases like “feeling valued,” “acknowledged,” “heard,” “appreciated,” and “respected” in describing how they want to be treated.

While this might seem obvious, the comments helped us see an even more nuanced and powerful story. Consumers don’t just want to be on the receiving end of value. They also want to give value in return. In comments mentioning the word “value,” nearly half of the respondents (48.4%) used it to express their desire to provide value back to the company. And when asked why they give feedback, four in five consumers selected “I enjoy offering my feedback and making a difference.”

And consumers told us exactly how companies can do this:

• Tell them why: “I’d like to know that the information in the survey is useful. Maybe if there was an upfront comment statement like ‘We are interested in your opinion because…’
• Show you are listening: “It would be nice to not only be acknowledged, but to receive some feedback regarding the suggestion or comment.”
• Take action: “It would be nice if companies let us know what changes they’ve made in response to customer comments.”

» View our infographic: Make Them Feel Valued. Make Them Feel Heard.

Super-Empowered and Well-Intentioned

In a time when consumers have nearly infinite options and a global communication platform at their fingertips—and customer experience has become the place to compete—it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. And while customers do wield unprecedented power, they don’t seem to want to use it for evil. Instead, they are asking to become partners in brands’ success. The question is, Will companies take them seriously? Will they value customers’ advice as strategic business intelligence? Will they treat customers as individuals and not just transactions?

Our Take: The stars are aligned. Customers are clamoring to give exactly what companies need. If brands listen well and listen often, their customers will provide real-time guidance on how to deliver the best experiences and improve nearly every part of the business. Talk about a win-win.

We’re well-intentioned. Really, we are. We Customer Experience professionals are passionate about customers and want to do everything within our power to improve their experiences. But in our rush to connect with our customers, we may actually be driving them away.

Understanding the customer experience your organization is delivering requires a lot of asking. We have a massive array of tools to delve into the state of our customer experience—from third-party perspectives like market research and mystery shop programs to transactional data that tells us how our customers behave.

The Ballooning Survey

One of the most powerful sources of customer intelligence is their direct feedback. And so we monitor social media, conduct exit interviews, and we survey. We love our surveys! So many lovely numbers that we can crunch, slice, dice, quantify, and measure. And as more groups within our companies discover the treasure trove of information within customer feedback, they want in on the fun. So the surveys get longer, and longer.

Our poor customers have become the victims of our exuberance. Slogging through question after question after question after question, most of which they couldn’t care less about. We have crossed the line—from earnest asker to unapologetic interrogator.

Feedback, a Positive Experience?

How do we balance our need to understand with our need to keep the feedback experience a positive one? Following are a few tips that will help you get even better data, while not just “doing no harm,” but actually improving your customers’ experience:

On Their Own Terms

The phrase “Customer Experience Management” is headed the way of the laserdisc. As a customer myself, I have absolutely no interest in having my experience “managed.” Today’s customers want more authentic relationships with brands, and they want to share their stories—but on their own terms.

Social Listening automates the process of finding and gathering feedback on brand- and location-level social sites, and in online review forums. You can view social feedback on its own or alongside other types of customer stories for a more holistic view. Links to social comments allow you to respond directly to customers.

Comment boxes are another incredibly valuable tool. Inside those four walls, customers tend to share details that give you specifics on exactly why they feel the way they do about their experience, and how you can either fix a problem or reinforce what’s working. In verbatim comments, customers also prioritize what’s most important to them, giving you the insights you need to focus on the areas with the most impact.

Actively Listen

While comment boxes are great, sometimes customers need a little nudge to get going—and keep talking. Active listening tools can transform a comment into a conversation, where you’re subtly letting your customers know that you’re listening. A familiar strength meter lets them know that you’d like to hear a little bit more. Follow-up questions based on their personal stories keep the Q&A focused and relevant to what they want to tell you.

Let Them Know

Customers want to know three things when they take the time to give feedback:

• That you heard them
• That you are going to act on what they said
• That the insights they shared will make a difference.

While few brands take these final steps, they are critical in building a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship between you and your customers. Today’s customers aren’t simply more demanding, they want to know that the time they spend makes a difference. Letting them know that you’ve heard them, and allowing them to peek behind the curtain at how you’re using their feedback to make positive changes, shows that you value them as human beings and as partners in an ongoing relationship.

End the Interrogation

It’s not okay to assault your customers during the feedback experience—even when you really, really, really want to know. It’s not nice, and it’s not necessary. With the right philosophy and tools, you can harness the important moment in your relationships with your customers to bring them closer—and get great data to crunch as well.

While many companies operate under the model of “If we build it, they will come,” the most successful companies know it’s essential to understand and actively engage with a targeted customer base.

At Pearl-Plaza, we believe that no one owns the customer, but instead that everyone owns the experience. Both the customers and the company equally share in the brand experience, and both carry equal importance in decision making.

To develop strong customer relationships, brands must fully understand how and why their customers choose to interact with their company. In other words, they must learn to empathize.

Understanding Empathy

To begin, let’s explore what empathy actually is. Empathy is frequently confused with sympathy, when in reality, they can have greatly different outcomes when applied.

Both sympathy and empathy involve relating to and having concern for the feelings of other individuals. Sounds good, right? In most circumstances, either sympathy or empathy are appropriate responses. However, when developing a relationship with customers and clients, empathy always wins.

Sympathy is feeling compassion for another person. Sympathizing requires little emotional investment or intellectual effort and can often be misconstrued as pity. Empathy, in contrast, is the act of projecting one’s self into another person’s thoughts, feelings, personality, and circumstance to gain greater understanding—walking a mile in their shoes.

The Benefits of Empathy

So what does empathy have to do with your customer relationships? People want to build loyalty and relationships with brands. By knowing your ideal customer and understanding how to attract them—in other words, empathizing with their experience—you open the door to developing a great relationship.

With this relationship comes success. When you understand your target customer, you can fine-tune your brand experience to better meet their specific needs and wants. In turn, companies experience the following benefits:

• Understanding what drives loyalty towards their brand
• Learning how to turn negative feedback into an opportunity
• Increasing customer referrals and brand advocacy
• Maximizing the efficacy of Pearl-Plaza’s customer feedback products

Actively listening and engaging with your customers’ perspectives—whether through one-on-one interviews, in-person observations, or through Pearl-Plaza’s customer experience software—provides the highest ROI on your market research.

Creating an Empathy Map

What does this look like in practice? How do you actually get to know your customer? Copyblogger recently produced a comprehensive guide to understanding your customers’ worldview. Inspired by the user experience world, Copyblogger outlined the process of creating empathy maps for your ideal customers. These maps address four key areas in which customers interact with brands: thinking, seeing, feeling, and doing.

Copyblogger suggests gathering several key players to map out your brand experience, including stakeholders, customer support leads, vendors, product developers, and marketers. In this exercise, you’ll sit down together to discuss both experience and specific questions (What do our customers say or feel when they use your product? What are customers hearing from other people who use the product?), along with more personal, worldview questions (How do our customers think about their hopes and fears? How do our customers interact with family and loved ones?).

Some of these questions may seem fairly abstract in comparison to typical market research practices. This is what makes the approach such a success. By striving to understand your customers’ thoughts and feelings beyond the confines of your brand experience, you better understand your customer as a person, not just a source of revenue.

Dr. Frank Luntz describes the necessity of this abstraction in his book Words that Work. “The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listener’s shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart.” This “imaginative leap” will lead you to uncover the answers to questions that can truly revolutionize your business.

A Few Questions from the Imaginative Leap:

• What drives my customer to spend their money at my business?
• What pain points does my customer experience in their average day?
• Can I resolve any of these pain points?
• What pain points do customers experience with my brand?
• In what unique way can I improve my customers’ lives?

Pearl-Plaza’s technology is the perfect complement to these empathy exercises. We develop all of our products to capture the voices, feelings, and stories of your customers and understand them in our platform.