Thought Leadership

Surveys are at an interesting crossroads in the modern experience landscape. On one hand, brands have traditionally relied on written questions to solicit feedback and suggestions from customers. However, as technology and social media continue to evolve, the idea of a long survey that’s packed with nothing but questions seems a bit antiquated. Some might even call that type of survey a sore thumb amid all the visual media swarming the internet.

Fortunately, brands don’t have to stick with sending out tomes of questions ad nauseum and hoping for a response. Survey design, like everything else having to do with customer experience (CX) has to stay as limber and ever-changing as the customers it aims to attract. There are many design elements to consider here, but multimedia feedback is arguably the most important.

Worth (60) Thousand Words

There’s a strong case for allowing customers to submit visual feedback instead of just written answers, and it’s that people process images about 60,000 times faster than text. Quite an order of magnitude. While brands shouldn’t necessarily do away with written questions altogether, customers’ propensity for pictures means that image and video upload options must be included in surveys.

Additionally, customers don’t just process images faster than text—they tend to attach more meaning to them, too. This means that if they have a chance to enclose the images and videos they care about in feedback, they’re more likely to find the entire experience more rewarding. Brands benefit from this cycle as well, because a piece of authentic visual media is much more powerful than a written response.

Uploading Meaning

There’s something to be said for the emotional power derived from an image, especially within the context of customer experience. Customers don’t “just” record themselves unboxing a product or take a selfie with one—they’re conveying their wider experience using a meaningful medium. This is the root of visual media’s feedback effectiveness.

Brands that allow customers to submit images or videos with their other survey feedback can tap into this emotional power as well. As previously mentioned, people process images much faster than text. Combine this heightened speed with the added meaning conveyed by an image, and the result is a piece of feedback that CX practitioners can process faster and act upon more meaningfully. Since more meaningful feedback is one of the hallmarks of any best-in-class CX program, it’s important to give customers the ability to express themselves through multimedia options.

Going Deeper

Once brands gather more meaningful feedback from multimedia surveys, they have an opportunity to enact truly meaningful change. These changes are also much more likely to reflect what customers are concerned about because images and videos are much more unequivocal than words.

Think about it—a written phrase like “the checkout process was muddled” is open to many interpretations. By contrast, a video of a customer interacting with an automated checkout machine is specific, impactful, and much more likely to let brands learn exactly what the problem is. 

Once brands learn precisely what customers love or what went wrong, they can take steps to enhance that offering or correct the process in question. In short, multimedia feedback enables everyone to win. Customers are more likely to provide feedback because they can communicate in ways they prefer, while companies glean much more specific and relevant feedback.

The Human Connection

Multimedia options enable brands to better experience a customer’s emotional connection to them. Reading written answers is one thing, but hearing stories through voice feedback, watching body language through video feedback, and seeing facial expressions in an image adds context that writing simply cannot convey. This type of feedback also shows the customer’s passion and emotional connection to the issues enabling CX leaders to help internal leaders connect with the customer.  Brands can turn that context into action, which adds another layer of meaning to customers’ images, videos, and recorded messages.

In short, multimedia feedback transforms feedback from mere questionnaires into human connections. It enables brands to better harness emotion, which in turn empowers them to enact far more meaningful change. That potential for meaningful change is the crux of multimedia feedback, which is why it’s key for any brand hoping to reap transformative success to include it.

Want to read more about how you can effectively listen to your customers, employees, and the greater market? Check out this Pearl-Plaza Point of View, “How to Achieve Meaningful Listening Through Surveys” today!

We’re getting lots of emails these days from airlines, restaurants, schools, and grocery stores—and they’re not survey invitations! Rather, these messages are about what these organizations are doing to prevent the spread of the coronavirus (and how they can attempt to put their customers at ease during this pandemic).

As CX professionals, we help our clients leverage our technology to garner insights they can use to drive business outcomes. However, with this pandemic on the rise, the singular business outcome many companies are seeking (particularly small businesses) is simply survival. The same holds true for countless non-salaried workers. 

Between the NCAA announcing that no fans will be allowed to watch the upcoming March Madness games in person (if the tournaments are not already canceled by the time you read this), and the NBA and NHL suspending their seasons until further notice, it’s important to consider the stadium workers, parking lot attendants, and others who have been temporarily furloughed.  Additionally, with business travel shrinking daily, Uber and Lyft drivers are likely to see their income cut, too. This phenomenon is impacting nearly every sector of the economy.

So, how can companies leverage CX during this challenging time? We have a few ideas.

Tip #1: Keep Listening 

Customers are going to continue to consume products and services, so don’t turn off your listening programs. Pay special attention to unstructured feedback and use those themes to train customer-facing teams in empathy and flexibility. 

If you use text analytics technology, set up alerts on keywords associated with the coronavirus so you can recognize trends quickly and respond accordingly. 

Tip #2: Provide Reassurance 

While some companies are using this opportunity to confirm the steps they have always taken to protect their customers from diseases, other brands are leading with stating their own business travel policies. While these communications are nice to hear, we do not think they resonate with customers as effectively as specific plans for maintaining safe environments.

The best messaging we have seen during this pandemic comes from companies that acknowledge the coronavirus threat and simply tell their customers—candidly, not in vague corporate-speak—what they are doing to mitigate inevitable risks. 

A great example of corona-era customer experience comes from Starbucks in a letter from their CEO and President, Kevin Johnson. Starbucks specifically mentioned that the coffee chain has learned from its Chinese operations, and mentions concrete next steps that the brand may take. This strategy conveys a sense of security because the company has presented a solid plan that can be implemented immediately—versus developing a plan on the fly. TGI Fridays and Lyft are also doing a great job laying out concise, specific safety steps.

Tip #3: Be Flexible

Now is not the time for call centers to “play by the book” and enforce rigid corporate policies. We encourage our clients to empower their teams to over-index on consumers and their specific circumstances, and respond in a situation-appropriate manner.  

In times like these, it’s important for brands to be flexible rather than follow hard-and-fast procedures when it comes to service-level agreements and expectations. 

Tip #4: Put Customers First, Not Profits

Companies shouldn’t focus on Q1 profits or particularly fee-driven bad profits right now. Instead, they should focus on the medium-term, long-term, and lifetime value of their customers. How? By proving to customers that they care.

Brands should treat customers with empathy and recognize the struggles that business travelers, hourly and contingent workers, and spring break vacationers are experiencing right now by waiving change fees, late payment fees, overdrafts, and other charges that would prove a serious nuisance to those individuals.

Doing so will generate tremendous customer goodwill and foster long-term loyalty. Companies that engage their customers with acts of goodwill will recover faster from the inherent economic slowdown brought about by this pandemic. Even better, they will secure their long-term financial health by creating brand advocates in a time of need.

Tip #5: Don’t Forget Your Employees

We cannot underscore the need to keep an employee experience perspective during this time. Employees own another level of stress in situations like this. 

Beyond the real potential economic impact, we all have other issues to deal with. Who will watch our kids when schools close? How can consumer-facing employees keep themselves safe and healthy? 

Companies need to do more than just empathize—they need to execute programs that truly ensure safety, financial security, and confidence for their employees. The last thing we need right now is tone-deaf employers, so leverage your employee listening tools and step up support for your team members.

The Bottom Line

These are truly uncharted waters for us, but one thing is abundantly clear: the companies that provide excellent customer and employee experiences today will come out much stronger than their counterparts when this pandemic is over. 

While we recommend that firms continue to be proactive and leverage voice of customer and voice of employee tools, we also strongly encourage companies to treat both groups of individuals with empathy and understanding in this challenging time.

Looking for more CX tips and advice from our experts? Check out eBooks, case studies, and more on pearl-plaza.ru/resources today!

This article was originally published by Knowledge@Wharton. The original article can be found here.

Job No. 1 for CEOs today is ensuring the company delivers a compelling customer experience. This laser sharp focus on the total experience must span the entire demand and supply chain and incorporate every aspect of how products and services are designed, priced, marketed, sold, delivered and supported. However, delivering compelling experiences requires that leaders avoid common mistakes, notes this opinion piece by Mark Leiter. Leiter is chairman of Leiter & Company, a strategy consulting and investment firm, and a distinguished strategy fellow at The Conference Board. He is author of the book, Crafting Strategy in an Accelerating World.

In 1981, Ford started running an ad campaign that asserted “Quality is Job 1.” Automakers weren’t alone in prioritizing quality back when dead batteries, overheated engines, flat tires, and broken turn signals were all frequent car problems. This was also an era when television reception was fickle, food was quick to spoil, and banks miscounted money. Over the last 40 years, most major quality problems have vanished due to fanatical measurement coupled with advancements in design, business processes, science and technology.

Now customers expect even more. For example, my first car seat only moved forward or back using a manual lever. In contrast, today my car has 18-way power, massaging seats with lumbar support that can be heated or cooled. Unfortunately, my car seat doesn’t know how to sense my actual comfort and automatically reposition itself to make me happier while I’m on the open road. I now ask myself a question that would have been unimaginable in my youth: “Why isn’t my car seat getting smarter each time I drive my car?”

From ‘Full-service, Analog’ to ‘Self-service, Digital’ Experiences

With excellent quality now more or less a given, companies have shifted their energy to improving every aspect of the customer experience. To distinguish themselves in this environment, the best companies are on a quest to put intuitive, self-service, digital experiences at the center of their customer interactions.

The financial sector was an early adopter when it started replacing tellers with ATMs. Customers these days rarely need tellers, bankers, brokers or service agents to handle transactions or inquiries; most everything can be conveniently and accurately handled on some screen. Talking to a financial services employee might soon become a “once in a decade” occasion for an average customer.

It’s not just financial services. We see this front-line transformation happening everywhere. Cashiers are disappearing from grocery stores while pharmacies use apps to manage Rx refills. It has probably been years since you stopped to check out of your hotel.

However, the new world of customer experience also makes new demands on customers. If not managed skillfully, these demands can drive away large segments of your customer base. Long before customers arrive at the self-checkout aisle they have been overwhelmed with mind-boggling choice. Amazon offers more than 600 million products on their website. A typical Walmart has 150,000 products in a supercenter and 70 million more online. Typical smartphones now have several hundred features — and access to more than a million apps.

Without meaningful guidance, a world of abundance can lead to paralysis for customers forced to make their way alone through the thicket. Even worse, our self-service world assumes customers can independently follow instructions and complete tasks — despite huge variations in intellect, education, health and wealth. The future will demand even more customer self-sufficiency in an environment of greater complexity. A glitchy app, devices that turn out to not be so intuitive, or long queues for help can devastate your customer service strategy. Companies must work overtime to ensure no customer gets left behind.

Entangled Brands

Our global ecosystem requires leadership teams to constantly rethink how they can improve their experience in the context of every other experience that might impact their customers. Like it or not, you need to understand how adjacent products and services work with your offerings, or your customer will end up in the dreaded Catch 22 in which the hardware maker blames the software maker — and vice versa.

Consider Jessica, who is flying from NYC to San Francisco for a business trip. She takes an Uber from Brooklyn to JFK airport. Arriving at the Delta Air Lines terminal, Jessica zips through security using her TSA Precheck status and grabs a coffee at Starbucks.

She is thrilled to be upgraded to First Class, but that joy fades once Jessica can’t connect her Apple MacBook to the GoGo inflight WiFi using her T-Mobile account. Meanwhile, her fancy Bose noise-cancelling headphones can’t tune out a screaming baby.

Her plane lands, and she takes a Lyft to the Westin, but gets stuck in traffic. Her frustration escalates when the check-in kiosk doesn’t recognize her reservation. She often stays at Hilton hotels and has no Westin status, so she stands in the “non-elite” line to get her keycard.

While standing on that line, Delta pushes Jessica a survey asking for feedback about today’s trip. “What is her willingness to recommend Delta on a 1 to 10 scale?” Where should she begin her story? Her journey is the byproduct of entangled brands and external forces. This influences her mood, reviews, and rants at any moment — and she is just one of several million travelers that had their own unique expedition that day.

Avoiding Common Mistakes

During the peak of the quality movement, the big problems were obvious (e.g., several million cars with overheated engines each year), while solutions were universally applicable. In contrast, today’s enterprises aspire to align the individual experience to a customer’s exact needs. That’s a big ambition, one that requires continuous improvement in multiple dimensions. Success in this environment means swerving around several common mistakes and pitfalls.

Leaving average customers behind in favor of indulging the most loyal, profitable customers. Which customer is more likely to define your company’s brand image this year? Is it the highly profitable “platinum” customer who has no complaints because they get expedited concierge care — or is it the average customer, who remains on hold for 45 minutes to reach a call center agent who fails to resolve an urgent problem?

In today’s world, your company’s reputation is only as good as the experience delivered to your average customers — because they are your biggest population and hold the social media megaphone. When your average customers are unhappy, they post that news on Facebook, Twitter, and a host of specialty forums. Instead of leaving average customers behind, maybe it is time to reset the bar. The winning formula now is ensuring the average customer is completely satisfied while highly profitable customers are ecstatic. How do we make this happen? Let’s turn to the next topic: business model transformation.

Neglecting fundamental business model transformation to reinvent the customer experience. The famous pivot Netflix made from shipping DVDs to offering thousands of videos via streaming is a classic example of business model transformation dramatically improving the average customer experience. While this transformation involved capitalizing on new technology, the point of departure was rethinking the business model.

This line of inquiry may be more important than ever. Why? In a world with more than 300 million businesses that are seeking new sources of growth, industry lines inevitably keep blurring. At any given moment, a new array of non-traditional competitors is already casting an eye on your customers. The “payments experience” is a prime case extending across the global financial services, technology and telecommunications, and social media sectors (e.g., using Apple Pay or Venmo on your Apple iPhone powered by AT&T and linked to your American Express card to pay for a meal at a McDonald’s restaurant).

Based on my work with CEOs and Chief Strategy Officers, every leadership team is exploring how best to shape the customer experience using insights drawn from massive amounts of data — leveraging analytics, algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence systems. All these capabilities will be part of the solution, but successful companies aren’t starting their strategic debates focused on new tools and techniques. Instead, they are challenging their most fundamental strategic assumptions, and are willing to consider business model transformation as often as necessary. Not being bound to what worked in the past is a prerequisite for unlocking new innovations that can make a step change improvement in the average customer experience.

Failing to predict how customers perceived an experience before intervening or requesting feedback. Imagine you are fast asleep at 1:30am in a hotel room. Your hotel “neighbor” blasts loud music that startles you awake. As a frequent traveler who is now half asleep, your first instinct is to wait a few minutes and hope they turn the music off. Eventually, you lose patience and call security. After another 20 minutes and a few loud knocks on their door, the music finally stops, and you go back to sleep.

The next day you receive a survey from the hotel asking you about your experience. You ask yourself, “Why don’t they already realize I had a horrible experience last night, and why isn’t this reflected in their outreach?” You take a few more steps, pause, and also then ask yourself, “Why don’t they have sensors and cameras in every hall to detect loud noises and dispatch security automatically to check out what’s happening, long before I have to complain?” More intelligent tools and technology will eventually address all this missed opportunity, but the winning companies will be those that get to this future faster. Much faster.

Under-valuing great horizontal leaders who rally colleagues to improve the total customer experience. Delivering the end-to-end customer experience requires precision cross-enterprise integration. Yet, too often organizations shine the brightest spotlight on vertical leadership success, which is all about a CXO leading a silo of executives, managers and associates to deliver measurable goals that are escalated each year. In parallel, these same organizations often fail to applaud the naturally gifted horizontal leaders who work across silos and engage peers to renovate the customer experience. This may be harder to measure in practice — although we all recognize the behavior when we see it. The strategic question is whether the organization is devoting enough time to teaching and rewarding horizontal leadership that strives to ensure no key component of the customer experience is dropped during handoffs between divisions and departments.

Failing to connect Boardroom conversations to your customer experience evolution. While many corporations aspire to be “customer-centric,” Boardroom discussions are frequently disconnected from the customer experience. They might include reviewing M&A deals, new government regulations, rising health care costs, succession planning, and other matters without a single mention of the word “customer.” This is a missed opportunity. Ideally, each board meeting should allocate some time to reviewing what steps are being taken to make customer experiences more compelling — because that is a clear path to prosperity and should leverage the board’s expertise. If you’re a board member and you notice that the agenda includes everything except customers, you might suggest a shift. Your fellow board members will appreciate the intervention.

Where are we on this grand voyage to radically improve customer experiences and rewire organizations to avoid common mistakes? If we step back and consider the complexity that leaders must navigate, we might be standing in a spot that is analogous to where we stood as a society with respect to the quality movement in 1985, the mobile phone in 1995, or cloud computing circa 2005. We are still in the early innings of proactively shaping the individual’s entire customer experience journey in tune with their changing needs. That means we can all look forward to decades of innovation. It’s a moment of tremendous opportunity for leaders who are willing to fundamentally reinvent how companies connect with their customers.

With over 15 years of experience in the customer experience (CX) space, I have seen multiple companies employ training efforts to get their employees involved in new CX programs and initiatives. I have witnessed this process from the perspective of an Account Manager, Implementations Manager, a member of the Product Team, a Business Operations Manager, and now as the Director of Learning Services.

Throughout my experience, I’ve seen successes, but I’ve also seen teams fail to execute a training approach that actually engages employees. The theme across these failures is that their approach is time consuming, over complicated, and essentially inactionable. The truth is that while everyone knows training is important, it is easy for it to get lost in the list of day-to-day tasks—especially if the approach isn’t accessible. 

In order to set yourself—and your business—up for success, you need to avoid over-complicating things when it comes to rolling out employee training for your new program, but that’s easier said than done. To get you started, I’ve outlined 5 easy steps to help you craft an effective CX training approach for your business.

Step #1: Designate a Training Leader

As I started above, everyone knows that training is important. However, this understanding isn’t where most companies fall short; the failure is most often in the execution.

That is why it is so important to start your efforts by naming a project manager or leader to be directly responsible for your training efforts. This person can be the program champion, someone from your internal training team, or a representative from HR. 

Regardless of who this person is, it is their job to make sure that every employee participates in the training program. This means that they need to have the tools to track employee participation effectively—and to share results. 

How you track doesn’t need to be fancy, it could be as simple as an Excel or Google Sheet housed in a common area within the company, or it could be as complex as your work’s HR portal. By monitoring who has completed what, you’ll be able to keep the ball rolling for continuous success (and you’ll be all set up to execute step two).  

Step #2: Hold People Accountable

After finding your CX training owner, you need to create a way to hold employees accountable for completing their training. At the end of the day, we are all human and most of us need a carrot or a stick to be inspired to finish a task. 

Many businesses will create a goal or key performance indicator (KPI) directly related to training—this can be something as simple as a quarterly compliance record or something a little more involved. For example, one of our clients found a way to gamify their employee training by creating a board game for team members to play together. This way, the CX training was a fun team building exercise that also got employees actively engaged in the program.

No matter what your accountability method is, it will help employees know they are responsible for completing a set amount of CX training by a certain date. Deadlines are important drivers that everyone can understand, so use them!

Step #3: Make Training Easy to Complete

Now that you’ve designated your training leader and found a way to hold your team accountable, it’s time to make training easy to complete. When faced with a large task, people will be more likely to complete it if:

1. They know what needs to be done: Make a simple list of all required training and make this list accessible.  
2. They know when it has to be done: Send regular reminders via email or program notifications into your HR platform   
3. It is easy to find and complete: Locate training links in a place people often visit during their work day (like Slack, and internal sharing site, or learning management system.)

Remember: the easier you can make training to consume, the more likely your team will be to complete it. 

Step #4: Provide Opportunities for High Performers to Help

Now that you’ve set your learning program up for success, invite others in to join the party. As you curate your program, there will be folks who naturally rise up and quickly become subject matter experts. 

Successful training programs will make an effort to hold up those CX training rockstars as an ideal that the rest of the organization can aspire to. For example, if one region is doing exceptionally well, share their success with others to inspire them to step up to the plate as well. 

Encouraging your people to celebrate high performers and come up with their own creative ways to get their coworkers involved curates a team mentality and helps to foster a customer-centric culture.

Step #5: Celebrate!

Lastly, celebrate those wins! When people have successfully completed the assigned work, reward them. When you reward them, do it publically. Everyone likes to be recognized—plus, there is nothing like a little bit of healthy competition to motivate people. 

Post results in a place all can see—this can look like sending out a congratulatory email to the team that calls out those who have finished CX training, or putting a “congratulations” in via your internal rewards program. Again, it doesn’t have to be fancy—just remember to do it! 

If you follow these easy steps, you’ll be on your way to implementing a successful CX training program. Leadership, accountability, accessibility, team work, and rewards will pave the way to the desired result: a CX program that is both highly successful and fully utilized from top to bottom. 

If you’re looking for more content that will help you drive employee engagement, check out this piece on employee incentives. You’ll learn what’s wrong with traditional approaches and how you can create a system that actually works in “Considering Employee Incentives for CX Success? 5 Ideas for Better Engagement.” 

The Net Promoter Score® (NPS) and the wider ecosystem to which it belongs, the Net Promoter System®, have long been organizations’ preferred means of evaluating everything from employee and customer satisfaction to internal processes. The reasons for NPS’s popularity are many, but its most attractive features are its speed, ease of use, and its ability to distill the state of almost any experience, department or function into a single number.

NPS’s benefits have earned it plenty of acclaim since its 2003 debut, but the metric has faced skepticism in recent years from some CX experts. Some of these practitioners have gone so far as to proclaim that NPS is “dead” and that organizations should leave it behind. What follows is a quick, honest look at these claims and at NPS’s place in today’s experience landscape.

It’s All About the Numbers(?)

One reason some CX practitioners shy away from the Net Promoter Score is because it’s just a number. How, these experts contend, can a simple number tell organizations what changes to make or what initiatives to undertake in order to achieve transformational success, let alone improve their score?

It’s true that the Net Promoter Score is “just” a number, but companies that focus solely on the metric aren’t tapping its full potential to begin with. Instead, organizations need to look to the deeper movement behind that number: the Net Promoter System. The Net Promoter System promotes customer centricity, continuous improvement, and learning from customer feedback. These principles are hardly outdated in today’s experience landscape, especially since they espouse finding meaning beyond the metric.

The Perils of Scoreboard-Watching

Relying more on the Net Promoter System’s values than the Net Promoter Score may sound well and good, but it also raises a natural question: if the System promotes the principles that the modern experience landscape thrives on, what’s the point of using the score at all?

First, let’s take a step back to discuss the relationship between the Net Promoter Score and companies’ expectations of it. Far too many organizations expect change to come about as a result of merely observing their score. Frankly, this expectation is a cultural problem, not the fault of NPS. Change is no less difficult to attain within an organization than in any other arena of life or business, and as with those other arenas, the only thing organizations can do to affect change is to work hard. Once organizations labor to apply the Net Promoter System’s principles, the metric will take care of itself and finally become an accurate indicator of a company’s standing.

Additionally, while endeavoring to understand the relationship between NPS and a brand’s financial incomes, some organizations may find that another metric, such as OSAT or Likelihood to Repurchase, suits them better. That’s great, but the principles behind the Net Promoter System still apply and can be leveraged even in those other contexts.

NPS Lives

Organizations that shift their focus from the metric to the meaning that the Net Promoter System provides can execute NPS with modern, data-ingesting experience intelligence tools. After all, the Net Promoter System helped bring about the wider customer experience world to begin with (it’s no coincidence that CX began proliferating shortly after NPS’s introduction).

Organizations can use the Net Promoter System and data-ingesting platforms toward the same end: capturing the voice of the customer at its most relevant moments, analyzing sentiments, and delivering those insights to stakeholders that can turn them into action. Because of this, NPS is far from dead—the values and internal business practices it promulgates are relevant to any organization that seeks meaningful, transformational success.

Want to read more about the state of NPS in 2020? Read the full article for free today!

That “new year, new you” mantra is difficult enough to achieve on a personal level, let alone an organisational one. As companies return from the holidays, many of them will begin assessing which milestones they want to pass in the new decade. This is especially true (and challenging) for CX practitioners as the business intelligence landscape will no doubt continue to rapidly change.

Figuring these organisation-wide New Years resolutions out is never a small task, but it’s not insurmountable, either. Practitioners who want to tackle the new decade with gusto and prioritise projects in 2020 can do so by following a few simple steps.

Step 1: Review and Evolve Your CX Charter

A CX charter is a set of statements about a company’s aspirations and its customer journey. If you’re looking to shake things up in 2020, checking this living document is a great first step for seeing where your organisation has been and where it could go from here.

Don’t have a CX charter? Crafting one is another great way to sort out CX prioritisation in the new year. A CX charter is there to clarify your own priorities, and is not intended for public use. As previously mentioned, the most effective CX charters contain a set of aspirational, implicit statements meant to guide a company’s experience vision, as well as a description of a brand’s high-level customer journey. Whether you’re looking to revamp a current charter or make a new one, this document is a great place for practitioners to start.

Step 2: Audit Your Customer Journey

The next step that practitioners should take when reviewing CX prioritisation in the new year is taking another glance at their customer journey. Customer journeys typically consist of both high- and low-level descriptions. The former consists of sales funnel-esque steps like “buy” while the latter includes more detailed steps, such as “I forgot to pay.”

While mapping customer journeys is useful for understanding how they interact with a brand, there’s another layer to this process: touchpoints. Auditing customer journeys allows practitioners to assess customer journey touchpoints, decide which ones are most important, and which ones might need a bit of polish; this all factors directly into creating CX initiatives.

Step 3: Creating Initiatives

Once practitioners have identified problems to solve and intelligence gaps to close, what’s the best way to get started? It’s never a bad idea to begin with an abstract, high-level problem statement. That may sound like the stuff of unproductive meetings, but practitioners can follow this statement up by breaking it down into smaller, more specific problems to solve.

This process, when executed in an agile way, enables practitioners and their teams to both establish an overarching vision of their organisation’s priorities and derive actual projects and initiatives from that vision. This parallel dynamic also enables CX practitioners to stay connected to their brand’s mission and justify CX’s importance to seeing that mission through.  

Step 4: Fit Those Initiatives Into Your Roadmap

While on the subject of seeing a CX mission through (and justifying ROI in the boardroom), putting your initiatives on a roadmap is a great way to track projects, evaluate changes, and demonstrate to the C-Suite that CX prioritisation can yield tangible results and performance markers.

If all of these tools prove anything, it’s that a little structure can go a long way. Establishing a charter, identifying customer journeys, creating initiatives, and charting those projects on a roadmap can inexorably tie CX to a brand journey, and thus stand a far greater chance of being a boon to that journey. CX practitioners who rely on these prioritisation tools will have an easier time establishing CX’s worth and reaping transformative success for their organisations.

Want to learn more about these steps? Read the full PDF here or visit our Resource Center for more info on CX how-to’s, hot topics, and more!

Sometimes, the problems holding your organization back are easy to spot. Much of the time, though, organizational issues are well-hidden,  well-integrated, or simply entrenched into the operating rhythm, which makes fixing them a bit more complicated.

Though trying to isolate and fix deep-rooted problems is not an easy or simple task, organizations can meet this challenge with perseverance and the power of customer experience data tools. What follows is a quick overview of those tools and the best practices to bear in mind while using them.

Step #1: Canvas the Company

The first step organizations should take to identify problems is to round up all of their data. That’s right—customer survey feedback, employee feedback, company metadata, and even external market and social data—scoop it all up and gather it in one place for analysis.

Though it probably doesn’t need spelling out, organizations can’t find problems if they examine some data sources and not others. Issues that may seem like they’re stemming from one department may actually be rooted in another. For this reason, it pays to have all data gathered in one place. Additionally, gathering from ALL data sources keeps all involved groups honest to the process and eliminates any bias that could creep into the improvement process. 

Step #2: Identify Far-Reaching Problems

Once organizations have their data ready to go, they can begin scouring it for problems. The most efficient way to go about this process is to leverage an employee feedback tool to look for the biggest and most common problems, i.e. issues that are affecting multiple departments and processes. 

Leveraging these listening tools has many benefits. First, organizations can identify issues that are affecting the most departments—and thus, the most customers.  Secondly, the process of gathering and capturing multi-source data becomes repeatable. And thirdly, these tools can be used to help search for and isolate the small issues that comprise big problems.

Step #3: Implement Fixes

The reason why organizations should break big problems up into small ones is because it makes issues easier to address. Finding fixes for 10 small problems is still easier than trying to convene a one-size-fits-all solution that transcends departments and processes. Rendering problems down to more bite-size chunks also uncovers the root causes of problems—and makes those causes simpler to manage in both the short- and long-term. 

Organizations that take the time to identify large-scale problems, cut them down to size, and take action to implement issue-by-issue fixes have a far greater chance of attaining meaningful, transformative success than those that don’t. Driving incremental improvement is also great from a culture perspective because it displays a focus on continuous improvement. 

Looking for more guidance on how you can effect real change in 2020? Read “How CX Intelligence Can Drive Meaningful Product Innovation”  today!

If I asked you to picture a survey, you’d probably think of that email you receive after buying something online or having worked your way through a call center phone tree. These transactional surveys, as they’re called, are ubiquitous in today’s customer experience landscape and are effective for learning how customers feel about short-term brand experiences.

But what about long-term brand experiences, though? What kind of survey do organizations use if they want to know how customers feel about every facet of their brand experience from top to bottom? This is where the relationship survey comes into play.

The Impression That I Get

While transactional surveys are designed to evaluate purchases, website feedback processes, and other specific interactions, relationship surveys ask customers to reflect on their entire experience with a brand—not just their most recent. 

Effective relationship surveys ask customers how well a brand is delivering against its principles, as well as for their impressions of recent changes or news. These surveys may also ask for customers’ impressions of a brand’s messaging on key topics, such as the environment.

Take the Good With the Bad

Relationship surveys ask customers about their entire brand experience, so there’s a chance that those individuals will throw some improvement suggestions in with the praise. I’ve never seen a brand score a perfect 10 with its customers all the time, so some disapproval is to be expected with this type of survey. No matter the score, though, getting a survey back means that a brand can begin improving how customers perceive it over time.

It’s important to remember, though, that relationship surveys connect directly to customers’ thoughts and opinions about an entire brand experience. This means that these surveys are an ideal means of identifying problem areas and room for improvement that transactional surveys may not identify. From what I’ve seen over the years, the more of this feedback an organization can gather, the better positioned it will be to achieve meaningful change and close intelligence gaps. 

Being Tactical

What specifically might companies keep an eye out for as they solicit this kind of feedback? Well, for a start, many relationship surveys ask customers to compare their current impression of a brand with the one they may have had previously. In addition, these surveys are an excellent means of asking customers for their opinions on an organization’s values, ethics, and the direction it’s taking.

Survey Synthesis

Relationship surveys are comprehensive, high-speed tools that can deliver a high volume of feedback in a short span of time. Brands that use them can understand what their audience thinks about a variety of different interactions, and create a cumulative sense of how their relationships with customers are changing over time. 

As previously commented, there are other types of surveys that are better for, say, gauging how customers feel about specific transactions and other short-term brand experiences. Organizations that employ multiple types of surveys can gain all of this context and be better positioned for success because of that. 

No matter how many kinds of surveys an organization may use, though, they’re all only as relevant as the action that companies take with them. Proactivity and a willingness to act on feedback are the keys to a successful survey strategy. This is no less true for relationship surveys than for any other kind of questionnaire.

If you would like to learn more about relationship surveys—and how you can pair them with transactional surveys—check out “Uniting Transactional and Relationship Surveys to Capture the Entire Experience” today!

Optimizing the customer experience for success is a necessity in today’s competitive business environment. And, for any initiative, customer data is the perfect place to start adjusting your strategy. With careful planning, analysis, and execution, you can transform CX intelligence into effective product innovation.

Our webinar, “From Information to Innovation: Using Customer Data to Drive Product Innovation,” helps you identify ways to leverage your CX program to sustain product enhancements that delight customers and drive loyalty. What follows are three notable, in-depth takeaways from that webinar that your organization can leverage to optimize its customer experience strategy.

Start with customer data.

It’s no secret there’s an abundance of data, but it’s rare for that data to produce any drastic change by itself. Often, the hardest part of listening to customers is figuring out which information to utilize and how. Start by taking a hard look at the data you have available, whether it’s surveys, comments, or employee feedback. Then, with either a skilled CX professional or a data-ingesting experience intelligence platform (or, ideally, both), you can begin to piece together information to find common themes.

Scrutinizing the information you already have allows your business to identify problem areas and to improve. Be sure to prioritize the most prevalent issues your company is facing that also have the biggest impact on customer experience. With solid listening tools in place, you can leverage existing insights to drive a better experience for customers across all facets of your organization.  Sometimes, the customer voice at one touch point may even provide insight for a completely different improvement opportunity!

Leverage intelligence tools to fuel strategy.

To go from knowing about a problem to fixing it, you need a plan. Fueling your business with CX intelligence resources and professionals gives product teams specific goals to work toward and issues to resolve. For example, the goal of fixing your product’s layout is much more tangible than broadly improving customer satisfaction (though a properly packaged CX business intelligence tool can enable both).  “Artful” listening allows teams to transcend the superficial to find both deep insights and the root causes of problems.

Your organization’s issues are unique and complex, and should be treated as such. With the right tools, authority, and people, problems can be squashed quicker and more efficiently. Specificity, context, and attention to detail are all unique to CX intelligence—and by leveraging these elements, you can improve your product.

Act quickly, but consistently. 

Achievable success is always the goal, but sustainable growth can be particularly elusive. The key? Proactivity. Data-ingesting experience platforms allow organizations to identify problem areas and develop specific improvement initiatives, but it’s what your teams do after that that really counts.  Bring cross-functional teams together to digest data, tie it to operational processes, and help product teams prioritize long-term change.

Additionally, be sure to measure success so that a model of “listen-understand-improve-monetize” can be repeated. Oftentimes, when working with smart tools, smart people are underutilized. It’s important that your organization treats intelligence as an enabler for customer experience, not a replacement for it.

When companies prioritize CX innovation, they have a much easier time turning hard-won insights into meaningful innovation. After that first win, CX practitioners can establish enough credibility to drive even more success for their organization. Use your wins to both justify the importance of CX to executives and to see the business grow firsthand.

To hear more about how you can utilize your customer feedback to transform your product, watch the full webinar for free today!

We live in a fast-paced and sometimes disconnected, impersonal world. Many prefer texting to calling or face-to-face communication.  We shop online for convenience—and because some of us just don’t feel like interacting with a sales associate. Waiting in line at a store or having to call into a service center can be painful. When the retail experience can sometimes be a hassle, why would we bother buying at brick and mortar when we can from the comfort of our homes?

Retailers are struggling to find their fit in this new world: How do they overhaul the retail experience, bring it into the 21st century, and re-engage with this new type of customer in a personalized and inclusive way?

Customer feedback across many different industries shows one common thread: People want to connect with the brands they love in more than just a transactional way. CX intelligence can help revamp the entire experience, from in-store to online—even in the way brands listen to customers.

Our focus at Pearl-Plaza is to help retailers embrace the future of feedback and create inclusive and personalized experiences for every type of customer. At Forrester CXSF, we partnered with Foot Locker to share how the global retailer is innovating the customer experience at three main touchpoints to bring about a retail transformation.                

How Consolidated Data Helps Foot Locker Gain Holistic Insights

Consolidating its siloed data into one platform with Pearl-Plaza, Foot Locker was able to carefully identify a diverse array of customer types, from the sneakerhead who wants the latest and greatest in footwear to up their street cred, to the senior citizen who just wants a comfy pair of kicks. In between are the in and out power shoppers, non-sneakerheads, and many others.

 By specifying different categories of customers, Foot Locker has been able to design personalized and inclusive experiences in-store, online, and during the feedback process. 

Foot Locker’s Power Stores and pop-up retail spots are celebrating the local culture of the neighborhoods they serve. Different from the traditional brick and mortar store, Power Stores are a hub for local sneaker culture, art, music, and sports—featuring wall designs from local artists, and custom shoe designs celebrating their hometown. 

With its pop-up stores, Foot Locker is literally meeting customers where they are, setting up shop for instance in parks where kids are playing ball. By partnering with big brands like Nike, sports stars, and other celebrities, Foot Locker is building a stronger brand connection for its customers, building relationships that will continue to attract them to brick and mortar stores. 

These innovative in-store designs are the result of Foot Locker truly understanding who its customers are, thanks to data consolidation. 

When it comes to feedback, Foot Locker partnered with Pearl-Plaza to create a more personalized and engaging survey experience. Using Pearl-Plaza’s Video Feedback and Image Upload capabilities, customers can tell their own stories in their own way.  For example, Video Feedback helped customers alert Foot Locker about online orders that arrived in damaged or crumpled shoeboxes. With Video Feedback, Foot Locker can see, hear, and better understand the customer’s emotion by their tone of voice and body language, and it’s a fast and easy way for customers of all ages to interact with the retailer without having to go to the store or call customer service. 

With Image Upload, one customer shared with Foot Locker how excited she was that her son with cerebral palsy was able to find brand-name shoes that fit over his leg braces. In response, Foot Locker reached out to him directly and sent him a gift card to get another pair. The boy’s mother then sang Foot Locker’s praises on Facebook, reminding everyone to “fill out those surveys…someone is listening!”

If the Shoe Fits, Wear It

Pearl-Plaza CEO Andrew Joiner believes retailers will only succeed in the future if they follow Foot Locker’s example by looking at the big picture: Who customers are and where they’re connecting with the brand. 

“Don’t just collect feedback from a single point – you will get data in multiple channels, but if you look at it holistically and across every point you’re talking to customers through, you get amazing results,” said Joiner. 

By cultivating holistic data with Pearl-Plaza, Foot Locker is embracing this changing retail world. It’s promising customers through action that interacting with its team in person, online or through feedback is going to be an excellent experience—something many retailers are failing to do in this new retail atmosphere. 

Creating these personalized and inclusive experiences has kept Foot Locker at No. 4 on Forbes’ Most Engaged Companies List, and has increased its OSAT score by six points since 2018. 

But scores aren’t important. What’s vital is that customers feel that brands are stepping into their shoes and connecting with them on a more personal level. That’s what locks in customer loyalty. That’s why Foot Locker is changing the game. And Pearl-Plaza is honored to be a part of it. 

Last week, I spoke to a group of executives in Singapore about CX intelligence; specifically, how to use it to make meaningful, transformative business decisions. This is an issue for many businesses—according to Forrester, 74% of firms state they want to be insight-driven, but only 29% actually turn analytics into action. How do they do it? By following a few key principles that can help any company unleash its CX data’s full potential.

Principle 1: Structure

I’ve seen companies that have considerable CX programs, but no means of implementing any findings. The only way organizations can make use of CX data is by building governance structures that allow them to do so. These structures should always be accessible to both employees and the high-ranking organizational members for whom that information is useful. 

Businesses that create formal communication channels around CX intelligence and make it easy for business leaders to take action can put intel to greater use than they would otherwise.

Principle 2: Accessibility

Though reporting and action structures are vital to executing on CX intelligence, companies can go further by creating an insights-centric culture. Organizations can achieve this cultural shift if they turn data into intelligence, keep that intel simply formatted, and place customer satisfaction at the heart of their employee engagement strategy. Employees will feel more empowered in their work and will be more driven to keep customers happy.

Principle 3: Accountability

Just as companies that wish to be more intelligence-driven must implement accessible structures and share insights with more employees, so too must they emphasize accountability. Employees should take pride in their successes, but they must also be compelled to own their setbacks. 

Likewise, executives should go beyond merely endorsing CX efforts and give practitioners the resources they need to make their programs successful. Practitioners can get that green light by framing data as a compelling story rather than a set of numbers.

Principle 4: Speed

Every insight has a shelf life. Wait too long to act, and it becomes hindsight. It’s easy for CX programs to become bogged down in endless analysis, but practitioners who can demonstrate their proposals’ ROI, test hypotheses quickly, and execute without fear stand the best chance of arguing that speed really does matter (not to mention sidestepping all the red tape). Typically, managers who are made to understand CX ROI will also understand that time is of the essence when it comes to insights.

Principle 5: Embedment

In my experience, companies that weave CX intelligence into every customer interaction and every stage of their buying journey wield a distinct advantage over competitors that don’t. 

For example, a major UK bank found that some of its customers were angry over how long they had to wait to speak to a representative. After gathering that insight, the bank implemented an action plan: setting their IVR to recognize repeat calls. This system enabled a specialist team to address angry customers faster, resulting in a 20% decrease in complaints. Win-win.

This final principle can only be attained if the four we already discussed are correctly implemented—employees and business leaders who can access a CX-dedicated structure, who are empowered to leverage findings in a timely manner, and who are held accountable for both successes and setbacks stand a far greater chance of succeeding for themselves and their company.

When it comes to using customer experience to help international brands improve themselves, few track records are as impressive as Rob’s. Before joining Pearl-Plaza as the company’s Customer Experience Strategy Director, Rob used his deep knowledge of customer experience and product management to create meaningful, positive change at Vodafone, MyRepublic and other multinational companies. He strongly believes in keeping people at the center of transformational change, which seems a winning strategy given his clients’ XI success.

Last week, I led a roundtable discussion at the Future Guest Experience 2019 conference, where I had a chance to chat with executives and CX experts who are searching for ways to future-proof their guest experiences.

One of the biggest challenges that I’ve seen businesses face today is creating experiences that are both consistent and memorable. The truth is that it’s no longer enough to provide an experience that is solely consistent or memorable; the former lacks novelty, while the latter lacks, well, consistency. At the same time, companies must also strive to provide these experiences today and in the future—essentially “future-proofing” their brand against issues that guests might experience with it.

Fortunately, there’s a path to providing better guest experience, and it begins with considering what guests are truly after (it’s much more than a purchase) and leveraging the right strategies that can help you improve the guest experience today and redesign it for tomorrow.

Here are a few strategies to get you started:

Improving Experiences Today

In today’s experience economy, it’s no longer enough for a business to merely provide products. Guests seek much more than a transaction; they’re after an emotional connection that creates a memorable experience.

Consider a guest who meets with their friends regularly at a restaurant; eventually, their experience transcends ordering an appetizer and becomes fond memories of dinnertime conversation. Unfortunately, typical survey approaches cannot capture the emotion that makes these experiences memorable.

Just so we’re clear, questions that offer guests a zero-to-ten scale to define their satisfaction aren’t going to properly reflect those guests’ true feelings. The best way to capture a guest’s experience is to let them describe it in their own terms. 

In my experience, providing surveys with open-ended questions, reading comments and analyzing the common themes therein are an effective means of identifying today’s drawbacks and successes. Using this method, businesses can pinpoint where they might be coming up short and—thanks to that aforementioned feedback—create plans that result in transformative change and consistent, memorable experiences.

Redesigning for Tomorrow

Companies that leverage CX technology to staunch today’s problems are well-positioned to keep them from popping back up tomorrow. The only way to truly future-proof an experience, though, is to stay proactive. 

Future proofing starts with combining guest and loyalty data. Companies that can accomplish this will achieve an unparalleled view of the brand experience that their guests are having. That’s what future-proofing is really about: capturing guest data and preferences at the point of contact, then using that information to design new, more personalized experiences.

Numerous companies are taking advantage of future-proofing. For example, several retailers have begun combining facial recognition technology with CRM data; this information is then forwarded to frontline employees to ensure a more personalized experience.

What You Need to Future-Proof Tomorrow—Now

I’ve seen companies that take the time and effort to use unstructured guest feedback capabilities reap sizable benefits. At the same time, it is important to remember that the intelligence you receive from your guest experience efforts is only effective if you act on it.

That proactivity shouldn’t be limited to guest experience, either. Companies that can combine CX data with the right hiring, onboarding, and training processes to deliver a better employee experience will be best-positioned to future-proof their experiences. The more of these pieces that businesses have in place, the better off their future-proofing will be.

Of course, all of this is easier said than done. Even the most CX-savvy companies may find it challenging to isolate their brand’s signal from the noise and balance short-term fixes with long-term improvements. Pearl-Plaza’s customizable guest experience platform and inveterate consultants make it an ideal place to start for any company considering future-proofing. 

If you’re ready to take the next step toward improving your guest experience today and creating memorable experiences tomorrow, reach out and schedule a demo today to see how the Pearl-Plaza platform can work for you!

Eric Smuda has built a distinguished career out of turning venerable brands into CX powerhouses. His novel, impassioned approach to customer experience implementation changed the face of the rental car industry, in which he found award-winning ways to connect customers and companies. It’s only fitting, then, that Eric serves as a Principal of CX Strategy & Enablement at Pearl-Plaza, lending his seasoned perspective to many of the company’s strategies.