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Continuous Improvement Framework

Struggling to Prove the ROI of Customer Experience? You Could Be Missing These 3 Keys to Success

ROI

More than ever before, proving the ROI of customer experience is absolutely vital. Businesses are under pressure (amidst the Year of the Squeeze, declining employee engagement, etc.) to look at cutting discretionary spending. And, unfortunately, customer experience programs may fall on the chopping block. In fact, research shows that 30% of businesses reported having budget related issues to their CX programs. 

Under all that pressure, how are you supposed to build a CX program that continuously demonstrates its value?

If you are looking to unlock a true return on investment in your experience program, you need to go beyond sending and collecting surveys. You need to craft a strategy that enables you to use customer feedback and employee feedback to take action in strategic areas that actually improve the experience and map to business value.

To help our customers to do just that, we leverage a philosophy we like to call the “Continuous Improvement Framework.”  

The Continuous Improvement Framework: A Quick Summary

The Continuous Improvement Framework focuses on building an experience program that moves past measuring and managing what customers are saying and transforms into one that actually improves the customer experience and benefits your business.

To reach the goal of a truly effective, ROI-focused CX program, we cycle our customers through our five step framework. Those steps are:

Design

The road to true experience program success begins with clearly defining an experience strategy that aligns with overall business goals and brand promises and then designing a program purpose-built to support those goals.

Take this opportunity to take a step back, identify goals, and assess the current experience program to see if it is achieving the desired outcomes. This would be a good time to engage in customer journey mapping, to visualize the ideal touchpoints a customer would hit in their journey with your brand.  

Listen

Thoughtfully deploy modern listening strategies and data integrations to expand and enhance holistic understanding.

This step revolves around customer feedback. Analyzing feedback from your customers will help you uncover their wants, needs, and expectations.

Understand

Centralize data streams and leverage advanced analytics and behavioral science experts to identify where and how to act—and the anticipated impact.

Merely attuning to customer voices isn’t sufficient for businesses; even if they manage to listen diligently. It’s equally imperative for companies to delve into comprehending the identities of these individuals, enabling a profound grasp of their desires and anticipations. Pinpointing customers empowers brands to prioritize both the amassed insights and any feasible knowledge, culminating in the provision of a heightened, tailored experience.

Transform

Create and implement dynamic actions plans, trainings, and policies that facilitate organizational change and promote revenue-generating activities.

After organizations have lent an ear to their customers and acquired insight into their identities and expectations, it is time to initiate impactful changes or even forge fresh encounters. How can businesses embark on this journey of transformation following attentive customer listening and heightened comprehension? The foremost stride towards effecting any form of change involves sharing these newfound insights among other stakeholders.

Realize

Evaluate and demonstrate results of experience initiatives including organizational change, improved metrics, and financial impact while determining appropriate next steps.

A Common CX ROI Misperception

Where we’ve seen so many brands go wrong on their path to CX ROI is that they are too focused on the “Listen” and “Understand” steps of this framework, and not enough on the other three. 

In our latest webinar, “Designing, Actioning, and Realizing a ROI-Focused CX Program,” two of our esteemed experts, Jim Katzman and Eric Smuda, break down the truth behind common difficulties in proving the ROI of customer experience—and discuss why surveys alone do not create ROI.

And because we are all about sharing the best practices you need to overcome obstacles, here is a breakdown of those three necessary keys you need to take your experience program to the next level.

3 Keys to Prove the ROI of Customer Experience

  1. Design
  2. Transform 
  3. Realize

Key #1: Design

Design is arguably the most important phase of your experience program. If you build your program on a faulty foundation,  the results can be deadly for your program (think lack of actionable insights, false signals, and hours of work that don’t accumulate ROI).  

When designing the right program for your business, it is important to shift your focus away from scores, scores, scores. A program that relies too much on scores can hurt your chances of proving ROI. Additionally, if there is too much focus on the financial drivers of the past, there isn’t much room to ideate, test, and implement financial drivers for the future.

So what should you focus on when designing your program? The answer is simple: you need to focus on what you want to get out of the program. And if that’s ROI, you want to build a program that will allow you to capture insights that can be turned into actions that result in financial returns. 

In our experience, the four areas most programs prove the ROI of customer experiences in are:

Key #2: Transform

In order to completely transform your experience program, you need to focus on three key processes: organization, action planning and project management. 

Organization

Organization refers to how you are taking action, and how that is being implemented across your company. One major step in successful organization comes from developing cross-functional teams and avoiding siloing data from department to department. 

Each department needs to be connected to the customer experience and work to support front-line employees. Upward and downward organization will lead to a more holistic customer experience. 

Action Planning

Using the Net Promoter System (NPS), you can look at inner loop and outer loop processes for action planning. Inner loop processes are very 1:1 based. They refer to individual customer feedback and the learning, and actions that come from that. 

Outer loop processes are when teams meet and determine that they keep hearing similar feedback from multiple customers and that maybe something is going on systemically that is causing issues for many customers. Learning how to close the outer loop and create a culture of customer centricity is incredibly important in order to realize success. 

The inner loop is generally focused on short-term action, while the outer loop focuses on structural improvements that may take longer.

Project Management

Whether they be short-term or long-term, you will always have multiple projects going on at the same time. With so many things to do, how do you decide where to focus your efforts? You need to consider how many customers are going to be impacted by this project, what is the cost/benefit of this change, and how easy is the change to implement. 

Now, if you design your program thoughtfully, you should be able to use your findings to understand where you focus your efforts to help continuously improve the customer experience.

Key #3: Realize

After you collect insights and take action based on your findings, you need to measure success and then share that proof across the company. Because if you truly can prove the ROI of your customer experience but don’t share it with your stakeholders, how is it helping you in the long run?

It is important to share your wins! Be vocal about the success you have seen from your CX program. Not only will it help show how your program is helping the customer, it will also create a culture of commitment within your business and show your employees that their efforts are being successful. 

Additionally, when you are looking to prove the success of your CX program, it is important to partner with your finance department. They are the ones who will help you measure and validate your wins, then turn them into a cost analysis report that your c-suite will want to see. 

If you are able to use the metrics your c-suite cares about (customer acquisition, customer retention, customer lifetime value and cost reduction) then your program will become a proven asset in your company, not a liability at risk of being cut. 

To Sum It All Up

Proving the ROI of your experience program is crucial. But, it is important to remember that it isn’t always about the money. 

Changing your CX program is as much about driving a culture of customer centricity as it is about driving revenue. This cultural journey can be reflected in an increase in employee commitment, and by building a program that delivers as many cultural wins as it does financial wins. 

To learn more about how you can transform your CX program into an ROI-Focused, revenue generating machine, watch the full webinar with experts Jim Katzman and Eric Smuda here!

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

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

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

This isn't your average trends report – read on to see how your business can lead the charge into a new era of CX

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

A game-changing guide for your team on how to build & implement a competitive, fully-stacked integrated CX program.

Experience Improvement 101: What You Need to Know About Pearl-Plaza’s Mission

Experience Improvement is Pearl-Plaza's Mission

Just discovered Pearl-Plaza? Curious to know a little more about us and our differentiated Experience Improvement (XI)? Well allow us to introduce ourselves! 

Own the Moments That Matter

At Pearl-Plaza, we have this saying: “Own the Moments That Matter.” This is fundamental to our mission, because those moments—packed full of emotions, judgements, learnings, and more—shape the world we live in. And with every moment, there is an opportunity to make a positive impact; to leave a mark.

But when it comes to your business, there are simply some moments that matter more, to your customer, employees, and beyond. 

Our goal is to empower you with the data, technology, and human expertise necessary to identify the moments that matter, understand what’s working (and what might need improvement), take informed action to solve business problems, and ultimately provide a truly differentiated experience for your business. 

Our CEO Andrew Joiner said it best:  “Whether it’s customer acquisition, growth, or retention that’s needed, Pearl-Plaza brings a rigor, discipline, and science that makes our results trusted by the boards and executive teams of the world’s best brands.” 

What Is Experience Improvement (XI)?

Despite increased investment, experience management programs have plateaued. Why?

Because experiences don’t need to be managed or measured, they need to be improved.

The truth is that monitoring services and D.I.Y. approaches aren’t enough for today’s businesses; they cause program stagnation and make meaningful return on investment (ROI) impossible. Instead, what’s required for success is a new approach: an Experience Improvement (XI) initiative that solves the biggest business challenges, like retention, growth, and cost savings. 

The Moments That Matter

Improving experiences begins with sifting out the noise from experience data and identifying the moments that matter: where customer, employee, and business needs meet. This allows businesses to prioritize their focus on high-emotion, high-impact areas and connect with their most valued customers. Additionally, businesses can empower their employees to recognize and take action in these moments, ultimately culminating in organization-wide transformation from the boardroom to the break room. 

Data, Technology, and Human Expertise

Experience Improvement is made possible through our industry-leading Experience Intelligence XI technology and our in-house Experience Improvement (XI) services teams. With our ability to collect and gather data from anywhere and in any form, industry-leading technology, and decades of experience in key industries, Pearl-Plaza can help you craft an experience initiative that truly meets the unique needs of your business. We are dedicated to being more than just a vendor to our clients—instead we take the role of a dedicated partner committed to a businesses’ short- and long-term success.

The Intersection of Value

Our mission is to help our clients improve experiences at the intersection of value—where customer, employee, and business needs come together.  Ultimately, our clients are able to move the needle and go beyond managing their experience to actually improving it. With the right intelligence, businesses can empower the right people to take transformative, informed action in the most effective ways and drive value across four key areas: acquisition, retention, cross-sell & upsell, and cost reduction. In other words, better results for the business and better experiences for their customers and employees.

The Continuous Improvement Framework

The key to taking an experience program beyond metrics is to move beyond monitoring customer feedback and stories and focus on the formation of actionable plans for changes informed by them. Customer narratives contain meaning that companies can use to diagnose both superficial and deep-seated problems, define remedies to those problems, positively impact the bottom line, and create more meaningful experiences. We help our clients  achieve all of this by sticking to a simple, five-step framework that we call the Continuous Improvement Framework: define, listen, understand, transform, realize. (You can read all about it here!)

Does this Experience Improvement (XI) mission align with your vision? We’d love to hear from you—reach out to our team for a chat here!

Watch the Video – See Pearl-Plaza in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

When CX Value Is Hard to Find: 3 Truths You Need to Hear if Your CX Program Isn’t Moving the Needle

CX Value

Here’s a difficult truth you may be facing: “my customer experience (CX) program is just not moving the needle.” Whether it’s an inability to prove CX value or a lack of recognition for your improvement efforts, it’s a scary realization to have. At the same time, it’s also an opportunity for you to reassess and, more importantly, transform.

The beginning of a true CX transformation journey starts with facing the reality that your old ways of approaching experiences might not be the best—and being willing to adapt your approach according to best practice. 

If you find yourself at the beginning of such a journey, we’ll be diving into three truths you’ll definitely want to hear. Let’s get started!

Truth #1: Stagnant Programs Are Only Measuring and Managing Experiences

More often than not, the reason your program may not be impacting your bottom line is because you’re not actually improving experiences. Many businesses keep tabs on endless amounts of metrics. And that’s valuable information!

But measurements are not outcomes. They only tell you that there’s a problem. 

In a similar fashion, managing experiences only focuses on understanding the customer or reacting to their interactions. But how does this ensure that customer problems are solved not just in one case but in all future iterations? You see, measuring and managing is one thing—actual improvement is another. So how are the experiences you’re providing really getting better on a day to day basis?

Truth #2: Improving Experiences (and Finding CX Value) Focuses on the Big Picture

Of course, today’s experiences are crucial. But so is every future one! That’s why the big picture matters. Because if you can predict and solve future customer problems today, you’re already a few steps ahead. 

And that doesn’t just apply timewise as your customer journey develops. It’s also core to the progression and structure of your business. So many companies are organized in siloes, but it’s highly beneficial to a CX program if you close the gaps between departments. One effective strategy is to utilize a governance model that will keep your company in alignment and accountable.

Truth #3: True CX Transformation Requires Action

And finally, real Experience Improvement happens through action. People often use the Voice of Customer (VoC) and customer experience as interchangeable terms when they technically do not operate the same way. VoC is all about listening—but it doesn’t enact the necessary shift to concrete action. 

Our Continuous Improvement Framework maps out the steps you need to take to actually see success: design, listen, understand, transform, and realize. You can see here that listening is only the second step! To have a successful program, there are three more steps to complete the full process and improve experiences.

Give yourself a pat on the shoulder for getting through these truth bombs with us. But it doesn’t end there! It’s now your chance to transform customer experiences for the better. 

And if you’re vying for more CX insight, check out this webinar where Eric Smuda (Principal, CX Strategy & Enablement) speaks on “CX Transformation: The Key to a Truly Valuable Program.”

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

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

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

This isn't your average trends report – read on to see how your business can lead the charge into a new era of CX

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

A game-changing guide for your team on how to build & implement a competitive, fully-stacked integrated CX program.

The Secret to Improving Your CX Survey Response Rates

The Secret to Improving CX Survey Response Rates

It is a fact that CX survey response rates have been declining. Additionally, we are being surveyed more and more every day about every mundane thing in our lives. Even the federal government is in on it—an executive order in 1993 directed federal agencies to gather public feedback on how well they delivered services and to strive to offer a comparable level of customer experience with private companies. Orders similar to that one have continued into the present day.

But, with surveys being the lifeblood of nearly all customer experience (CX) programs, what is a CX practitioner to do to improve their CX survey response rates? Much has been written about the tactical things a survey owner can do: list hygiene,  fatigue or quarantine rules, visual appeal of the invitation, subject line, formatting, time estimates in the invitation, etc.  And while these elements can have some impact, they are temporary band-aids for the over-surveying problem.

The Secret to Improving CX Survey Response Rates Is…

I’ll let you in on a secret: if you truly want to improve and sustain your response rates, look to your CX program (specifically your closed loop processes). There are two critical things any company can do to improve its response rates, and they tie back to the inner and outer loop concepts described in the Net Promoter SystemSM.

You’ve probably heard that it’s vital for organizations to close these loops, as doing so can help you achieve everything from Experience Improvement (XI) to enhanced customer retention and sustained business growth. That’s true!  But effectively closing these loops also provides an incentive and opens a door for continuous feedback from your customers or members.

The Inner Loop

The inner loop refers to the systems, processes, and teams that organizations use to respond to customers one-on-one to address negative feedback. Having an effective inner closed loop process is of obvious importance to any company that wants to keep its doors open, let alone create a differentiated and meaningful experience for customers. Fail to close the inner loop, and you open the “leaky bucket.”

However, if you can build a system that allows you to receive customer feedback, analyze it for actionable insights, and respond both meaningfully and expediently, you’ll have a much easier time retaining customers and extending their lifetime value. You will learn more about their individual preferences and may even potentially cross-sell or upsell them to additional products and services.

There is also plenty of research that demonstrates that customers whose complaints have been successfully resolved tend to leave higher review scores than customers who never had a complaint in the first place! Finally, by responding to customers when they have complaints, you demonstrate that you have listened and acted on their feedback, giving them a strong incentive to provide feedback again in the future.

The Outer Loop

The scope of the outer loop is considerably wider than that of the inner loop and requires more organizational resources, cross-silo cooperation, and team coordination.  Rather than focus on individual customer interactions and complaint resolution, the outer loop is about the actions your organization takes on the collective feedback you’re receiving to drive Experience Improvement and communicate those improvements back to a much broader segment of customers (if not your entire customer base). The one-on-one interactions that comprise the inner loop are certainly important, but the outer loop is all about incorporating those into a cumulative group effort to drive sustained Experience Improvement.

This improves your CX survey response rates by demonstrating to all customers that your organization truly does care about feedback and attempts to take action to improve the overall customer experience. This provides a feedback incentive even for customers who may not have shared it in the past, as they see the direct benefit.

Widening Focus

Click here to read my full-length Point of View on how focusing on your CX program will actually help you achieve better outcomes. In the meantime, take advantage of anything you might have learned here to meaningfully improve your inner and outer loop processes. I promise you you’ll see a difference.

Watch the Video – See Pearl-Plaza in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

The Employee & Customer Experience Framework for Improvement You Need in 2022

business man placing sticky notes on glass to outline employee and customer experience improvement framework

Every year, we at team Pearl-Plaza like to look back and reflect on what we’ve learned about employee and customer Experience Improvement, and then put those top learnings into a “cheat sheet” of sorts for our readers. Building a customer experience program that helps you to differentiate from the competition is difficult—that’s where Pearl-Plaza’s customer experience framework, the Continuous Improvement Framework comes in. This employee and customer experience framework will provide you with some of the best practices in the business to help you get the most out of your customer experience program.

So, sit back and read on to learn how our customer experience framework can benefit your business!

What Is a Customer Experience Framework?

As a starting point, it is important to define what a customer experience framework is. 

A customer experience framework is a set of processes a company implements in conjunction with its customer experience program to help the program be as successful as possible in its efforts to improve the customer experience, create a customer-centric culture, and positively impact the bottom line. It is like an map that you follow as you go through all the steps of gathering feedback from customers and improving processes based on the feedback.

Without a customer experience framework, it is hard to get consistent results you want. But with a customer experience framework, you’ll be able to make your CX program consistently successful, and adapt your program to scale and evolve with your company, customers, and the greater market.

The Continuous Improvement Customer Experience Framework

Your Path to Employee & Customer Experience Improvement Success

The key to Pearl-Plaza’s customer experience framework, the Continuous Improvement Framework, is to move beyond merely monitoring employee and customer feedback. Instead, experience professionals need to focus on using that feedback to inform action plans. Customer narratives are a goldmine for companies looking to eradicate superficial and deep-seated problems. Their feedback allows you to identify issues, define remedies that positively impact the bottom line, and ultimately create more meaningful experiences.

Brands can achieve all of this by sticking to a simple, five-step  customer experience framework that we call the Continuous Improvement Framework: define, listen, understand, transform, realize.

Continuous Improvement Framework for employee and customer Experience Improvement

Step #1: Design

When folks start up their employee and customer Experience Improvement programs, they’re often tempted to start listening right off the bat. However, it is absolutely essential that experience professionals design their programs before they launch listening posts. 

Here are some notes from Pearl-Plaza expert Andrew Park about the first step of the customer experience framework, design:

“Listening to customers is obviously an integral part of any well-built experience program, but it isn’t enough on its own, especially when brands don’t truly know what they’re listening for. Listening broadly can be helpful, but far more useful is the capability (and the willingness) to listen purposefully.

There are mountains of data out there, and the only way for companies to own the moments that matter (when business, customer, and employee needs intersect) and thus achieve transformational success is to figure out how to listen purposefully. That’s why it’s important for brands to design their experience program’s goals, objectives, and other factors before turning the listening posts on.”

Want to read more from Andrew? Click here to access “Why ‘Just’ Listening to Your Customers Isn’t Enough”

Step #2: Listen

Now that you know what you’re listening for, you can start setting up your listening posts. And whenever most of us think about employee and customer listening, we tend to also think about surveys. But what are the best practices and philosophies successful listening programs follow?

Here’s Andrew Park again:

“Traditional forms of listening usually involve long-winded surveys that focus on single points within brand channels. These surveys may also take a spray-and-pray approach, asking about everything the brand cares about—but that customers may not. Finally, brands may also spend too much time focusing solely on solicited customer feedback, which results in fragmented data. Fortunately, brands can be more versatile when it comes to collecting feedback.”

Want a succinct look at how to achieve meaningful survey listening? Get the four steps you need to follow in “How to Achieve Meaningful Listening Through Surveys”

Steps #3: Understand 

You’ve collected data at strategic touchpoints using best practices. Now it’s time to leverage analytics to get to the actionable insights in your data. That’s when text analytics come into the picture. 

Text analytics are vital to your brand’s ability to understand your customer and employee experiences. You can have listening posts across every channel and at every point in the customer journey, but if you don’t have the best-possible text analytics solution in place, your ability to derive actionable intelligence from that data is essentially moot. And your ability to create transformational change across the organization and drive business growth? That’d be a non-starter without effective text analytics. Without them, all you have is a score, not any context or information on what actually went well or needs improvement.

It’s obvious that text analytics are vital, but in an industry full of jargon, claims about accuracy, and a huge amount of conflicting data, how can you tell what solution attributes will be the best for your company?

Learn everything you need to know about text analytics in this eBook.

Step #4: Transform

In our experience, we’ve found that the hardest step for programs to conquer is going from insights to action—and therefore, to transformation. This is also arguably the most important step in the employee and customer experience framework. 

Transformation is an important step of the process not just because brands can actively improve themselves, but also because it’s what your customers expect is happening. Customers wouldn’t provide feedback if they didn’t expect brands to do something about it, so bear this in mind when working toward providing the best experience for them.

So how do you go from insights to transformation? Learn the process in this article.

Step #5: Realize

This is what you’ve been building toward all along: realizing employee and customer Experience Improvement. But what does true success look like? How do you prove it to your business stakeholders? 

Here are some thoughts from Pearl-Plaza XI Strategist Jim Katzman:
“Realizing success occurs when you can evaluate how well your program is hitting goals and when you can quantify the results. Even if you don’t hit a homerun against all your goals, evaluating what you have achieved—and what you haven’t—still gives you a great idea of what exactly about your program might need tweaking.

There’s another, more profound way to evaluate your experience program’s impact on the business, and that’s through the lens of four economic pillars. The handy thing about our model is that it’s broad enough to be of use to any company regardless of size, brand, or industry while also giving experience practitioners a foundation from which to evaluate additional financial metrics.”

Want to learn about the four economic pillars and other ways to quantify program results? Read Jim’s full piece here.

A World of Possibilities

With the right mindset and a proven employee and customer experience framework for success in place, the possibilities for your employee or customer experience improvement initiative are truly endless this next year.

With that, we’d like to say happy holidays from our team to yours!

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

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

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

This isn't your average trends report – read on to see how your business can lead the charge into a new era of CX

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

A game-changing guide for your team on how to build & implement a competitive, fully-stacked integrated CX program.

What Is the First Step in a Customer Experience Transformation Roadmap?

Customer Experience Transformation

Whether your program is just getting started or has stagnated over the years, this post is for you! 

Every brand—across industries and around the globe—has a unique opportunity to overhaul outdated ways of managing customer experiences, and move toward actually improving experiences for customers and employees. Achieving this is no small task, and often requires customer experience transformation. At Pearl-Plaza, we’re here with you every step of the way and ready to take on the challenge, together.

So, what is the first step in a CX transformation roadmap? Set up your program with the end in mind!

Whether you are taking on a program for the first time, or redesigning an old one, this is the most fundamental step of a customer experience transformation. For a lasting impact, we can’t emphasise enough how important it is to take the time up front to outline your CX vision, align it with your corporate objectives, and make a tactical strategy for how your CX program will ladder up to expectations. 

Three Ideas for Taking Action Toward Customer Experience Transformation:

Action Item #1: Outline Success

Decide what success looks like for your CX program in six months, one year, and three years. Without a vision to point to, it’s difficult to make any progress. An example of a program goal could be: 20% increase in customer retention, 10% reduction in cost to serve, +10% increase in revenue per store year on year.

Decide how often your team will check in to make sure you are still tracking toward your targets. As for the best cadence, plan to check in once a month with a program roadmap or visit these goals in quarterly board meetings—and don’t forget to schedule those calendar reminders!

Action Item #2: Consider Employees

Get super clear on how your customer experience program will impact employees. These frontline workers are your biggest resource to transforming customer experiences, and it’s important to help them understand what delivering success looks like in their unique roles. 

You should develop a solid comms plan to bring staff on the journey, co-design and embed processes and training for closing the loop, or perhaps train employees to reach out to happy customers with a personal ‘thank you’.

Action Point #3: Decide What ‘Solving For X’ Looks Like For You 

Decide which initiative you will tackle first—will it be customer retention, reducing costs, cross- or upselling, or customer acquisition? Pick one of these, which is your ‘X’, and make a plan for tackling financial linkage. 

Action Point #4: Settle on a Program Soundbite

Ensure you understand the business benefit of transforming customer experiences so that you can communicate far and wide across the business. Prepare a soundbite or elevator pitch so you are prepared to communicate why CX transformation is so important and what it means to people in their roles.

At Pearl-Plaza, our team of experts are the best in the business for helping you design innovative, continually evolving experience initiatives. In fact, for three consecutive years, our clients have won the award for “Best CX Transformation” through the CX Awards! To learn the next five steps to an award-winning CX transformation, download the full guide here!

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

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

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

This isn't your average trends report – read on to see how your business can lead the charge into a new era of CX

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

A game-changing guide for your team on how to build & implement a competitive, fully-stacked integrated CX program.

You Said, We Did: What Is Operational Transparency & How Can It Lead to Experience Improvement?

On this blog, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the importance of taking action on customer feedback to inspire tangible Experience Improvement (XI). For most programs, this “action” means closing the loop with individual customers while also working to identify and solve systemic problems to improve the overall customer experience. But after closing the inner and outer loop, there are those brands that take even further action with operational transparency.

This additional step communicates to customers the actions a brand has taken to directly improve the customer experience. And for taking this extra step, brands are rewarded with further customer engagement and loyalty. In our article today, I’ll discuss how your brand can take this final step and reap the benefits. Let’s dive in!

What Is Operational Transparency?

“Operational transparency” is a behavioral science concept that refers to a company that purposefully exposes its processes to customers to help them understand the work being done on their behalf.  Think watching employees at Subway build your sandwich, or make your coffee at Starbucks. Another example is seeing a progress bar during a software update that lets you know you’re on item 5 out of 20 updates, just so you know how long it will be before you can work again.  

Research has shown that customers value this glimpse into a company’s process and that being transparent builds engagement, trust, and loyalty. Why? Customers appreciate the work companies do for them.

How Operational Transparency  Improves Your Customer Experience  

Operational transparency can be a two-part process embedded into your customer feedback efforts. First, you can combine your transparency efforts with your immediate “thank you for participating” message after a survey. This can look like providing a short overview of how you as an organization plan to look at the feedback and take action. This message can be sent to both participants and non-participants.

So what does this do for you? It lets you be completely transparent about the process and show how feedback will shape the organization. It’s not necessary to identify the exact actions the organization is going to take based on the feedback. Instead, you could mention previous actions you’ve taken as evidence that you aren’t just making empty promises

Secondly, it is important to communicate the actions you’ve taken after the fact to bring feedback full circle. This communication can piggyback on existing marketing communications, be included in feedback invitations, or be a standalone communication.

The key is to be short and focused on a few specific actions, sharing both the feedback driving it as well as the actual improvement (and maybe even how it’s been received). The idea here is to say to your customer, “you said, we did!”

How Does This Work in Practice?  

We have many clients who successfully communicated their Experience Improvement actions to their customers. Here are just a few of those examples: 

  • One client, a global supply chain company, sent out an email from their COO in early January to all of their customers, thanking them for their business and sharing the results of their survey alongside the improvements the company planned to make.  The company tracked the number of customers who opened the email and found that the vast majority of customers opened the email.
  • One of our superannuation clients builds operational transparency into their ongoing newsletter to fund members and employers. They include in the newsletter an update of any action that has been taken based on their voice of the customer program. 
  • A shipping company has automated their customer communications through our platform. They have an email that explains their action process and also highlights several initiatives they have implemented based on the feedback they’ve received. They update the email regularly to keep it fresh and relevant.
  • A global technology company has created a page on their website which they continuously update to reflect the actions they have taken based on customer feedback. In an annual email, they incorporated a video from the CEO regarding how feedback was used to make changes, including a summary of the items implemented.

In the end, this type of transparency not only engages customers, but it also communicates how much you value their feedback. It is a way to show appreciation for the customer while also building loyalty. And that’s what we like to call a win-win.

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The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

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10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

A game-changing guide for your team on how to build & implement a competitive, fully-stacked integrated CX program.

5 Steps To Realizing Your Experience Program’s Goals

The road to true Experience Improvement (XI) is rarely a straightforward one. There are many ways to take the journey, as countless companies have discovered over the last 10-15 years, but only experience improvement produces the type of customer connections and employee passion that turns companies from followers to true leaders within their verticals.

I talked about realizing experience program goals and success in a recent POV, but I think it’s time to talk briefly about how companies get there. What are steps brands take to get to realizing their goals, and how can they ensure that realization truly means transformational success? Our framework is designed to help companies get there, and it consists of five steps:

  1. Design
  2. Listen
  3. Understand
  4. Transform
  5. Realize

Step #1: Design

I’ve seen a lot of brands kick their experience programs off by turning listening posts on and then forming goals around whatever feedback they can find. It’s much more effective, though, to come at this step in the opposite direction: brands should first design their goals, then turn listening posts on. Defining what you want to do with your experience program before you begin it is much more effective (and a lot less messy) than the inverse.

So, what business challenges do you want your experience program to help solve for? Are you looking to boost customer retention, or lower the cost to serve? Maybe you want to cross-sell or upsell to your existing customer base. Whatever your goal, lay it out at the beginning of your program process and describe it in terms of specific numbers. Goals like “retain more customers” are too vague; design your initiative with percentages and financial goals, and ascertaining how successful it’s been will largely take care of itself.

Step #2: Listen

Another big component of designing your program is deciding which audiences to listen to. This is a more targeted approach than attempting to intercept feedback from all sides and can garner you intel pertinent to your specific goals. Once you’ve completed the legwork of deciding who you want to listen to, that’s when you should turn your listening posts on and start gathering feedback. All told, being selective about who you listen to will make realizing program goals easier.

Step #3: Understand

After you’ve gathered a sufficient amount of feedback, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and delve into what your customers, non-customers, or other audience groups are saying. There are several ways to go about this process—utilizing an experience improvement platform that can analyze sentiments and thus commonalities within your feedback is one of the most effective. Finding the common threads within your feedback will make you aware of what customers (or other groups) are saying, what they like, and most importantly, what needs fixing.

Step #4: Transform

Transforming your business means applying what you’ve learned from gathered feedback. It means identifying processes and potential problem areas, then working with the relevant stakeholders to come up with solutions. Brands should always desilo their experience data as a matter of course, but working directly with relevant departments is crucial to actually seeing change occur where it needs to. This is not an easy process by any means, but this collaboration is the best way to guarantee that meaningful transformation occurs.

Step #5: Realize

After this, the final step of our framework, realize, can take place as experience teams and practitioners see changes take place and goals hopefully get reached. What more is there to the process, though?

Click here to read my full POV on the subject, where I explain how brands like yours can best realize their experience goals and make a difference for themselves, their customers, and their employees.

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Take Action on Customer Feedback in 4 Simple Steps

Over the last decade or so, countless companies have fired up their own experience initiatives. These companies set out to create happier customers and employees, as well as a stronger bottom line—all through the power of experience programs! However, even after a brand’s CX practitioner(s) has gained program sponsorship, launched listening posts, and gathered data, it’s not uncommon for them to hit a wall when it comes to taking action on customer feedback

Gathering metrics is all well and good, but executing an action plan is what makes the difference between measuring and transforming your experience. Today’s conversation covers how to take action on your experience program feedback in four steps.

Four Steps to Taking Action on Customer Feedback

  1. Define Your Plan’s Stages
  2. Identify Collaborators
  3. Define Actions
  4. Create a Timeline

Step #1: Define Your Plan’s Stages

Every CX practitioner knows that taking action isn’t as simple as A-to-B. That’s why it’s important to hammer out the concrete steps you need to take toward experience improvement and brand transformation. It’s important to first consider where you are and remind yourself of the program’s end goal. Then, collaborate closely with your team to figure out which actions you need to take. This process empowers your team to prioritize what to execute on first.

Step #2: Identify Collaborators

Once your team has mapped out action plan stages, it’s time to decide who else in the organization may be needed. This isn’t necessarily the same as returning to the execs or other stakeholders and sponsors—you may need to reach out to other teams who own processes that impact the experience, such as IT or user experience. Including individuals before you take action will make the transformation process smoother.

Step #3: Define Actions

You’ve drawn a line from feedback to improvement and have the collaborators you need at the table. Now it’s time to work together to define specific actions. This step is why it’s so important to reach out to collaborators whose teams or departments you see improvement opportunities for. You’re going to need their help to figure out the best way to solve a problem in their respective parts of the organization. You can share your experience data, they can share their perspectives, and meaningful action will soon follow.

Step #4: Create a Timeline

A timeline helps ensure that the actions become reality. It’s also a great way to hold your team accountable as they begin putting those actions into motion. Creating a timeline helps ground program expectations in reality and gives your team a firm timestamp at which to start monitoring implemented changes. Indeed, all of this makes creating a timeline perhaps the most important part of an action plan.

Following these four steps will allow your organization to leverage what you’ve learned from your experience program. You can put those learnings to great effect creating a more emotional experience for customers, greater meaning for your employees’ work, and, consequently, a more robust market position for your organization.

Click here to read my full article on the importance of taking action to transform your business. I take a deeper dive into this vital process and provide additional tooltips on how to revolutionize your brand through the power of Experience Improvement (XI).

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Tons of CX Data? Here’s How to Make Sense of It

If there’s anything organizations aren’t hurting for these days, it’s CX data. Brands may have been avidly searching for it once upon a time, but nowadays, they face the opposite dilemma: having more data than they might know what to do with. This is particularly true for experience program data—a few listening posts here and there can quickly inundate even larger organizations with a ton of customer intel.

Today, I’m going to talk you through how to make sense of your data. Using the tips below will help you isolate signals, cut through all the white noise, and ultimately leave your organization more CX savvy.

All Data, No Decisions

Having a lot of data is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it is more challenging for brands to make data-driven business decisions when they’re not sure where to start. Should companies dive directly into customer feedback? What about employee surveys and financial metrics? The sheer amount of disparate data sources at play within most companies can make gleaning actionable intelligence feel overwhelming (if not flat-out impossible).

The first step toward overcoming this challenge is to take all of your data and pour it into one place. This includes customer feedback, employee intel, financial data, operational data, and other sources. Why? Because siloing data makes understanding your customers and their experiences much more difficult because it obscures the context needed to fully understand both of these business problems. Putting all your data together will help your company not only contextualize what is broken, but also illuminate the path toward solving those challenges.

Finding The “Why”

Desiloing data gives companies the chance to holistically understand their customers’ perceptions and experiences. This is important not just for making data-driven decisions, but also understanding the root of broken or underwhelming experiences. When brands connect experience data with financial and operational information, it becomes much easier to see where things might be going wrong and how badly.

Once brands gain this holistic view, it’s time to dive deeper with key driver analysis. This doesn’t mean sit back and watch your NPS—it means rolling up your sleeves and getting into exploratory analysis and customer profiling. These processes allow companies to learn exactly why their customers behave the way they do. Even more, they identify what experience strengths and weaknesses drive that behavior.

Don’t forget to ask your employees for their experience feedback as well! A lot of brands mistakenly overlook this step because the employee and customer experiences drive one another. There’s no better way to make an employee feel valued than to ask for their feedback. Moreover, it encourages employees to feel involved in and take ownership of customer experience.

The Next Step

Brands can make sense of their experience data by desiloing it, analyzing it within the context of additional data, and hearing employees’ side of the story. These are the first steps toward becoming a more data-driven (and customer-centric) organization, an endeavor that can make any company a leader in its vertical.

Click here to read my full article on the importance of understanding customers to transform your brand. I take a deeper dive and provide additional tips on how to revolutionize your brand through the power of Experience Improvement (XI).

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3 Ways an Improvement Success Framework Can Supercharge Your Experience Program

ROI has been a notoriously fickle element of experience programs for years—but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, the difficulty of proving ROI stems less from experience programs being a financially elusive unicorn than many companies not tying their program to a quantifiable objective.

These days, it’s not uncommon for brands to take the term “listening program” to mean a series of listening posts set up across multiple channels.

Yes, those posts are an important part of listening, but experience programs can be so much more (and do so much more for your business). They can go far beyond listening in across channels and reacting to customer comments only as they come in.

Listening for, reacting to, and measuring customer sentiment in this manner is what’s commonly known as experience management. And honestly, it rarely moves the needle for brands or creates a better experience for customers. Experience improvement (XI), by contrast, allows companies to achieve both of those goals by connecting to customers in a very human way. Essentially, it pays for brands to have an experience improvement success framework.

Today, we’re going to touch on three ways a success framework can add unbridled power to any improvement effort:

  1. Proving ROI
  2. Listening Purposefully
  3. Owning The Moments That Matter

Key #1: Proving ROI

ROI has been a notoriously fickle element of experience programs for years—but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, the difficulty of proving ROI stems less from experience programs being a financially elusive unicorn than many companies not tying their program to a quantifiable objective.

This is why it is crucial that brands establish hard, specific goals for their experience program. An objective like “be more customer-centric” isn’t going to cut it, especially when it comes to proving ROI. Rather, experience practitioners and stakeholders need to work together to hash out program objectives that can be tied to financial goals.

Whether it’s acquiring X amount of new customers or lowering cost to serve by Y percent, creating goals like these and gearing your program toward them will make establishing ROI much, much easier.

Key #2: Listening Purposefully

ROI isn’t the only area a success framework can help companies stencil in. This setup can also help brands better identify who to listen to and why.

Conventional wisdom holds that companies should listen for feedback from anyone, but that isn’t necessarily true. Callous as it may sound to some, the truth is that some audiences are just more worth listening to than others. A success framework can help companies identify which audiences they need to listen to to achieve program goals.

This approach is also handy for cutting through the mountains and mountains of data that experience programs inevitably rake in. They also help programs get to the heart of providing a great experience, which leads us to our final topic:

Key #3: Owning The Moments That Matter

The moments that matter are the instances in which the needs of customers, employees, and businesses all connect. They’re the moments in which a customer journey transcends a transaction and becomes a profound emotional connection. Owning the moments that matter is vital to creating connections and inspiring transformational success across your business.

This final key is a culmination of establishing financial goals, listening purposefully, and taking action—ultimately creating meaning for customers. That capacity to create meaning is what sets the best brands apart from the competition and carries them to the top of their verticals. And it all starts with building an experience improvement success framework.

Click here to learn more about how to create a success framework and why doing so at the very start of your experience improvement journey will guarantee success for you, your customers, and your employees.

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The Case for Moving Your Experience Program Beyond Metrics

Experience programs can revolve around so much more than scoreboard-watching and reacting to challenges only as they arise—we’re going to go over how much more these programs can be and why brands should adjust their ambitions accordingly.

For a lot of companies, the phrase “experience programs” brings careful management and lots of metrics to mind. Both of those things are important components of any experience effort, but they can’t bring about meaningful change and improvement. Experience programs can revolve around so much more than scoreboard-watching and reacting to challenges only as they arise—we’re going to go over how much more these programs can be and why brands should adjust their ambitions accordingly.

Movement Over Metrics

Conventional wisdom holds that if an experience program is returning great measurements, that must mean it’s really working for a brand. However, this isn’t necessarily true. Metrics are effective for highlighting a brand’s high points and weak spots, but that’s about it. A true experience program’s job doesn’t end with better metrics—that’s actually where the work begins.

Companies can create a fundamentally better experience for their customers (and thus a stronger bottom line for themselves) by taking action on their program’s findings. This means sharing intelligence throughout an organization rather than leaving it siloed, as well as encouraging all stakeholders to own their part of the process. In short, taking action is what makes the difference between being really good at watching scores roll in and actually fixing problems that might be muddying up the customer journey.

Narratives Over Numbers

The phrase “program findings” from the preceding paragraph can also mean more than just numbers. It can also denote customer stories, employee reports, and other, more abstract forms of feedback. Many experience programs pick this information up as a matter of course, but it can be difficult to take action on that intel without a concrete action plan.

One reason why many companies encounter this difficulty is because their programs don’t acknowledge a simple truth: some customer segments are worth more to listen to than others. It doesn’t make much sense to try to listen to every segment for feedback on a loyalty program that only long-term customers use or know about. This is why it’s important for brands to consider which audiences they want to gather feedback from before even turning any listening posts on.

Once brands have matched the audiences they want to listen to to the goals they want to achieve, that’s when they can turn their ears on and start gathering that feedback. Companies that take this approach will find feedback significantly more relevant (and helpful) than intelligence gathered through a more catchall approach. They can then perform a key driver analysis on those customers and put their feedback against a backdrop of operational and financial data for further context, which goes a long way toward the goal of all of this: meaningful improvement.

Experience Improvement Over Experience Management

Experience improvement is not a goal that can be reached just by reading metrics. It demands more than turning listening posts on and hoping that a good piece of customer intel comes down the wire. Rather, experience improvement demands action. Much like water molecules, the forces that drive customer expectations, acquisition, churn, and other factors are in constant motion, and thus demand constant action to stay on top of it all.

Desiloing intelligence, motivating stakeholders, and expanding program awareness to customer stories instead of just higher scores and stats is what makes the difference between an industry-leading experience and everyone else’s. These actions create better experiences for customers, compel employees to become more invested in providing those experiences, and creates a marketplace-changing impact for the brand.

Click here to learn more about how to take your program from simple metric-watching to meaningful improvement for all.

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