Forrester’s Customer Experience (CX) Index has found that 73% of companies felt ‘improving customer experience’ was a key business priority. Yet, only 1% are actually delivering an excellent experience for their customers. When you look at the CX sector, this dissonance is perhaps not surprising.
If you start by simply searching customer experience you’ll find 4,650,000,000 results. When you delve a little deeper into these articles and reports you can quickly find yourself getting lost in a haze of jargon. To simplify matters, some of the main terms to be aware of are: Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score.
Tracking customer experience is a business imperative. A recent study of more than 34,000 consumers worldwide revealed that two-thirds of consumers are happy to switch to the competitor that provides the best customer service or experience. Ignoring customer experience comes at a big cost… to your business!
That said, creating amazing and engaging customer experiences can swallow up substantial resources. So, how do you know if they are delivering the desired outcomes? That’s where careful customer experience tracking is so essential.
The approach to data collection taken by the traditional market research industry is often inadequate to track the fast pace of CX. That’s why, over the past few years, we have seen such a boom in digital CX tracking tools. They are designed to give insight into customer experience and to predict what customers will do next.
The sheer scale and pace of these developments can feel overwhelming. That can make it difficult for organisations to know where to start. There are many points to consider when designing your CX tracking processes, but here are four particularly crucial steps we recommend you to focus on first, based on our experience of how we, at Happ Consulting, track CX.
1-Remember the reasons behind your CX tracking
The purpose of collecting customer data is to give you insight that will genuinely improve the customer experience. Often, companies get so embroiled in the metrics and measurements, they forget that the purpose is to really hear about the experience. It’s not about parading the NPS scores in board reports or on company walls and websites.
It’s also important to ensure your customers know why you are asking for their feedback and that you intend to act on it. It’s likely that they are asked to complete surveys from all kinds of different brands and organisations. Feedback fatigue is real!
2-Get your survey timing and content right
This is crucial. You need to reach out and collect your customer insight at the optimum time. That is usually right after their experience; not three days or even 24 hours later. If you leave it too long, their experience will become blurred with many other interactions.
Your customers are busy and have limited time for completing surveys. We recommend asking no more than three questions. But, make sure those questions encourage them to freely tell about their experience, rather than making assumptions about what they will tell you.
3-Demonstrate that you value your customers’ insight
When you ask customers to comment on your products and services, it is polite to tell them what you will be doing about their insight. You need to implement the right action at the right time to show you value their time and opinions. Then you need to tell them what you’re doing and why.
If there is a quick fix, do it straight after collecting the insight (especially if it is a question or complaint). You may even be able to automate your response. For example, you could send a link to a video tutorial or simply a message asking if they would like a member of your team to contact them to discuss the matter further.
Whatever action you choose, be agile and take it quickly. Don’t make your customers wait days or weeks for a response. And, don’t leave them wondering why they are bothering giving their feedback; that just makes them feel more un-valued than not being asked at all.
4-Follow up on the impact of your action
When you invest in CX tracking, you need to understand the effect of all the actions you’re taking. How do you do that? Ask your customers again, concisely and using their preferred communication channel.
Try not to get too obsessed with the metrics. It’s more important to be genuinely interested in whether your customers are happy or not with the solution you provided for them.
Creating amazing customer experiences is more important than ever. And, measuring the effectiveness of that investment makes perfect business sense. But organisations also need to consider the effect of their customer experience tracking on their customers.
Busy customers are more likely to complete surveys that are easy and convenient for them. And, when they are confident their time and opinions are valued and will be acted upon. The ultimate test is: do the mechanisms you have for tracking customer experience make your customers feel happy when giving their feedback?
Would you like to know more about how our Happ Customer Experience Management Platform enables you to understand and act quickly upon customer insight? If so, you can contact us.
