| 1. Customer Experience is one of the key strategies for your business. | |
| 2. You have the full support of the Board for your CX program. | |
| 3. You are receiving feedback from every customer touchpoint. | |
| 4. There are reports with customer feedback being distributed here, there and everywhere across the business. Informing the various functions what they are doing to create Promoters and Detractors. |
That should be enough, right? Unfortunately not.
That is certainly a good starting point and covers the “Listening” component of a CX program. However, without a defined plan of action to come out of these reports, the program may lose impetus and become an expensive missed opportunity.
A Customer Experience Program, like any business initiative, is only effective if the execution is spot on.
You can summarise the stages of a Customer experience programs as:
1. Listen,
2. Engage and
3. Act.
Much of the focus for these programs is the execution of the Listening stage and the Act stage is not fully addressed. Therefore, this blog will provide tips on how to implement the “Act” stage in a measureable way.
1. Use insights from the “Listen” and “Engage” Stages
Firstly, I recommend that you use the insights from the “Listen” and “Engage” stages. This can help you to write a short list of business objectives.
For example, if you discover that the main reason you have been creating Detractors is “unhelpful staff”. One of your objectives could be “to decrease the number of customers that refer to unhelpful staff by 50%”.
2. Estimate the Financial Gain of Achieving that Objective
Secondly, the next stage is to estimate the financial gain of achieving that objective. By using the data you have harvested from the program. For example, customers that are satisfied with staff helpfulness are 10% more valuable than those that are dissatisfied (all other factors being the same e.g. sociodemographic profile, tenure, price sensitivity, product preferences). Consequently, this 10% increase in value is most likely related to an increase in brand loyalty/ preference.
To conclude this section, you now have clear information about what you need to improve and what the benefits will be.
3. Workshop Solutions to Achieve the Objective
Thirdly, the next stage is to workshop some solutions to achieve the objective. In fact, this can be organised with a Root Cause Analysis workshop. Here you delve into the reasons why you have complaints about “unhelpful staff” and possible solutions to the problem. Additionally, this process may uncover that staff lack confidence because their product knowledge is poor. Or perhaps they are demotivated because they feel underpaid.
4. Plan and Test Ideas Scientifically
Once you have a list of ideas for ways to achieve the objective, you build a plan to test out 2 or 3 of the ideas in a scientific way. For example, one of the ideas may be to run a staff training program for staff that get complaints about helpfulness. Moreover, to set up a reward system so that the staff with consistently excellent feedback from customers about their helpfulness are financially rewarded. Of course these plans will need to be tested out in different areas of the business and then reviewed against a control area that has not been involved in the plan.
This method of test and learn will not only identify which ideas are the most effective, but will also help you calculate the return on investment. Equally, the most effective ideas can be rolled out to the entire business with confidence.
5. A Continual Evolution and Process
Finally, The most important thing to remember is that this is ongoing process. As you work to resolve one issue, another may crop up and need to be addressed. So there is a need to constantly review the feedback from customers, prioritize the issues to resolve and keep testing different ideas.
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