Towards Positive Customer Experiences

A customer experience is a richer and more complex interaction in today's world as it is the sum of all interactions that a customer has with a brand in a multi-channel environment (face to face, phone, email, chat, social media) across multiple touch points, and from sales to customer service and everyone in between.

So, to hear the true voice of the customer, you should understand how customers interact with the organization-their customer journey-measuring how you are doing at each point. Thus, a great customer experience is the key to a customer's heart and a customer experience program begins by measuring the customer's perception and ends with creating actions from the insights, what we call ‘Actionable Intelligence'.

A successful customer experience program is earmarked by effective measurement and, then, action. Processes are improved, staff is trained, and roadblocks to a positive experience are removed. Then the measurement starts over and further improvements are made in an iterative process. Hence, it becomes essential for an organization to deploy Voice of Customer Analytics (VoCA) to capture customer intelligence.

A Voice of the Customer program helps organizations capture customer intelligence, uncover business trends, discover the root cause of employee and customer behavior, and optimize the customer experience. Its importance lies in the fact companies can effectively derive insights from this data and then take action to achieve growth, competitive differentiation and an ongoing focus on the customer experience.

Building a successful program isn't always easy. However, organizations that get it right are reaping the benefits. Positive customer experiences bolster brand equity, garner customer loyalty, boost revenue and even increase company stock price!

A recent Forrester report cited the stock performance of organizations that were Customer Experience Leaders to that of organizations that were classified as Customer Experience Laggards. The results were dramatic. Over a five-year period, the customer experience leaders gained 22.5% while customer experience laggards lost 46.3%. They weren't even close.
What does a successful customer experience program actually look like?

Relevant

The customer experience program is relevant to the organization. First, the goals of the program align with the organizational goals. For example, if the organization is in a growth industry, the customer experience goals align by creating customer loyalty that results in greater market share. If the organization is in a crisis mode with renewals, the program goals are prioritized to creating loyalty with the current customer base. Relevance is also established with employees. As the customer experience program learns more and more about customers, this is shared with management and staff so the voice of the customer can be included in all projects.

Action-oriented

Data is great, but if you don't turn insights into action, there was no reason to collect it in the first place! Successful programs not only take action but also inspire employees across the organization to take action in their everyday interactions. Action-oriented programs develop customer advocates, coordinate project teams, calculate RoI and through these activities build customer-centric cultures.

Across Touch Points

Successful programs look holistically at the customer journey, understanding that the customer wants to deal with them as one organization, not a group of silos. Interactions are mapped and the customer's perception is measured at key points. These programs are also keenly aware that improving satisfaction, the customer-service department is just the tip of the iceberg. Most importantly, they broaden the lens, helping the organization understand what it is like to be their customer.

Just monitoring customer interactions across multiple channels to gauge customer experience and/or satisfaction is not enough to maintain a competitive advantage. The successful customer experience program monitors and, ultimately improves, all the customer touch points to create a business differentiator. They measure the customer's perception at each interaction-and most importantly-take action on what they find.