Sometimes it’s worth reminding ourselves why we care about customer experience. What is it that makes us want to engage our customers and give an experience worth raving about?
We want customers to stay with us longer, spend more and recruit new customers.
But there are problems with the way many of us approach customer experience:
Problem #1 - We have competing priorities
Organisations are complex beings. While we might have a strong and clear commitment to service, this inevitably has to be balanced with cost.
Likewise there is often a real conflict between collecting scores/metrics and collecting insight. While the score can tell you where a customer fits on a scale, it doesn’t give you the reasons why they chose this score.
Problem #2 – There are real adoption challenges for VoC programmes
Research by Forrester has identified several core challenges facing VoC programmes:
- 33% of programmes don’t have any executive support
- 60% don’t use it for CX design
- Over 65% don’t engage employees
- 45% don’t close the loop with customers
All this suggests that there are fundamental problems with the typically approach to VoC programmes
The traditional approach to VoC programmes
Traditionally, it all starts with a strategy. From here we go to insight, then to execution and finally we get to engagement.
These strategies are all based around collecting a lot of information – to gain more insight you need to collect a lot of information.
The model you’re building with the insight needs to stay stable. If you want to have a statistical representative model, you can’t really change your questions. The model then becomes more and more important over time, which limits the things you can and cannot do. Imagine, for example, if you want to ask another question, or change the questions that you ask. Both of these would be quite difficult to do within the restrictions of the model. As well, the volume of feedback customers are asked to give becomes tedious and leads to fatigue.
The new approach to VoC and Customer Experience
We want to flip the way that we’re doing things. In short, shift from strategy to execution. The point being that customer experience is really all about execution and not so much about strategy.
We believe that if you get the engagement level right, you can have a more flexible model for developing your strategy over time. This gives you the space to engage with your customers, start to close the loop on feedback and recover customers, without the restrictions of the traditional model.
This approach also presents an ideal opportunity to engage employees, so it doesn’t become a management programme (on of the challenges revealed by the Forrester stats). By making your programme about engagement, you have a far higher change of engaging the frontline on success.
And, by focusing on engagement, you’ll also become more obsessed with changing your questions and being more creative about the way you engage with customers. This will, naturally, start to drive higher engagement.
Have a look at the presentations from our expert speakers from our recent CX Day event: Build a Great Customer Experience to find out how else you can improve your customer experience:
