A particularly interesting set of competing priorities we have is cost vs. service. When we work with new organisations, we ask whether they’re cost-led or service-led. Most will say service. But when you really test it in an organisation, it often doesn’t stand up.
Score and understanding is another competing priority. We want to measure things. But if customer experience is about ‘How do you make me feel?’ then it’s about emotion, not a number. How good do you think we are as people at expressing emotion in numbers? Just collecting a score means we’re missing out on the ‘Why?’ - we’re missing out on the insight.
If you look at most Voice of the Customer (VoC) programmes, there are some clear challenges that organisations are facing, which stats from Forrester help to back up:
- Over a third of VoC programmes have no executive support.
- 60% of organisations don’t use the programme for customer experience design (such as asking better questions, following-up with customers and knowing when is best to follow up).
- Two thirds of all programmes don’t have an engaged frontline, meaning these programmes stay at the top level. They stay as board reports and statistics, rather than being embedded within the organisation.
- The most startling of all, 45% of all participants undergoing VoC programmes don’t close the loop with the customer. So, in other words, they ask for feedback, they ask for improvements, but then don’t do anything visibly with this information.
We think this has something to do with the way we’ve been primed to work on projects. Typically, it starts with a strategy, and then goes into insight, execution and finally engagement.
The approach we’re suggesting is rather simple: start with engagement first. Reverse the approach, so we’re doing rather than thinking.
Top tip: Most customer experience projects fail because they’re projects and customer experience is not a project. It’s a set of principles that need to be enduring.
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