Addressing the Customer Experience Satisfaction Decline

The importance and value of prioritizing customer experience (CX) development is no secret. There are plenty of market research studies showing how consumers gravitate toward and stay loyal to brands meeting their CX expectations. As a result, customer experience has become the new competitive battleground – and most brands are taking action. A 2022 study found that customer experience will be the top priority for majority of businesses over the next five years – beating out price and product for the third time in a row.

THE SITUATION:

Yet, despite this increased focus and investment in CX development, brands are still falling short of consumer expectations. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of consumers who are dissatisfied with their customer experiences jumped 34 percentage points; from 35% to 69%.

This raises an important question: With heightened attention, effort, and investment being directed at CX development, why is consumer satisfaction trending downward??

THE OPPORTUNITY:

Since the consumer groups, competitive environments, and CX objectives vary from one brand to the next, there is no single answer to the question of why consumer satisfaction is on the decline. But across all brands and industries, there is a single CX development thread; to meet (and exceed) customer expectations, we must first understand those expectations. The more you know about what customers are looking for, the better you can identify misalignments or gaps within your existing customer experience offerings.

So, The Opportunity I see here is to take a step back for a strategic assessment of what you currently know and understand about your customers’ wants, needs, and expectations.

How up to date are your insights inventory, customer personas, and journey maps? What do you know about your customers as unique individuals, looking beyond standard demographics and transactional data? Where are you currently leveraging data to benchmark performance and guide decision making?

By addressing these questions, you’ll be positioning yourself to answer the big-picture question about why overall CX satisfaction is on the decline because you’ll get the insights needed to compare what customers want against what you’re delivering. Stepping back for a moment in this way will empower you and your team to take two steps forward.

THE CHALLENGE:

Throughout my years as a CX and customer insights professional, two things have really stood out.

First, many brands struggle to articulate their definition and vision for their customer experience. Without strong internal alignment regarding the state of your customer’s experience today, what you want it to be in the future, and even what that term means at its base level, any related goals and objectives will be a struggle. Clarifying and refining these foundational customer experience elements are vitally important to any development efforts. To yield progress, there needs to be solid ground to build on. But a surprising number of brands overlook the importance of addressing these pieces before diving into action.

Second, many brands don’t know what they don’t know because they haven’t clearly outlined what they do know. In other words, their current understanding of customer wants, needs, and expectations is murky. This can be due to a variety of reasons, but typically it’s because their existing customer insights are fragmented, siloed, or out of date. In these cases, existing data and insights aren’t being utilized to their full potential. Or, even worse, it’s leading to misguided conclusions based on incomplete or unreliable data. It also means there’s uncertainty around which types of additional customer insights are needed to grow and evolve. Without a clear picture of what is confidently known today, it’s invariably unclear what needs to be known for tomorrow. ?

These two things together create The Challenge; brands are left trying to find a CX solution to an unknown CX problem.

Meaningful customer experience improvements are dependent on fully understanding existing issues and pain points, which is dependent on fully understanding what customers want, need, and expect from the brand to begin with. Having that core knowledge enables brands to identify any CX problems and then pursue impactful CX solutions. Without insights detailing customer expectations, customer experience development is a challenge because the fundamental issues and pain points are unknown.

THE SOLUTION:

As touched upon in The Challenge, any customer experience development progress starts with strong internal alignment and a clear picture of what is known about your customers today. These are the first steps of The Solution, which is building a holistic Customer Insights Strategy focused on your specific CX goals and objectives.

The internal alignment regarding your CX vision and desired outcomes will serve as a framework to ensure all moving pieces are working together. Establishing a clear picture of what is known about your customers today will not only support short-term decision making, but it will also uncover insights gaps and reveal blind spots. With these two steps, your Customer Insights Strategy is taking shape and you’ve hit the ground running.

From here, since you’ve identified your customer insights gaps, the next steps are clear – go out and capture the insights needed to fill those gaps. But this part is easier said than done. It’s about capturing the right insights from the right customers at the right time. If the process is rushed or done incorrectly, it can create even more gaps or lead to misguided conclusions.

While there are a variety of data types and sources, one of the most effective tactics is simply asking direct questions through feedback surveys. Rather than trying to piece together multi-source data for complex deductions, you have the opportunity to go right to the source and gather the specific insights you need.

Revisiting the topic of customer experience development, you can leverage feedback surveys to capture targeted insights at specific points along the customer’s journey. Starting with acquisition, a “Getting to Know You” survey sent to new customers is a great way to kick off relationship building efforts and gain a detailed understanding of what people want, need, and expect from you upfront. A “Brand Perception” survey anywhere along the customer’s journey will help gauge what they think, feel, and say about your brand – while also benchmarking how specific touch points do or don’t impact customer perception over time. If customers haven’t purchased in a while, a quick check-in survey can help identify pain points or defection drivers that need to be addressed. ?

Each of those individual surveys should be sent to a subset of your full audience to make sure the topics are relevant and timely. But they’re also contributing to the big-picture goal of overall customer experience development. This is why a holistic Customer Insights Strategy is so important. It ensures each survey offers value on their own while also serving as pieces to the broader CX puzzle. If multiple feedback surveys are launched without a strategy in place, you’ll potentially end up drowning in fragmented, siloed, and unstructured data – and you’ll be back facing The Challenge once again.

MY ADVICE:

The idea of building a holistic Customer Insights Strategy can feel overwhelming. So, if you’re out of breath after reading The Solution, I get it. But my advice is to take things one step at a time.

Creating a strategy is a process, not a single action. As I previously mentioned, even the first two steps – establishing internal alignment and digging into your existing data – are huge momentum builders. Through a structured and organized approach, these steps can yield tremendous progress in a relatively short time.

Then, identifying and filling in just one specific customer insight gap will yield even more progress. It also adds another piece to the overall strategy building puzzle and serves as a framework for future projects. With each piece you add over time, the strategy becomes richer and fuller. Next thing you know, there’s a holistic Customer Insights Strategy supporting confident, data-driven decisions and promoting forward-thinking customer experience development.?

HOW WE CAN HELP:

Here at MacKenzie, we are all-in on the power of a Customer Insights Strategy for CX development. This is where the true power of data-driven insights are unleashed because efforts are focused, consistent, and goal-oriented. Whether you're just getting started or looking to strengthen your existing customer experience strategy, we want to support you along the way.

Here's a quick overview of two ways we can help:

Research & Insights Projects

Customer Experience Strategy

YOUR TURN:

I’d love to see your comments and thoughts about Customer Experience (CX) Strategy development. Do you have any tips or suggestions for someone just getting started? Are you leveraging feedback surveys to guide your decision making? Did any questions or ideas pop up while you were reading?

By sharing your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions, we’ll foster a collaborative community where actionable insights are the foundation and collective success is the outcome.

Do you have a stat, fact, or trend you’d like me to write about?

Send me a message or share it in the comments. I’ll add it to my list of future newsletter topics!