The changing role of Customer Experience post Covid-19

In the wake of Covid-19 it seems like Customer Experience is at a crucial tipping point. Is it a non-essential business function that gets cut when budgets are trimmed, or does CX have an opportunity to really move up the value chain in enterprise organisations? Is this the time for CX to stand up and be counted?

CX has been on an interesting journey over the last few years. It seems like forever ago when Gartner boldly declared that “Customer Experience is the new battleground!” back in 2014. Since then CX has yet to really find its place in the Executive Boardroom. Despite every customer-facing organisation declaring itself to be customer centric many CX programs have failed to have the kind of impact that was expected. According to Gartner more recently, only 22% of CX Leaders report that their programs exceeded customer expectations. Proving the value of customer experience in many organisations has been tricky. So, what has changed in the age of Covid-19?

Covid-19 has led to some incredible changes in the relationship most businesses have with their customers. Every company globally has been grappling with how to navigate through these turbulent times and come out the other side with the customer relationships intact. Marketing and customer communication in most organisations have pivoted quickly to try and adapt to this change. It feels like every advert and communication now is a variation of “We are here to help!” and rightly so. From Dove telling us that they do not care what brand of soap that we use as long as we wash our hands, through to QBE giving cash back to every car insurance customer, we are being told that “we’ll get through this together”. 

Those companies that are thriving (or even just surviving) are those that are exhibiting emotional intelligence and communicating with care, honesty, and empathy. In these emotionally testing times people are much more sensitive and they will make choices based on how much they feel a company truly understands them. Are you reaching out to help them — or to sell them something? Do you understand how they are feeling and are you able to communicate in the way that is most important? Brands are not competing over who has the best price or product but on kindness. It feels that the battleground of the moment is empathy. 

The interesting thing is that during the first period of crisis, understanding the customer is not that hard. We can guess how people are feeling. It is not too much of a stretch to guess that everyone is looking for support, help, and care right now and that they do not care about the features of the shiny new widget. But what about as we move out of the crisis period? What are customers looking for moving forward? How do you keep getting it right? This truly is uncharted territory, so how can businesses ensure that they support, evolve with and communicate with their customers in such a way that they make it through the other side, in this new “Empathy Economy”? Does the answer lie in the Customer Experience function and is this a new age of the Voice of the Customer? 

The answer is, in my opinion, a firm YES! To start with, let us first look at this word “empathy”. It is defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”. Its definition does not reference 2-way communication, empathy is simply about listening and understanding. The ability to listen to and understand your customers has now become the most important business need. Furthermore, in this new economy it is essential to get it right as traditional loyalties do not apply. However, truly understanding the way your customers are feeling and understanding what they will be needing from you moving forward is hard. So let's look at how we can do it.

A common reason that VoC programs have not moved up the value chain is that the insights gained are often not that powerful. Powerful insights are those that give clear direction for the actions that the business needs to take to drive a CX uplift. Powerful insights are those that are steeped in solid research that makes the C-Suite stand up and pay attention. Most programs do not deliver this. For example I know of a very large food retailer who has turned their VoC program off at the moment because the NPS score is plummeting. This is a time when they should be listening to their customers more than ever, yet the business has decided to turn the voice off. If all your program is feeding into the business is a barometer of CX performance, the program value will always be limited.

One of the biggest mindset shifts to take CX from simply being a numerical indicator of past performance to being the voice that shapes the business strategy is asking questions in the present and future tense. If you just ask “How did we do?”, “How was your experience 0-10?” then you are simply asking how an element of the product or service performed some point in time in the past. Now, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with driver questions like this, in fact I consider them to be very important. You need to learn from your mistakes. But do they really give you the insight needed to steer a business through economic uncertainty? Take “How could we have served you better?” and replace it with “How would you like us to serve you better in the future?”. The second gives the customer so much scope for feeding back text verbatim. Just imagine the power of feeding the business with ideas and insights based on empirical evidence on how the business can perform better moving forward. Alternatively you can also ask your customers how they plan to behave in the future. A very simple use case is a super fund asking a sample of its members whether they are planning to withdraw the $10,000 available to them as part of the new Government guidelines. That kind of insight allowed them to make better financial planning decisions. Ask your customers what they will be needing and when they will be needing it and how they want it to be communicated. That is the kind of information the business needs right now!

One of the other shifts that makes a real difference in the power of the insights that you can feedback is to move away from simply ranking drivers of CX and instead increasing the amount of open text verbatim. Many CX programs do not do this because they do not have the Text Analytics capability to handle large amounts of verbatim, but that is where the magic lies. Give the customers the opportunity to answer freely. Ask “How would you like us to support you?”, “What would you like us to do for you in the future?”. Encouraging the respondents to expand on their comments in a smart and sensitive way increases the text verbatim. You have to be a bit smarter than just asking “Please tell us why you gave that answer?”. The capability exists now to apply an AI-driven approach to encouraging respondents to expand on their answers. Applying Text Analytics and Emotion Analytics to the verbatim is the best way to uncover the gems that you can feed back to your business. This is the kind of insight that drives business strategy. This is powerful insight! Turn the feedback from an indicator of performance into research into future customer requirements.

Also, the way that people interact with and communicate with companies and each other has shifted. Many VoC programs have not evolved with that shift. For example we have seen that website intercept surveys, which traditionally had a low response rate, have in some cases tripled their response rate in the last 6 weeks. The technology now exists to understand customer data in its native form. We can move beyond calculating metrics to deriving deep meaning from the natural conversations customers are having through open-ended comments, social media channels, contact centers, video, voice and even images. In essence, NPS attempts to reduce the human experience to a number. And at a larger scale, structured surveys dumb down feedback regarding the real and complex human experience. The future of feedback is in allowing customers and employees to communicate whenever, wherever, and however they want, preserving that data in its native form, and then applying advanced analytics to uncover the intelligence that will drive true change in the business.

In an environment where the ability to listen to and truly understand your customers has become essential, companies with a mature VoC program have the capability to not just survive but thrive. By moving your focus to the future tense, increasing open-ended response and by widening the listening posts you give your company the best chance in this “Empathy Economy”. Now is the time for CX practitioners to stand up and lead their organisations forward into the unknown!