Customer Success is a Journey -not an Event. The role of customer journey in creating exceptional customer experience & profits

Customer Success is a Journey not an Event

The role of customer journey in creating exceptional customer experience & profits

As companies compete with each other to attract & retain clients, #CX or #CustomerExperience is the latest buzzword CXO's are talking about. It's no longer sufficient to have an excellent product, but also the experience to go with it. And the way one tracks it is through various #CustomerJourneys. Examples include the purchase process, the customer support process, the billing process etc.

NPS or Net Promoter Score is a popular metric that can be used not only as a benchmark for Customer Experience but also as a tool to track & derive insight from customer journeys. Research shows a direct co-relation between increased revenue & great customer journeys. And the cherry on top? A little help from behavioral theory.

This piece covers

1. The importance of Customer Experience & Customer Journeys (paraphrasing Neil Armstrong - One small step for the customer, a giant leap for the company)
2. Measurement metrics (You can't improve what you don't measure - Peter Drucker)
3. Net Promoter Score (NPS) & the various types (you didn’t know that did you?)
4. An example of Journey NPS' impact
5. Pro-tip: How companies can use a behavioral theory to improve their CX scores

Customer Experience & Customer Journeys

Wikipedia defines Customer experience (CX) as a totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral consumer responses during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase stages. Quite a mouthful!

I prefer a simpler definition shared by Zendesk - Customer experience (CX) is everything related to a business that affects a customer’s perception and feelings about it. It focuses on the relationship between a business and its customers and includes every interaction, no matter how brief and even if it doesn’t result in a purchase.

Jeff Bezos (you know who), mentions that the number one thing that made them successful was an 'obsessive, compulsive focus on the customer'. To do that we need to listen, record & track. And one way of learning about the customer & their experience is to understand their journey across various touch points.

Customer Journey is defined by SurveyMonkey as 'the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand'. A more business focused definition put forth by HubSpot - 'The customer journey is the process by which a customer interacts with a company in order to achieve a goal'.

McKinsey consulting underlines its importance based on research that states - 'measuring satisfaction on customer journeys is 30 percent more predictive of overall customer satisfaction than measuring happiness for each individual interaction. In addition, maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20 percent but also to lift revenue by up to 15 percent while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20 percent'.

Measuring Success

A survey by Nielsen Norman Consulting Group showed that respondents felt a customer journey exercise was more likely to be successful when measured. The 3 metrics generally used are

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS) - Covering how likely you are to recommend the product / service to your peers or family
2. Customer Effort Score (CES) - Tracks how much effort the client needs to spend to achieve their goal
3. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) - Measures how satisfied a client is with their experience

For purposes of this article we cover NPS as the primary measurement tool.

Net Promoter Score / NPS & NPS Prism is a creation of Fred Reichheld, Satmetrix & Bain Consulting. While a multilayered tool, simplistically put, it helps companies figure out how happy & vocal the client is with their experience.

To recap, NPS is calculated by asking survey respondents how likely they are to recommend a product, service or company on a scale of 0 to 10. Then, responses are categorized as promoters (scoring 9 or 10), passives (scoring 7 or 8) and detractors (6 and below). Next, the percentage of respondents who fall in the detractor category is subtracted from the percentage of those who fall in the promoter category, yielding a score that ranges from -100 to 100. So, if 61% of your respondents were promoters and 28% were detractors, your NPS would be +33.

 Image courtesy: Survio.com

Since it's agreed that focusing on customer journeys is far more actionable in driving CX improvements let us look at the range of NPS measures available.

Tip: To make it simple we add a prefix to express the kind of measure we are referring to. For example measuring the Journey via NPS is represented by jNPS.

Types of NPS measures (Source: NPS Prism)

Relationship NPS (rNPS): Measuring the perception customers have of the company or brand. This is generally what most companies use as their measure. This is a cumulative & 10,000 feet view of the customers perspective.

Product NPS (pNPS): Focusing on the product experience, it is used to determine if your clients are happy or dissatisfied with your product - do they find the price fair, the product easy to set up & use etc. Through this measure you can determine if your clients are buying (primarily) because they like the product or is the purchase decision influenced by the brand, your service & other CX elements.

Transactional NPS (tNPS): Transactional NPS measures the feedback based on a single interaction at one point in time with one channel. Think of a survey you are asked to fill after you speak to a call centre agent - where they would typically ask you to rate the interaction.

Channel NPS (cNPS): Used to measure the efficacy of your channels. Is your website easy to navigate & quickly find information. Do clients find your sales team knowledgeable or perhaps your customer support team empathetic and able to solve their issues with minimal follow-up?

Now it is easy to confuse transactional NPS with journey NPS and assume jNPS is merely a sum of multiple tNPS. Transactional NPS helps as a diagnostic tool to figure out whether individual touchpoints are working, but journey NPS gives companies an insight whether the processes as a whole are helping clients reach their objectives. Narrowly focusing on just the transaction comes with the danger of losing sight of the clients goal.

However without proper context, or rather without understanding the intent of the customer's journey it's quite likely to misinterpret feedback being received. For example a (cloud) software firm suddenly started seeing a spurt in customer support hold times & dissatisfaction scores. If we were to rely purely on transaction NPS, it might be perceived that the issue lay with the customer centre. However when the team analyzed the journey it transpired customers were unable to log-in to their online portal due to a server glitch. Their first point of contact was the customer support team who were soon overwhelmed with the quantum of calls - resulting in increased hold times & irate, dissatisfied clients. If the CX team were focusing on just feedback based on the transaction NPS scores instead of the journey, chances are they would have incorrectly recommended solutions for the customer care staff - rather than improving server infrastructure & fail safe systems.

Mapping journeys, measuring & analyzing them often throw up insights that invalidate certain hypothesis - rather coming up with data backed information on what actually is happening.

Let us walk through an example to understand this better (as shared by NPS Prism in their eBook- The key to better CX)

A journey at the grocery aisle

If you have shopped at a grocery store recently and were looking for something, chances are you would seek and ask an employee - just faster that way right? In fact - 'seeking out a staff member for assistance in the aisles' is one of the major client engagement journey across retail stores. While there are several factors that affect this journey, there are two important measurable factors that are tracked

1. How long did it take to find a staff member
2. Was the staff member knowledgeable

Using relation NPS scores as the (impacted) benchmark, data from Company A & B were analyzed on the basis of the above factors. Company A with a journey NPS of 72 had a rNPS (what customers perceived of the company/brand) score of 59 as compared to Company B with an abysmal jNPS of 10 and a rNPS score of 30.

Let's see how the wait time & knowledgeability scores affected the above scores.

At Company A 77% customers had to wait a minute or less to find & get an answer from a staff member. This resulted in a whopping jNPS score of 80. The 23% who had to wait more than a minute gave a jNPS score of 48 - which reflects their dissatisfaction.

Compare it with Company B where it took more than a minute for 56% of it's clients to get an answer from the staff resulting in a negative jNPS score of -16. Only 44% clients were served within a minute & their jNPS scores averaged to 44. 

As you can see the impact of dissatisfaction is higher in Company B NPS scores with a dip of 57 points - viz. 41 (positive score) - (-16) negative score, vs. Company A with a dip of 32 - i.e. 80 (positive score) - 48 (negative score).

Similarly the knowledgeability journey shows 93% of Company A's customers felt that the staff was knowledgeable returning a jNPS score of 80 while 7% who reported staff were not knowledgeable returned a score of -24 (a dip of 104 points). In the case of Company B, 59% felt staff were knowledgeable giving an average jNPS of 57 with the remaining 41% giving a -59 jNPS score (a dip of 116 points).

Based on this information the CX team at Company B now know that in order to improve the total experience, they need to focus on the journey of asking help at the aisle - with speed of response & knowledgeability being two critical differentiating factors. A possible solution on this actionable insight could be to incentivize staff members based on their speed of responsiveness & ability to educate customers on what is in stock.

The role of emotion in NPS scores

'When a given journey is highly emotive, that means it has a high propensity to delight and/or annoy. Journeys that have a high likelihood to create delight and a low likelihood to annoy tend to create customer promoters. When the inverse is true, those journeys tend to create detractors. When a journey has a high likelihood to delight or annoy, we call it a “moment of truth” — something that’s crucial for a company to get right in order to create delighted customers and avoid unhappy ones.'

 - From The Key To Better CX by Net Prism: Bain Consulting

Cheat sheet: Using the Peak-End rule in behavioral psychology to drive emotive, memorable & positive customer experience.

As you perhaps can attest, the human brain does not remember every single moment (the missus though would most likely disagree). Researchers found the brain only remembers those parts of the event it considers important for future decisions. By remembering the most impactful moments, whether pain or pleasure, our brain helps us decide what to seek out or steer away from in the future. It is this evolutionary behavior that influences your clients to either keep returning to your brand or stay away.

Enter the Peak-End Rule

Postulated by psychologist & Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman it states that we evaluate events not in its entirety but based primarily on two parts of our experience - the peak & end. The point where the experience has the strongest emotion, either positive or negative, is what's considered the peak and the end is how the experience ended.

Kelechi Okeke, in his article mentions 3 steps companies can take to dramatically improve customer experience by using the Peak-End rule

#1 Identify your Peaks

Analyze your customer journeys & identify the emotional highs & lows they go through as they experience your brand. Find out the peaks moments, when & why they occur.

#2 Create favorable Peaks

Once you have identified your peaks, work on making them / reinforcing positive experiences. The best part is that you can manufacture these by design. It doesn't need to be expensive or highly elaborate. Something simple as greeting them with their names, remembering and using an important information about them in conversation (a recent promotion for example), remembering important dates like a birthday or an anniversary can go a long way in creating a positive (peak) memory.

#3 End on the highest possible note

This can be achieved in several ways like a surprise discount at checkout or a small gift at customers leave. The point is to create a grand finale to ensure the customer leaves with a memorable & positive emotion.

If you are a company that's looking at reducing costs & increasing profits (well who isn't), executing well on customer journeys leads to the best outcomes. To track progress, derive actionable insights & create opportunities for success, it is important to measure those journeys rather than just individual touchpoints. McKinsey consulting's research has shown clients have extremely low patience for brands & companies that do not provide consistent & memorable customer experience. And no time like right now to get this journey started.

References

1. The Key To Better CX - NetPrism: Bain Consulting
2. www.netpromoter.com
3. www.netpromotersystem.com
4. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/the-three-cs-of-customer-satisfaction-consistency-consistency-consistency
5. https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/unveiling-the-new-and-improved-customer-effort-score
6. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-mapping-ux-practitioners/
7. https://uxmag.com/articles/how-to-measure-customer-experience#:~:text=Examples%20of%20commonly%20used%20metrics,Effort%20Score%2C%20and%20Customer%20Satisfaction.&text=Many%20companies%20use%20the%20Net,to%20measure%20their%20overall%20experience.
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_experience
9. https://www.bain.com/consulting-services/customer-strategy-and-marketing/nps-prism/
10. https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/peak-end-rule
11. https://customerthink.com/understanding-the-peak-end-rule-how-it-affects-customer-experience/
12. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/peak-end-rule/