The CX Index (part 4) – Characteristics and advantages

If the notion of customer experience is increasingly gaining ground in companies and organizations, the idea of quantifying this experience by measuring it objectively is still in its infancy.

We mentioned in previous parts that because every business is unique, there was no single customer experience metric that could apply the same way, under all conditions, to all businesses, and across all industries.

We stipulated that a CX index should be customizable and therefore unique to each organization according to its particularities, to the expectations of its customers and to the degrees of requirements that a company sets in order to provide a memorable experience for its customers. We emphasized the importance of evaluating the elements that are most important to your customers and being able to act directly and easily on these elements in order to make them pivotal points for decision-making and improvement of the client experience.

We will go further this time:

It is not so much the indicator that is unique to the company but the quality standard that is attached to it. And that’s what will distinguish you in the first place. Let's take a simple example to illustrate this fact.

Two competing companies could take “waiting time” as one of the components entering into the CX evaluation. It is not a distinctive element in itself. On the other hand, the fact of having a standard of 5 minutes for one and 3 minutes for the other is very significant since it becomes obvious here that one of the two companies has a standard in terms of waiting time that is 40% lower than the other (which is very positive in itself). So their respective decisions regarding excellence will obviously be different even if they use the same evaluation criterion.

So, now imagine a CX index made up of around 20 different criteria. In practice, it is not uncommon to see serious companies evaluate their CX indices using around 60 different analysis criteria. Hence the fundamental notion of personalization of CX indices according to the sector and the type of activity, according to the objectives pursued and the particularities of the targeted clientele.

Advantages of the CX index over other metrics

There is a range of KPIs and metrics to measure the marketing performance of an organization. Among the best known are market share, customer satisfaction rate, NPS (Net Promoter Score), proportion of new customers, complaint rate, etc. But although very useful in decision-making, none of these measures are really interested in the customer journey, the quality of interactions at contact points, the perceived image and the customer experience as such.

We summarize below four (4) major distinctions which favor the use of the CX index over the other metrics cited above:

1. While all these measurements are made after the action, CX is measured “in the action”, ultimately in real time. Information is therefore obtained very quickly (and can even be instantaneous provided if we take the means to do so) and discrepancies can therefore be corrected very quickly.
2. As CX measures are taken according to pre-established standards, gap analysis, decision-making and corrective measures become accessible to everyone.
3. The CX analysis is multi-criteria (i.e. it uses numerous evaluation criteria). Which makes it one of the richest marketing measures.
4. CX index analysis is one of the rare measures that both identifies the source of a problem and at the same time, identifies the ideal solution to correct the situation (since we would have expressed a priori standards of pre-established actions to achieve an optimal customer experience).

To be continued...

In the next part of this customer experience series, we will discuss the concrete operationalization of the CX index.

Your business strategy facilitator,

Mostafa El Adraoui (www.eladraoui.com)

Mostafa holds a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in marketing and business administration from l’Université de Sherbrooke. He has more than 30-year experience as a consultant in organizational transformation, marketing, and business strategy, as a business coach, and as a university teacher and trainer.