HOW CAN I TELL WHETHER I AM DOING WHAT MATTERS TO MY CUSTOMERS?

This is a common refrain from customer service organisations, but often met with methods of varying effectiveness. Measuring what matters to customers makes a huge difference in knowing whether real improvement is happening in the eyes of the customer.

THE PROBLEM FOR SERVICE ORGANISATIONS

Whilst organisations have all manner of measures and metrics on financial performance, does an improvement in one of these areas keep customers coming back or telling others about your service? Sales may be a lagging indicator of success, but seeing sales go up or down does not inform an organisation’s people what they should do differently. We find that organisations need measures and metrics that relate to what matters to customers so people at the front line can lead change. Imagine all of your people knowing what they should be working on to make more customers happier about their experience. NPS will not do that either–so you have a score of 7, what comes next–nobody really knows.

THE SOLUTION

This can be done in teams, manually reviewing all of the organisations customer channels and touchpoints, but we can also supercharge this process with text analytics and by connecting various other sources of data to get an end-to-end view of:

1. What is important to the customer at each stage of value creation (understanding their own problem, choosing the type of service to solve that problem, and receiving the service in the way that that customer wants it)
2. How and how well the customer is served
3. Where the friction for customers is
4. What organisations can do to improve their business flow
5. Where things are improving from the customer’s point of view

This is placed into a dashboard that is not only for top management, but also for people at the front line to see what they should work on and how their improvements are bearing fruit. There is a lot more to this step which we will be writing on in the future, but a key point is to look at variation in the data over a period of time.

We have seen this method is highly motivating for staff members as it gives them a clear view on where the pain points are for customers and whether their initiatives are working. There are also helpful statistical methods to cut through the noise and give a data-driven read on what is working and what is not.

Organisations often divert spend from paid marketing campaigns to this effort because it develops the service to one that is better for customers. This results in better conversion, less churn, higher value per customer, and more organic growth–all of which makes growth more sustainable, in addition to reducing the costs of dealing with complaints and waste.

There is so much more in each of the above paragrahs to show but that's a summary of what can be done to truly understand the customer experience. Set up a call with us to learn more.