Track Your CX Quality and ACT on it in Real Time

A couple of years ago a colleague of mine told me about a bad experience she’d had shopping at a big-box retailer in the U.S., and how she had returned home entirely frustrated. That evening, she said she had received a call from this retailer asking how likely she was to recommend the company after her shopping experience that day. It was just a routine, automated survey call, but given the opportunity to vent, she said she had responded that she was highly unlikely to recommend the company and she went on to record a five-minute verbatim about her frustrating experience.

And that, she told me, was the very last she ever heard from the company! No follow-up, no acknowledgment of her frustration or of her survey response, no reply to her lengthy verbal message at all. Nada.

Unfortunately, this kind of frustrating feedback experience is all too common for customers, because it’s exactly how a great many companies operate. They begin with well-intentioned efforts to track the quality of the customer experience they’re delivering, but the data gathered isn’t fed back into the organization and used on a real-time basis to improve it. This retailer was obviously concerned enough with improving its CX that it had established a monitoring system for getting customer feedback and tracking it over time, but it proved unable to act on that feedback, when action was called for. Immediate action.

Obviously, tracking the quality of your CX is important, but it’s also important to recognize that two fundamentally different types of metrics are required to paint an accurate picture:

• Subjective feedback from customers (like the retailer’s survey), and
• Objective, observational data.

Customer feedback is important, but opinions are also subjective, so any general conclusions based on customer sentiment must always be compared to what customers are saying about your competitors, as well as considering the general economic mood. Voice analytics and voice-to-text, when they are applied to a customer’s recorded phone interactions, can be especially useful here, because observational data like this is “non-invasive,” in that a company isn’t bothering a customer to answer a question or participate in a survey, with all the implicit selection bias and subjectivity that this introduces.

Ideally, the software that helps your company track, manage, and improve CX should have at least four important features:

1. First, it should be easily configurable and flexible. You want your non-programming business managers to have the ability, based on their own rules or criteria, to do things such as selecting which particular customers to be surveyed, or what types of feedback to be forwarded, when, and to whom;
2. In addition to tracking direct interactions with customers (including surveys), your software should also be able to capture, analyze, compare and distribute a wide array of observational data – including not just product and service-quality metrics (on-time deliveries, warranty claims, complaints, etc.), but text analytics of customer verbatims, relevant social media commentary, and other observable customer behaviors, as well;
3. Your solution should also be able to develop predictive models to anticipate the quality of different customers’ experiences, so as to help you deal with them in real time. In essence, by relying on both observational data and direct feedback, your CX management solution should allow you to predict customer satisfaction in many specific circumstances without even asking the customer; and
4. Finally, any truly helpful CX management software should be able to deliver results directly to a company’s line managers and individual employees in real time, perhaps even via a smartphone app.

Your business must be able to take real-time action based on whatever results your CX data tracking shows.

This requires you to automate the mechanisms not just for collecting the data, but for distributing it to the CX management team, to your store or branch managers, and even to individual employees. You don’t want to be like that big box retailer my colleague described, with an unconnected survey tool that generates data and is capable of discovering complaints, but has no follow-up. 

Unifying the actions and intentions of employees around the customer experience is essential to every company’s CX improvement effort. Software designed to help companies do this is offered by several different companies, including Medallia, Qualtrics, and AlternaCX, a company founded and run by some former colleagues of mine from the Peppers & Rogers Group.

On Thursday, January 31, at 11:00 am GMT, I’ll be participating in a Webinar with Poyraz Ozkan, Co-Founder at AlternaCX, and we’ll explore some of the capabilities this company offers to its clients. To register for this event, click here.