Using Data to Improve Your Customer Journey
Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CSP
Customer Experience Speaker, Trainer, Podcast Host, and CEO
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Better Customer Journeys Require Improving Your Customer Intelligence With Operational & Experiential Data
In an ideal world, customer experience would be built, improved, reviewed, and evolved based on real-time intelligence.?This intelligence would include customer feedback, operational measurements, and an overall understanding of the world and marketplace.
Yet most of us don’t live in this ideal world and need to work with what we have.?If there’s one thing I see as missing in many customer experience initiatives, it’s understanding how powerful operational data can be when combined with customer insights.?In fact, customer experience leaders are often put into the role of what I call “number narrators.” They report out on feedback metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or transactional Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) rates. Yet these metrics on their own don’t provide the insight and directive to take real action.
Operational metrics are measurable indicators that track the performance of a business’s processes and systems, while feedback metrics capture the voice of the customer to understand their experience with the business.?To improve customer experience and business results, both operational metrics and feedback metrics should be used together.?These measurements can then be used to tell the story of what’s needed and provide real business intelligence.
This type of data combination is not just for you, as the CX leader, it’s for your OTHER leaders.?A survey by Customer Contact Week Digital?found that nearly 60% of customer experience professionals believe that operational data is critical to gaining leadership buy-in for customer experience initiatives.
CX leaders need to tie the well-known experience analytics with operational insights.?This powerful combination will provide more robust and meaningful findings, which lead to better actions and outcomes for the business.
What Operational Metrics Should You Use?
When considering what operational metrics to analyze, start with what you want to discover.
Here are some examples of operational metrics that can be evaluated in conjunction with feedback metrics to improve customer experience and business results, but each business and industry has specific operational objectives to use.
By analyzing both operational and feedback metrics, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of how well they are meeting customer needs and where improvements can be made. Leaders can then make data-driven decisions to improve customer experience and ultimately drive better business results.
Start with the Customer’s Experience
If you aren’t sure where to start, begin with the customer’s experience.
Here are some steps to get started:
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1. Map the Customer Journey
Begin by mapping out the?customer journey, starting from the initial awareness stage and continuing through the purchase and post-purchase stages.?Identify each part of the business that the customer interacts with, such as customer service, marketing, and product delivery.
2. Identify Critical Touchpoints
Identify the touchpoints that are most critical to customer satisfaction and loyalty.?These might include customer service interactions, website navigation, or the checkout process.
3. Determine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Determine the KPIs that are most relevant to each critical touchpoint.?For example, if customer service interactions are a critical touchpoint, consider tracking metrics such as AHT, FCR, and customer satisfaction scores.
4. Establish Baselines and Goals
Establish baselines for each KPI and?set goals?for improvement.?Use these metrics to track progress and make data-driven decisions to improve the customer journey.
5. Integrate Data Sources
Integrate data sources from across the organization to gain a comprehensive view of the customer journey.?This might include customer feedback, web analytics, and operational data from various systems and departments.
Brands that do this well find what can be measured from both the experiential and operational data.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies often track a combination of metrics like churn rate, which measures the number of subscription cancellations, along with usage data and CX metrics like NPS. Other organizations may watch a combination of purchase frequency trends along with retail returns and transactional survey results.
Your organization will have a unique way to look at the right combination of metrics.?The important thing is to look for ways to evaluate the larger picture of both what customers tell you in feedback and how they behave.
What operational data will you combine with your experiential data to provide richer insights?
This article,?Using Data to Improve Your Customer Journey, originally appeared on?ExperienceInvestigators.com.
Insights for Innovation & Strategy. Founder of Threads Research & CX Forums
1 年VOC insights are also very helpful when designing experiences. These insights are usually qualitative in nature. I'll be holding a free workshop on VOC Insights for Design vs. CX Performance Metrics next Thursday. Would be great to see you there if you can make it. It's and interactive zoom meeting room format, not a webinar.
B2B SaaS & AI Leader
1 年Awesome article per usual Jeannie Walters, CCXP. I've witnessed a project recently first hand with real-time point of service Operational data that contradicts the NPS and CSAT feedback, so it's vital that businesses, especially B2B and B2B2C operators get the whole picture and are able to defend themselves from subjective ratings on the old school surveys, when the real-time point of service data paints an entirely different picture.
Customer Centric Strategist | AI and Customer Tech for Revenue Growth and Experience Optimization
1 年This is a deep rabbit hole most large companies struggle with, and they're looking at all of these metrics with large teams of Ops folks trying to tease out what is happening, and why. Bringing them together is usually no clean task. This is why core customer data structure and analytics integration for customer insights is the key to understanding the connection between customer experience and operational impacts. It starts and ends with clarity into your customer data gaps and needs.
3X Hi-Tech CEO & CTO | 3X LinkedIn Top Voice | 3X Thinkers360 Top 10 | PhD, FBCS, CITP | Coach, Speaker, Author, Leader
1 年Indeed, Jeannie! Nice article. NPS & CES can only signal that something is amiss. We need to use the operational metrics, and we need psychometrics (like SERVQUAL/SERVPERF derivative) to be able to show which operational metrics to study and also to identify what aspects of the service lifecycle (strategy, design, delivery, operations) to zero in on for a long term fix.
Customer Experience Transformation | Change & Transition Management | Process & Operational Excellence | Product Design & Innovation | Voice of Customer & Employee Design | Customer Experience Consultancy
1 年This is a great summary and is an example of one way that I got my leaders and stakeholders to get more engaged, in the programs I used to run. As much as I wanted us to get passed dashboards, sometimes they were needed to get people's attention. The trick was to ensure that the feedback being reported was contextual and meaningful to the audience. It had to illustrate what happens in a specific part of the journey and that illustration should allow the audience to zoom back out to see the journey overall (so that they can see how events in their slice of the journey impact other parts of the journey). In my example below, we managed to pull in real-time business operational data from a post-sale portion of a journey. The business had tons of data, but we chose to only focus on KPIs that mattered most and that most closely aligned with the feedback that we were gathering. Using this as a tool we managed A) get people's attention, B) focus our energy toward investigating and improving specific business processes that drive these experiences, and C) track our progress over time from the business perspective as well as corresponding customers' perspectives.