Jun 20, 2023 | Customer Satisfaction
Several operational, technological and process innovations have leveled the playing field in most industries. Size and scale no longer necessarily guarantee market share. Customers have more avenues to indulge in comparative buying and are more likely to investigate alternative vendors. Therefore, in a business climate far more alive with dynamic forces and behavior, customer satisfaction has become more critical than ever before.
Ruby Newell-Legner, an American CRM specialist, notes in her 2016 book, “Understanding Customers”, that a mere 4% of dissatisfied customers approach businesses with their concerns and it can take up to 12 positive interactions to make up for a single negative experience. Worse still, a far more dramatic 91% of customers would terminate their relationship with a business without any interaction at all. Likewise, a recent Deloitte survey found how customers have become much less tolerant of the lack of an easy and seamless experience (2). Over half of the respondents to this survey said that the overall enjoyment of their customer experience was important in their decision to purchase a service or product.
Given such size-able negative consequences, businesses are well advised to allocate the required resources and actively strategize towards keeping customers satisfied.
Ensuring effective measurement of customer satisfaction is key
A significant aspect of customer strategy is listening to one’s customers, which can be achieved by conducting feedback surveys. However, organizations need to go about doing this unobtrusively and to avoid over-surveying. Constantly soliciting surveys from customers has been shown to generate considerable resentment and is not advisable. A reliance on customer complaints to identify areas of improvement too is inadequate and likely to generate a skewed perception.
Here are a few things to consider when deriving insights from data gathered through customer surveys.
- On a 1 to 10 numeric scale to measure individual aspects of the service they are receiving, the vast majority of customers tend to rate between 7 and 9. This means that an average performance should be rated at 8, rather than 5.
- Businesses should assess the data set their surveys generate with an eye on both what is working and what isn’t. “Customer satisfaction” scores could seem acceptable, while certain specific areas score low – or vice versa.
- Looking at customer feedback in isolation from the larger industry you are part of is a mistake. Assessment of data must take into account how your competitors are perceived.
- In order for data to be useful in generating actionable insights and driving strategy, it must be statistically significant. Organizations should take care to not be misled by data that is not representative of overall trends.
- It is important that each piece of feedback from the customer is considered within context. For instance, a recent service experience that is liable to skew the customer’s short term opinion – whether in the negative or positive – should not be extrapolated from disproportionately.
Interpreting data must lead to strategic insight and proactive initiatives
Gathering and interpreting data is only one half of the challenge. It is perhaps even more critical to generate actions to drive improvements in customer satisfaction.
- Care must be taken to ensure that teams driving change are small and focused along specific actionable goals in quality, customer engagement and internal processes. Diffused responsibilities reduce the potential for innovations and breakthroughs.
- Customer feedback needs to be mapped against business KPIs. Data is useful but data-driven action is truly priceless.
- Actionable items must include both long term and short term initiatives. As important as the overarching concerns may be, addressing easier fixes helps generate positive perception among customers.
- Customer satisfaction must be owned by the entire organization – not customer service or sales and marketing alone. The top echelon of management must also be seen to be invested and involved in the effort, for it to succeed.
Customer satisfaction is a key differentiator that secures the market share of a business. In an era of unprecedented volatility in customer behavior, creating a robust cultural orientation towards customer satisfaction can be the difference between relevance and relegation.
At Kanari, we are all about helping you measure customer satisfaction. Our innovative customer experience management solutions provide a reliable, flexible, and scalable platform to help your company create better customer relationships. Contact a member of our team to schedule your customer experience management consultation.
Jun 20, 2023 | Customer Experience
Delivering the highest standard of customer experience (CX) is a proven means to enhance customer loyalty, brand status, and market share. While most businesses aspire to these outcomes universally, not enough are able to translate their intentions into capable and effective initiatives. Subsequently, their CX enhancement programs tend to lack the clear methodologies needed to succeed. However, with a little planning and careful considerations, any business can achieve customer experience excellence and deliver what their customers desire.
Organizations Continue to Recognize the Importance of CX Excellence
According to a recent Forrester survey, 32% of B2C and 23% of B2B CMOs identified delivering an enhanced customer experience as one of their top three business objectives. Perhaps the most definitive way to underscore just why there continues to be a heightened concern around CX is to bring some even more categorical statistics into the discussion.
A recent Gartner study found that 89% of B2B businesses expected to compete mostly in the realm of customer experience. Moreover, it’s not just businesses identifying the central role of CX and organisational success. According to the 2016 Kapost Customer Experience Benchmark Report, businesses with an enhanced CX experienced an increase in consumer purchases of more than five times their normal sales.
Given the competitive nature of the global marketplace, ignoring the vital role of CX can prove to be detrimental to a business’s bottom line.
Leveraging the Power of CX
When it comes to CX, one size does not fit all. For CX initiatives to be a true game changer, they must be custom-tailored to your specific organizational needs. And while having an established focus on CX is non-negotiable, it’s also important to realize that an unimaginative or generic CX strategy would probably prove inadequate.
The most successful enterprises differentiate themselves within their industry by developing a unique and impressive customer experience that attracts, impresses, and retains consumers. However, that’s not to say that you can’t learn from the success of other organisations. Market leaders across various industries have learned a great deal about successful customer experiences based on the first generation of CX programs.
Having established a precedent, these successful strategies have raised the bar for customer expectations. As such, future CX initiatives need to be more thoughtful, targeted, and in sync with the evolving needs of a customer base. Now more than ever, businesses need to anticipate emerging trends and align their customer experience initiatives accordingly. Not only will this attract customers, but it also allows businesses to create proactive engagement and true differentiation from their competitors.
Interpreting Trends and Leading Innovation in CX
When it boils down to it, customer experience excellence is a matter of perception. In order to design a CX program that truly sets an organization apart from competitors, a business must place itself in the shoes of their target audience.
Every demographic of customers and every market segment, within each industry, has very specific and distinct needs. By addressing these specific requirements successfully, an enterprise can identify itself as being innovative, customer-focused, and in-tune with the future of its industry. This, of course, can prove to be a complex exercise. Consistently delivering a definitive customer experience that meets the needs of the customer goes far beyond strategy, and is the result of adopting a customer-centric business culture.
So how exactly can you determine if your CX strategies are on the right path? Market share and brand value are both great indicators of the success of a CX program. However, a business can become over-reliant on these parameters, causing them to second guess the implementation of their CX Strategy. A truly effective and transformative CX program needs to be based on a refined intuition about the customer base that a business is addressing. This requires subject matter expertise, insightful empathy for customers, and a sincere and driven commitment to excellence.
Kanari for Customer Experience Excellence
The modern consumer is highly empowered, acutely aware, and very vocal when it comes to their needs. What’s more, thanks to evolving technologies, more flexible engagement strategies and greater diversity in solutions, consumer needs, and requirements are in a constant state of change. By definition, implementing a successful CX program requires an agile, flexible and dynamic implementation that’s always cognizant of the fluid market forces and changing customer opinion.
A successful customer experience is focused on strategy and is often the direct result of a deserving company culture. Identifying, targeting, and bench-marking relevant performance metrics is a key factor to an effective customer experience enhancement program. Businesses that seek to truly optimize the returns on their CX strategy have to be dedicated to engaging their customers more insightfully than their competitors.
At Kanari, we are all about your customer and their experience. Our innovative customer experience management solutions provide a reliable, flexible, and scalable platform to help your company create better customer relationships. Contact a member of our team to schedule your customer experience management consultation.
Jun 20, 2023 | Customer Experience
In the battle to gain a competitive advantage, customer experience has become a primary focus among enterprises.
Focusing on customer experience (CX) is widely accepted as a critical component of gaining and maintaining market share. Additionally, enhanced customer experience ensures optimal business performance and increased profitability. Over the past few years, a wide range of metrics has emerged to process feedback and measure the extent to which businesses are addressing the needs of their customers. Nevertheless, it can sometimes be difficult for businesses to make the leap from exaggerated strategic emphasis to specific actionable initiatives and measures designed to help deliver an enhanced customer experience.
Key changes in customer behavior are adding to the benefits of delivering enhanced customer experience. A 2017 Salesforce study found that 50% of contemporary customers are likely to take their business to a market competitor if they perceive a business will not anticipate their needs and exceed their expectations. Future projections for customer experiences are even more dramatic. A recent PWC study predicts that by 2020 89% of customers will shift to companies providing better customer experience and engagement.
Omni Channels and Online Forums
Advances in technology and the internet make it easier for your customers to engage with one another in real-time. This can work for or against your company. The rise of online forums and social media customer reviews also amplifies the downside of failing to provide satisfactory customer experience. As Jeff Bezos once prophetically noted in the early days of the internet, “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”
When you provide an enhanced CX, you can leverage the power of positive exposure to your advantage. Omnichannel engagements and orientation make it easy for customers to define and use their preferred points of connections and access to engage with their service providers. In fact, 57% customers prefer companies who can be reached via mail, chat, video chat, and social media platforms compared to businesses using traditional means of voice-based customer support. In order to attract and retain your customers, you need to provide them with the enhanced CX they demand.
Customer Intelligence is Key to Delivering a Great Customer Experience
In order for your organization to deliver the personalized experiences your customers demand, it’s crucial to have an effective methodology to transform raw data into tangible and actionable insights. Understanding and defining your customer’s expectations within each demographic is the most effective way to use your data to create a truly enhanced customer experience. Targeted and appropriate actions can only be mapped onto highly distinct segmentation. Furthermore, discrete partitioning of raw data allows you to process data in a methodical way, which allows for the identification of useful and usable trends.
Whether at a segment level or in the case of individuals, blind spots in customer understanding can make it difficult for your organization to identify, let alone address, your customer needs. On one hand, any business that caters to a broad range of demographics, a generalized, non-specific initiative to attempt to raise standards in customer experience would attract significant investments. Furthermore, such a measure would likely prove highly ineffective, even running the risk of not actually addressing the specific needs of any demographic at all.
The Importance of Humanizing Data to Enhance CX
Customer experience includes every interaction your customer has with your brand and organisation. Across every stage of their journey, these interactions will shape their overall perception of your company. When your company creates a positive customer experience, they will be more likely to use your products and services.
By definition for such an outcome to be optimal, it needs to be addressed through interactive and proactive engagement. Ultimately, providing CX is essentially about caring. Rather than simply streamlining processes and enabling transactions, enhanced customer experience is the result of creating an emotional connection. While such fundamental aspects of delivering quality services are crucial to ensuring great CX, businesses require a more concrete understanding of their customer to deliver enhanced experiences based on their insights.
Therein lies the conundrum. Emotional connections are slightly imperfect and can be hard to quantify and understand. This emotional connection can sometimes prove intimidating for an organization to achieve. However, with a few simple steps, a business can orient its customer experience enhancement initiatives.
- Start by developing appropriate demographic segments to understand and anticipate the needs of your customers. Collating and rationalizing your customer interactions data and smart touchpoints is a critical component to delivering an enhanced CX.
- To better understand your customer, you must effectively process and integrate quality voice-of-the-customer (VoC) data. VoC is a term that describes your customer’s feedback about their experiences with and expectations for your products or services. VoC programs have gained traction over the years and are fast-growing segments of a core business strategy for organizations. A recent Aberdeen Group study found that best-in-class VoC programs generate a 10x increase in revenue year on year compared to other programs.
- Ensure that the structure and hierarchy of your organization reflect the priorities of your customers. To one extent or another, most businesses are modular. It’s crucial that the functions, teams, and organizational elements of your enterprise are optimized according to the customer experience it needs to deliver.
Achieve Organizational Success with Enhanced CX
Despite the overarching attention that customer experience is attracting, organizations often fall short of the goals CX management initiatives are seeking to achieve. As an intuitive function, mere budgets and data collection often fall short of their ultimate goals. Gaining an understanding of how your organization is perceived by your customer is crucial to the success and growth of your organization. This process requires listening well and empowering empathetic intuition by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes.
At Kanari, we are all about your customer and their experience. Our innovative customer experience management solutions provide a reliable, flexible, and scalable platform to help your company create better customer relationships. Contact a member of our team to schedule your customer experience management consultation.
Jun 14, 2023 | Customer Experience
It is common for businesses to equate the quality of customer relationships with their overall success. However, far too often businesses are quick to invest in enhancing the customer experience they deliver without methods in place to quantify the impact of these changes on tangible metrics.
Without quantifiable metrics in place, enhanced customer experience may become nothing more than a matter of public opinion. We believe that the capability of measuring customer experience is essential to running effective CX programs designed to generate measurable impact and returns.
What Gets Measured Gets Managed
Measuring customer experience allows businesses to generate continuous improvements and link this to business KPIs. Peter Drucker, celebrated management consultant, was once quoted saying, “What gets measured gets managed.” Like with all other corporate initiatives, measuring the right aspects will ensure the program reaps the most advantageous efficiencies.
That said, demonstrating a clear relationship between customer experience and business outcomes can prove to be an intricate task. A 2017 study conducted by Capgemini found a direct and clear correlation between CX and increased sales. The study found that 81% of consumers were willing to pay more for a better experience. However, in order to measure this correlation effectively, a business must carefully identify and evaluate their initiatives, creating a map to success.
CX Maturity is Dependent on Measurable Metrics
The 2018 Forrester Customer Experience Index for US Brands revealed how ineffective legacy models have been in addressing the expectations of their target audience. Additional data suggests that these trends are not limited to US businesses. Organizations seeking improved customer experience must clarify the value of the initiatives they put in place to achieve their objectives.
Start by comparing customer feedback over an extended timeframe, both unstructured and in response to surveys. Be sure this analysis is linked to each demographic your business seeks to attract and retain. By conducting a targeted cost-benefit analysis based on specific categories and parameters, an enterprise can create data that can be mapped to enhance future strategies and actions.
Customer experience programs must also be flexible enough to respond to future outcomes. By identifying distinct data points, and relating them to specific initiatives, businesses gain the ability to monitor their CX programs for optimal performance.
Measurable Metrics Necessary for an Enhanced Customer Experience
In order to accurately measure your CX initiatives and the value they generate, your CX strategies must include a variety of metrics that impact the success of customer experience. Not only will these measurements help you understand what’s working within your current CX strategy, but it also shows you what areas need improvement. The best place to start is by seeking customer feedback. After all, your consumers know exactly what they want and expect from the customer experience.
Customer feedback can be measured in different ways, here are a few metrics which can be used:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Ranging from -100 to 100, NPS provides a measurement of how many consumers would recommend your products and services to their friends and family. A direct link to the success of specific CX initiatives, NPS also serves as a proxy for gauging brand loyalty.
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): CSAT provides a measurement that determines how satisfied customers are with a business’s products, services, and capabilities. Leveraging the findings of surveys and ratings, CSAT can help a company determine how to improve or change its products and services. Best of all, metrics like CSAT and NPS allow companies to identify variations over an extended period of time.
- Customer Effort Score (CES): Now more than ever, customers prioritize convenience above many of their needs. CES is a single-item metric that measures how much effort a customer has to exert with a company, to include resolving a problem, fulfilling a request, processing a return, or answering a query. It correlates with business outcomes and is easy to track over time. In fact, studies commissioned by Gartner found CES more directly correlates to future loyalty than NPS.
- Visitor Intent and Task Completion: Most often related to digital engagement, these metrics can be incorporated into the customer’s online experience. Through short and simple queries, an enterprise can determine the reason for the visit and whether or not customer concerns have been properly addressed.
Customer Experience and Strategic Effectiveness
In addition to measurable metrics, all CX initiatives should be subjected to critical analysis in terms of strategic effectiveness. The most effective approaches include:
- Identifying changes in customer responses before and after specific initiatives. Metrics should be measured continually and well beyond their initial deployment so their specific ability can be quantifiably mapped onto any/all process changes.
- Identifying disruptive innovation that may generate competitive advantages. Big picture analysis is crucial in generating maximum value for your enterprise. Innovations should be continually tested for statistical variation against industry standards.
- Calculating value against initial cost and time to CX maturity. In relative terms, gaining a competitive ground alone can be inadequate when it is not measured against the time it takes to experience tangible benefits. Continuing costs and maturation often helps to identify the best returns on investment, which helps to prioritize CX initiatives.
Kanari for Measuring Customer Experience
For a CX program to be truly optimized, a business requires a thoughtful and effective strategy to collect, measure and analyze data. When accurately measured, CX data can be used to ensure the best return on investment, as well as sustained success.
At Kanari, we are all about helping you with measuring customer experience. Our innovative customer experience management solutions provide a reliable, flexible, and scalable platform to help your company create better customer relationships. Contact a member of our team to schedule your customer experience management consultation.
