Four (and a half) rules to measure Customer and Client Experiences

The good news is, there’s not much we can’t measure these days, whether it’s the mood of the nation or how fast the Universe is expanding.  And so when it comes to measuring Customer and Client experiences we’ve never had it so good.  Measure Customer Experiences - information at our fingertipsSo much information, right at our fingertips.

But the bad news is that it becomes very easy to over-complicate things.  Without a disciplined focus on measuring customer experiences, we’ll fix the wrong processes and remain blissfully unaware of what’s really important.  In the meantime, our competitors are turning the right experiences into better business while we’re left wondering why, despite an increase in scores, our Customer Experience Management programme isn’t working for the bottom line.

To avoid falling into this trap, there is no shortage of do’s and dont’s.  However, to make things a little easier, I stick to four (and a half) key rules that keep things on the right track.

Rule number one:  Measure the right things.  Sounds obvious, but it’s easy to make an assumption that the answers lie within the wealth of information that already exists.   Satisfaction scores, sentiment values, sales data, complaints analysis, operational metrics, channel performance, customer lifetime value and product margins all play a part and indeed will provide some useful information.  However, it’s real insight we’re after so we need to use tools like forensic customer journey mapping to ask customers the right questions at the right time.

Operational data may be applauded for reducing average call times, but if that touchpoint is the most important thing to your customer base, making them feel rushed and unimportant won’t be helping to create a better business.

Rule number two:  Be prepared to act on the insight. With the right analysis, good qualitative and quantitative information, overlaid with the priorities of the Customer Strategy, will show what to do next.  Rich and perceptive insight into what it’s really like to be a customer is invaluable.  Measurement though, is not the end-game, it is a means to an end.  There must be an appetite, framework and culture that ensures the right information is passed to the right people to make the right changes;  the right governance will then monitor, measure and report on the impact.

Rule number three:  Don’t let measurement drive the wrong behaviours.  That customer experiences are being measured is great news but beware the unintended consequences.  We need to know, for example, how the very mechanics of collecting feedback influence the scores.

Business units salivate at getting their next set of scores but the motivating factor can be more about hitting targets in Balanced Scorecards than improving customer experiences.  True, an increase in advocacy and satisfaction scores is a worthy aspiration.  But, if the interactions being measured and incentivised are just the ones that provide audits of what the operations manual says should happen, employees’ focus will be in the wrong place.

Track the right information to get where you want to

Track the right information to get where you want to

Rule number four:  Understand why the score is what it is.  A score is but a score, whether it’s advocacy, satisfaction or emotionally-based.  Spreadsheets of data, even ones showing improvements, don’t tell the full story.  Ask “Why?”.  Then “Why?” again until you can’t delve any further.

The real gold is in understanding the links between the qualitative feedback from customers and employees to the quantitative results and how they sit in the Customer Strategy.  The answers then give clear direction about what to do next in a way that works both for customers and the business.

Which brings me to the last (half) rule; it’s not a full rule because it’s simply my unbreakable mantra to stop organisations obsessing about the numbers.  It’s this:  Get the experience right first, and the scores will look after themselves.

Here’s to productive measuring!

Jerry Angrave

Jerry Angrave is a Customer Experience Specialist & Consultant.  Jerry Angrave, Customer Experience SpecialistHe helps organisations to be in a better position to offer the right experiences for Customers and Clients that lead to better business.
 
Call:          +44 (0) 7917 718072
Email:      [email protected] 
Web:         www.customerexperience.uk.com
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Customer Experience: listen to the silence of the customer

If ever there was a statistic to make us sit up and take notice, for me this is that stat:  “96% of customers who are unhappy don’t complain“.  96%! Frightening.  And it gets worse.  “Of those, 90% will just walk away and not come back”.

When businesses set out to build a branded, differentiated customer experience they will often search for the silver bullet; that single, elusive crowning glory that will set them apart from everyone else for ever.  True, such aspirations are good at galvanizing an organisation behind a common goal but the reality is that the starting point needs to be a broad and strong foundation of many smaller experiences that just get the basics right.

Understandably, most of the information for what to get right comes from the root cause analysis of complaints and operational data.  Investment and resources are directed accordingly and all being well, the number of complaints starts falling.

But just fixing the underlying causes of complaints doesn’t have as big an impact on customer numbers and their value as it might.  That’s because, generally, the things that are complained about get prioritised.  If fixing complaints are the foundation blocks for a Customer Experience programme, then addressing this potentially destructive layer of niggles and frustrations is the bedrock on which those foundations should sit.

So, we have a rich seam of things that don’t go as customers would want, which are significant enough to make them try elsewhere next time but not so significant as to warrant putting fingers to keyboards and to complain.  It might be about phone calls to a service centre that doesn’t answer the phone.  It might be a shop assistant who doesn’t smile.  Surprise at the final cost.  Things that are easily fixed but that have a big emotional impact on customers.  That in turn drives their behaviour next time. The silent customers then, voting with their feet and loyal only to their wallet. Gone.

And yet those problems are unintentionally left to fester because people are complaining about other things.  What we need to know is what our customers from today say to each other when they sit down for dinner tonight.  When they tell the tale of what is was really like to be a customer, is that story the one we want and expect them to tell?

Customer insight about what it's really like to be on the receiving end of our service

Wanted: to know what our customers tell each other that they don’t tell us

Tracking down that level of qualitative information isn’t without challenge but it is well worth the effort.  Research that asks customers what they want will give the proposition teams ideas for bells and whistles.  But knowing what niggles customers will show where finite resources need to focus on in the short-term to improve experiences, loyalty and therefore revenue streams.

To complain takes effort and many feel companies don’t deserve to be helped if they can’t get such basics right.  In today’s world where the customer is in control, and whose bar of expectations is rising all the time, customers are rightly less tolerant to anyone who shows them a lack of respect by not “bothering” to reach a minimum standard.

They might be the small, sometimes “fluffy” things and not the single shiny silver bullet – that will come in time – but left unchecked these corrosive issues may as well be bullets being shot in the brand’s own feet.

Jerry Angrave

Customer Experience Consultant

+44 (0) 7917 718 072
www.customerexperience.uk.com
[email protected]