The software-oriented Customer Experience framework — Phase 1/3
Phase 1 : Feedback — Insights — Improvement
Customer experience is the key to the success of an organization, but very few are truly able to harness the power of software solutions and technologies around, to build the ultimate weapon to an amazing #CX. This series, divided into 3 phases, aims to provide insights on how this can be done, with the use case of RightCom XP — The Experience Management platform.
I’ve got two simple questions, what attracts you? and what keeps you attracted?
1 — What attracts you to a product, franchise, or brand?
Well, for me, it’s quality. If I see something that could really add value to my life or a product that really stands out in comparison to its competition, It would definitely pique my interest.
2 — What keeps you attracted to a product, franchise, or brand?
Imagine, you stumbled upon an amazing clothing line. You love the way their items look, the quality is phenomenal, we’re ready to buy. The next morning, you head out to one of the brand’s retail outlets, and surprise surprise, you aren’t the only one that decided to buy that day: Tens of people queued to get their clothing of choice. Look, someone just cut the line, and the shop’s agent just skipped the queue to handle one of his friend’s order first.
After 2 hours of waiting, you finally got your item of choice, but definitely at the cost of your calm. You feel annoyed, you would like to raise a complaint and/or provide feedback to the company. Well, you can’t, because no one replies on their social networks and they do not have the necessary tools to accept customers’ input. You got attracted to the product, but the attraction didn’t last due to the scar your experience at the outlet left.
The truth is as customers we always yearn for attention, but ironically, as entrepreneurs, many do not seem to consider it valuable. It’s amazing to focus on building a phenomenal and high-value product, but what is the use, if your item is consumed only once per unique customer?
Quality does not always equal experience.
Transform feedback into actionable insights
This may seem like a complete no-brainer, but research shows that only about 25% of the companies in the world build actionable insights from customer feedback. 34% collect feedback, but do not understand it’s true potentials while a risk-loving 41% do not even bother about collecting feedback from their customers. This is dangerously depressing. How could we improve without recognizing our flaws?
It is important for enterprises of every scale, to know what their customers feel and use this information to adapt and fill up the holes in the circle. Let’s not forget, word of mouth can make or mar a company.
The question remains though, How do we achieve this?
Let’s break this into two aspects :
i — Gathering feedback
ii — Converting feedback into insights
Gathering feedback
Feedback collection should be possible through a customer’s existing tools, every additional step in the flow is a disaster.
It is essential, as the owner of a brand, to be able to track the impact of every single customer’s interaction with your brand. Harnessing the power of social media is the easiest way to do this. Automate your social media accounts, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp by linking them to a bot service (my suggestion, RightBot 😉). This would allow customers to receive instant responses, during his process, while reducing the level of human efforts involved in customer management. (Humans must work on the quality of the brand’s products too, remember?)
What are we collecting though ?
Two words — surveys and complaints.
NPS, CSAT, or CES Surveys are the most common metrics of measuring customer satisfaction. A one-question survey, where I (as a client) can simply choose from a set of numbers or a bunch of emojis with the power to improve/destroy a company’s self-esteem! That’s cool, even for someone like me with an attention span of -5. More seriously though, these short feedback mechanisms go a long way in letting us know, what we need to improve and how customers perceive their interactions with us.
Surveys are amazing, but we may always get either a similar or slightly declining review if we do not understand the customers’ pain points. A complaint/support ticket management system (ahem, RightCare 😉), that allows the company’s agents to collect, track, and resolve customer’s problems is crucial to building long-lasting customer relationships and improving brand loyalty.
Converting feedback into insights
Great! You’ve started collecting customer feedback, but now what? Are you going to read through each response? That’s going to take way too long, also, it’s boring and nerdy!
Instead, let’s pipe this information into a dashboard and capture in a single glance what our customers feel about us. Luckily for us, solutions capable of gathering survey responses, as well as displaying them on an intuitive dashboard exist (RightSurvey, just saying 😉).
This helps us have a global view on what our customers feel about our brand, and by filtering on the comments of our unsatisfied set of respondents, we would know exactly how we could build the ideal experience, our unsatisfied customer base yearn for.
We could go even further and integrate these individual products with CRMs such as Salesforce and Microsoft 365 and build/customise dashboards to filter exactly the information we require, to grow out of the depressive loop of negative reviews.
Leveraging the power of these CRMs helps us to have a deeper view, on the evolution of a customer’s experience over all his interactions with the brand. Every single interaction would be recorded as a case, and directly linked to the user. This kind of data can help us provide a completely personalised experience, tailored to this user in order to ensure a definite improvement in his loyalty towards the brand.
This is where the curtain would have to be drawn today. Phase 2 would consist of improving experiences in physical customer interactions (especially with Covid-19 around), and we would round it up with how to combine all of these solutions and strategies from phases 1 and 2 to form the ultimate #CX framework in Phase 3.
