The software-oriented Customer Experience framework — Phase 3/3

Combine, Analyse, Refine

After having understood the importance of feedback and great in-store experiences, let’s broaden our horizon by combining everything we’ve read so far in order to have a wider and more complete view of this miraculous framework, that has the ability to revolutionize our customer experience.

Pic Credit: RightCom Website

Let’s take a minute to digest the majesty of this miraculous diagram completely summarising the framework. This framework is divided into 4 main stages — Collect, Analyse, Act, and Measure, each of which we would be diving into today.

Collect

There’s no use having experiences, if we can’t collect useful insights from them.

As a company willing to understand what makes your customers happy, you need to be able to collect information on the impact that each of your interactions has on your customers.

• What products are your customers most interested in?
• Are they usually happy with the service they receive when they visit you?
• What can you really do to make your customers happy?

These questions can’t just be answered by a long meditative session, chanting mantras alone in the office. We need to connect. We need to listen. We need to ensure that our customers have exactly what they need to be able to share their experiences with our brand, and that’s exactly what this stage is all about.

Implementing the collect stage involves setting up as many modes of receiving valuable customer input as possible. Here’s how I would implement this stage:

• If the brand has a physical outlet or store, setting up a way of capturing the customer’s reaction in-store right after his interaction is an amazing starting point. This can be achieved using a simple CSAT survey — Survey based upon emojis ranging from highly unsatisfied to highly satisfied. Mobile Survey, one of RightCom’s solutions, provides an amazing interface to do this. A tablet with the Mobile Survey application would be installed on a terminal, usually around the exit of the outlet, requesting customers to simply choose the emoji that best describes their interaction and select an optional feature that he/she liked and/or hated the most during his interaction. The advantage this would have, over cold surveys, is that the customer would still be in the heat of the moment and would be able to portray his exact state of mind at that point in time, which is a very important metric to consider and improve upon.
• Apart from the Hot Survey, as it is called, it’s also important we send the user a Cold Survey (Survey sent with the intention of receiving a more detailed response, at a convenient time chosen by the client). As the description suggests, it allows users to respond whenever they like giving them the opportunity to give a more complete and detailed review on his/her experience, especially if it was traumatizing (as is the case, 86% of the time when companies do not listen to their customers). My implementation of this would be using RightSurvey, a solution I described in the first phase. This would allow me to easily create, manage, and share my surveys to customers as well as deriving insights from their responses in order to clearly visualize and act upon the pain points encountered.
• Another great in-store tool would be a facial analysis solution (RightFlow, if you want the best) allowing us to gather passive data on your customers. This would help in understanding our target audience. We could use this to align our experience and efforts towards these audiences, providing a more efficient roadmap to better experience management.
• Do I really need to emphasize how important it is to allow customers to share their queries and problems with you easily? Most companies believe having a support team is enough, but is it really? We would be missing out on so much insightful data if users were only submitting their requests by calling the support team. It’s also highly inefficient and expensive. The intelligent beings in the support team could be doing so much more for the company. Let’s fix that, then. The ingredients required to prepare this sweet fix is a ticket management system (RightCare, in our case) and a bot service (RightBot, definitely) capable of receiving requests from the most popular social channels used by our clients (Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, etc) and storing them in the ticketing system, basically tempting customers to reach out to us and tell us their problems.
• It’s very important, in order to ensure the best result in future stages of this framework, to select the right tools at the collect stage. We need to ensure that the valuable customer feedback we’re collecting can be converted into the insights we need to build our brand loyalty. I’ve discussed with a lot of believers in the manual era of feedback collection, but we need to realize that there would definitely be a price to pay in future stages if our collect stage isn’t optimal. Usually, the collect stage solutions (eg RightSurvey, RightCare) provide intuitive dashboards and reports allowing us to easily understand our shortcomings and in turn focusing on improving these.

Analyze

Millions of reviews, sleepless nights going through each of them ! nightmare. nightmare. nightmare.

This was best described in Phase 1 of this series. We can’t waste our or any of our team member’s time on reading each of the reviews we received or track the progress of the queries or problems resolved or in the process of resolution. Even if we decided to, we would return home with a throbbing head every evening because we had to go through so much.

This is the reason why I had placed huge importance on the tools selected during the collect phase. We don’t want to end up collecting tons of data, just to get bored of it. Here’s my recipe to easily learn about our customer’s needs (the cool way) :

• Let’s harness the true powers of the great decision we took while selecting a solution in the collect stage. Solutions such as RightSurvey and RightCare, mentioned above, provide a highly intuitive dashboard based on the type of data we are collecting.

NPS Scores? CSAT Results? Open-ended feedback? Customer Effort?

• All of this can easily be seen using the aforementioned dashboards. Well, don’t take my word for it, below are some interesting screenshots from surveys created on RightSurvey, as well as tickets created on RightCare.

• Let’s take these dashboards a step further and pipe this data into a more data-oriented solution (RightData), where we could not only create customized dashboards with data from these applications but also combine this with other important insights we may have collected from other sources or applications and stored in databases. This would help us have a 360o view of all our collections in a single environment. This is how a sample dashboard from RightData may look like.

• These graphs don’t only look beautiful and colorful, they also go a long way to summarising all the entries we may have received in order to extract the patterns and features we require to learn and improve from the customer’s inputs.

Act

Let’s show our customers we’ve done our homework, understood their problems and are ready to fix them.

Creating charts and deriving insights from the variety of input we got based on our interactions was a great first step. Glad we made it this far! This is where we start reaping the fruits of our hard work.

Now that we know who our target audiences are and what they need, let’s get to work. Let’s show them, we’re the best brand in our niche that they have ever come across. I am certain, we can do this.

There can never be an exact roadmap for implementing this as it is highly dependent on what your customers need and are interested in but nevertheless, let’s ensure that the essentials are in place.

• You can never go wrong with better queue management. Provided your brand has physical outlets, as traction increases, the organization decreases. Lack of organization in outlets is one of the greatest causes of customer in-satisfaction. Long lines, unruly behavior, angry service providers are all great red flags to customer success. It’s really important to have solutions in place to ensure that customers are received in an orderly fashion and are kept informed of their current position in the queue at any point in time. This may sound like a lot, but it’s actually very easy (provided you have the right tools in place, of course).
• Let’s solve the above problem. First step, queue management system (my choice? RightQ). This solution would allow us to not only manage the way clients are registered and served but also ensure the client is kept informed of his position in the queue as well as the estimated amount of time he would need to wait before being served. Let’s make this even better, we could use a Digital Signage solution (RightPlayer) and display a set of campaigns of our brand, as well as information on the current ticket being served, as well as the next couple of tickets in the queue.
• We’ve served the client, time to ask him how he felt (Remember, the collect stage needs to continuously be fed). RightQ provides an inbuilt integration with RightSurvey, to trigger surveys via SMS and Email as soon as the user’s request has been satisfied in order to capture his feedback and reactions based on the interaction he just had with our brand.
• Shorter queues, fewer problems. We should also think about reducing queues by using appointment systems, such as RightTime, in order to allow our customers to book an appointment with our stores online right in the comfort of their homes. This would drastically reduce waiting times, and improve the efficiency of customer service.
• Apart from the aforementioned common problems, there would definitely be a lot of other pain points that we may encounter based on our analysis and our niche. We would definitely need to ensure systems are put into place instead of mere solutions.

Divyam, I hear you ask. What’s the difference between a system and a solution ?

• Except for the fancy phonetics behind the word, a system refers to a long-term recurring process (hopefully, automated) implemented to resolve a given scenario, while solutions are fixes designed to provide a short period of relief to a problem. The constraint with a solution is that, if your problem recurs often, you would be stuck setting up your solution over and over.

Measure

Did we really improve anything at all, or just complicated our lives to deteriorate our brand?

Ensuring that our actions yielded the required results remain the most important aspect of this framework. How are we sure that our actions actually improved our customer’s experience? We might have been biased during collection and analysis, or might have forgotten something.

Could you provide true proof that we received improved results?

Well, we actually can. It’s simple and doesn’t require a lot of reinventing. We just need to ensure one thing — Actions return collections. It’s important that we’re able to pipe the customers that got the opportunity to experience our improved customer success methodologies back into the collection stage. A common word used to denote this process is Closing the Loop.

This would, in turn, help us to use our analysis tools discussed earlier to not only understand customer’s satisfaction rates and problems at a given point but also compare this with previous iterations where we made some improvement or the other to our framework. We can use this information to know which actions had a positive impact and must be continued as well as those that need to be thrown out immediately.

We’re finally at the end of this wonderful journey into the Software oriented CX framework. I really hope you enjoyed reading through this series, as much as I did while Feel free to share your suggestions, techniques, or questions on how we could improve CX using technology.