Introduction to Customer Experience (CX)

Contents

• What is CX
• Evolution of CX
• Why CX
• CX Maturity and Pillars
• The CX metrics
• Survey design basics
• Customer journey basics
• Practical recommendation
• Check your knowledge

What is CX
 

Customer Experience is the sum of all interactions between your customers and your organization’s brand, products, services and people. 

From navigating your website, receiving the product/service their bought, talking to customer service or receiving the bill

It’s not just a snapshot in time, but throughout the entire duration of being your customer.

It is the customers' Expectations & Perceptions of their interaction with a brand.

Evolution of CX
 

The idea of the Customer Experience, or CX, can be traced back to the first marketing & consumer theories from the 1960s to the 1990s. The years between 1990-2010 became a turning moment for CX. The information age started a role reversal for businesses and customers.

Since the start of the Information Age, individuals have digitized almost every human experience aspect. The advent of this new experience age focuses on the sum of all these parts in different touchpoints. Further, rising social media platforms gave consumers a way to talk about their experiences with different brands.

The idea of customer experience is quickly transforming. Thanks to new developments in technology, each client interaction can today be tracked, measured, analyzed, and corrected accordingly.

This evolution brings advantages to both parties, customers & brands!

Why CX

CX Maturity & Pillars

Customer Experience maturity is not about technology only!

The right technology is a component & instrument to support your overall CX initiative. The foundation of such initiatives require organizations to actively work on different fronts. Customer interaction & journeys are cross-functional by nature, these lead to a new business structure if we want to avoid CX siloed execution.

A typical program involves 4 pillars!

Be sure that besides the right technology your organisation includes activities in all 4 pillars.

CX Metrics

Are your CX measurements defining and quantifying the quality of your customer experiences and their link to the organization’s overall metrics?

Are you able to improve these metrics for the benefit of your client and their customer experience with your organisation?

CX measurement tracks and analyzes:

- how customers perceive their interactions with a brand

- what happens operationally during those transactions

- what customers do because of their experiences
 

It also communicates CX metrics with actionable insights to employees and partners to ensure that the company acts on the insights from the measurement program.

Choose Metrics that are relevant for your organisation, stakeholders & CX scope

Survey Design Basics
 

Survey, Survey....and more Survey! 

Today we are, as a customer, overwhelmed by surveys.

Who doesn't know the question "how likely are you to recommend us on a scale from 0 to 10" after a phone call to a contact centre or after an online purchase?

But, are these surveys always adequate for the situation, correct for the purpose, precise and concise, at the right time, etc.?

These and some more practical inputs await you in the following slides.

• Survey measures CX initiative progress or improvements
• Determine the role of the survey (the reason behind)
• Survey should be a conversation , not an interrogation
• Avoid survey fatigues – Succinct as possible
• Appropriateness of the question for that touchpoint
• Consistent metrics along the journey which permit later “Bright-Spot” analysis
• Once you finish, take them out and make room for new measurements

Transactional vs Relational NPS?
 

Surveys must have a Purpose

• CX Surveys serve to share thoughts about the experience
• Don’t use CX surveys to conduct research (e.g. How often do you buy? What is your preffered channel?)
• Are you communicating the purpose of the survey
• Do you know how responses influence CX decisions
• Do you avoid questions types that cause respondent bias
• Each question ask about just one thing

Surveys must be Easy & Succinct

• Do you give customers the sense of how long it takes
• Do you let customers decide which questions they can asnwer
• Do you avoid using many different scale types
• Do your open-ended questions encourage a detailed response
• Every Q & A option are interpreted always in the same way
• Do you avoid question that avoid cognitive load

Customer Journey Basics

A customer journey describes the story of the customer's experience, bringing user's feelings drivers, needs to move, motivations, potential opportunities, pain points and improvements.

A journey map is a visualization of this story and to illustrate the stages a customer goes through your brand's interactions in order to accomplish a goal, whether it be a product buy, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination.

Mapping the customer journey helps organisations understand and consciously reflect on how prospects and customers use the various touchpoints, how the organisation's is perceived and how the organisation would like its customers experiences to be. 

• Gives the possibility to have a unique CX metrics overview (operational data, financial, churn, NPS, CSAT, CES, etc.)
• Reveal gaps customer expectations vs the actual experience
• Helps to identify customer pain points

Here, for example, is a customer journey timeline that includes first the awareness & engagement with a customer (perhaps with a web search or in a store), decision & buying the product or service, using it, sharing the experience with others, and then finishing the journey by upgrading, replacing or choosing a competitor according to the entire journey output.

In its most basic form, journey mapping contains a series of topics such as:

Actions & objectives 

What is the customer doing at each stage? What actions are they taking to move themselves on to the next stage?

Motivation & thoughts

Why is the customer motivated to keep going to the next stage? What emotions are they feeling?

Questions

What are the uncertainties, jargon, or other issues preventing the customer from moving to the next stage?

Barriers & pain points

What structural, process, cost, implementation, or other barriers stand in the way of moving on to the next stage?

CX Practical Recommendations

• Define the GOALS and the top 3  “motivating” OBJECTIVES (CX or Financial) measuring your initiative's success
• Have a precise CX JOURNEY MAPPING describing interactions & responsibilities
• Define CX MEASUREMENT with a balanced mix between CX metrics (CSAT, CES, NPS) and their link to quantifiable business- & operational metrics (complains, ticketing system, usage, revenue, CLV, retention, cost to serve, etc.)
• Design and create a robust CLOSE-THE-LOOP PROCESS needed for eventual service recovery (inner loop)
• Start to improve your CX through QUICK-WINS based on impact/value to customer & feasibility to produce momentum 
• Define and implement a CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT PROCESS ables to translate insights into business improvements (outer loop)
• SHARE FINDINGS & INSIGHTS through dashboards/reports to your stakeholders to engage them
• AVOID SILOS EXECUTION and enable the mobilization of needed NETWORKED ACTIVITIES & RESOURCES

Ask Yourself

• Think briefly about the CX/VOC program within your organisation:
• Are you able to describe your CX/VOC program objectives shortly?
• How are you going to measure the initiative/project's success?
• Do you have a close-the-loop and "outer loop" (long-term improvement) process in place?
• What do you think you could do better for your customer?

Check your knowledge

1. Customer experience is the sum of all ......................... between your customer and your organisation's brand, products, services and people. Choose from interactions / products / complains / services
    

2. Perception is a belief or opinion shaped by the past experiences and according to which 3 factors:

   Emotion

   Services

   Quality

   Easiness

   Price

   Effectiveness

   Awareness
    

3. Please complete the gap with the correct answer
    

• Improve products & ......................... Choose from Marketing, Price, Services
• Increase customer retention/ ......................... Choose from Costs, Churn, Loyalty
• Reduce new  ........................costs Choose from Marketing, Acquisition, Product
• Improve and simplify  .........................processes Choose from Business, Buying, Escalation

• Increase customer  ......................... Choose from Lifetime value, Problems, Pain points

   

Answers: 1. interactions, 2. emotion, easiness, effectiveness, 3. Services; Loyalty;  Acquisition; Business; Lifetime Value