Optimising customer experience management strategy
Building your action plan
Effective customer experience management strategy isn’t just about robust results, interpretation and prioritisation. Simply knowing which direction your tracked KPIs are moving in does not give you sufficient information to facilitate action planning and ultimately drive change.
Good customer experience programmes have strategic objectives and will collect information on a number of product and service attributes, including how queries and complaints are handled. This can be done through ratings questions or through verbatim comments. With a number of text analytics packages on the market, it is possible to derive quantitative data from verbatim comment: for example how often are certain issues mentioned and are these mentions positive or negative.
Prioritising action
The next step would be to link frequencies or scores for these product or service attributes with movement in KPIs such as intention to recommend, overall satisfaction, repurchase intention or customer effort scores. You can link these through multiple regression techniques or correlation. Those areas where you are performing less well but have a relatively high impact on your KPI/ business success are areas you would want to prioritise in your action plan.
When putting together an action plan, a holistic approach works best. Consider how much investment, resource and time the improvements would need and identify which areas are the ‘low hanging fruit’, ie quick wins, and which areas need a longer time span to implement.
Optimising CX action management
Action planning can at times go wrong. It is important to allocate a person who will be responsible for each step and define clear timelines and deadlines. An essential step is to look at return on investment once actions have been implemented. Although it is not always possible to do this objectively, since turnover improvements can be the result of other factors apart from action planning, it is seen as good practice to estimate how many customers have been saved or accounts grown as a result. When you then apply the value and take away the investment in your action planning, you can derive the return of investment. Of course, this is more difficult to do in a FMCG or low product/service value environment, where it may be necessary to look at overall sales rather than individual customers.
Taking action
For those in the B2B sector and/or dealing with high value customers and contracts, an interactive case management system may prove to be very useful. These systems automatically upload ‘alert’ customers who have provided low satisfaction ratings. An overview of their feedback will be shown and cases can be allocated to relevant account managers. These can take action on an individual level and log them. Through an access hierarchy, the business can then keep track of each case and once dealt with to the satisfaction of the customer, cases can be closed.
“However good your systems and processes are supposed to be, something will go wrong and it’s how you fix it that determines how a customer feels about you”
(Tom Peters)
This is the case when improving your systems and processes and also on a more individual customer level – through interpretation, prioritisation, action planning and case management.
A full version of the topics discussed in this blog series is available in a free pdf guide. Download the full version of Promises, expectation and how to avoid the CX Gap.