General – Page 4

August 28, 2017September 25, 2017

Customer Journey Mapping the Road to Better Business Value

Before technology grabbed hold of the customer experience, the path to purchase was typically linear. Customers entered the funnel and followed through to the end goal, the point of sale. But, now that consumers have countless ways to connect with prospective companies, leaders must guarantee that every touchpoint greets both current and potential customers with one consistent brand message. Customer journey mapping now stands as the essential tool for understanding consumer behavior in modern contexts.

While customer journey mapping was once reserved for simply pinpointing customer experience issues, companies are now putting this strategy at the heart of the development process. Many prior strategies failed to put the customer at the center of the planning process, but doing so at the onset promises to boost engagement and retention. However, not all brands have reached this stage at the present moment.

The CMO Council’s “Making Personalization Possible” report emphasizes that, while marketers recognize that comprehensive customer journey mapping (44 percent) represents the future for successful, long-term customer relationships, deep understanding of each individual customer doesn’t come easy. While the majority of marketers—86 percent—are unable to personalize experiences across the entire customer journey, many can now better tie such engagements to business impact by focusing on improving retention (69 percent) and acquisition (62 percent) rates. However, only 29 percent of marketers agree that an omnichannel approach to customer engagement holds the key to long-term relationships, despite the fact that this holistic method has become the backbone for effective journey mapping.

For those grappling with the intricacies of customer journey mapping, companies must ask four crucial questions as they develop their analytical strategy:

Which channels do our customers prefer?
How does customer sentiment compare at these various touchpoints?
What inspires customers to choose one channel over another?
How are we interacting with customers on each channel?

Successful journey mapping requires equal parts internal and external analysis, as assessing this level of incoming data will be rendered null and void if the brand itself doesn’t have the correct processes in place behind the scenes. Determining customer pain points might offer guidance, but said information serves little purpose if companies don’t have the appropriate protocols for response established. Leaders must also realize that issues need to be identified and rectified in real time. Everything’s instantaneous now, and customers pursue relationships with companies that demonstrate competency and concern at every stage of their overall journey.

For each moment of truth, brands must be ready, willing, and able to service customers. Sure, it seems daunting to position customer service representatives at every available touchpoint, but there’s no longer one or two points of entry where the customer journey begins. Instead, today’s journey seems more like a maze—there may be more than one starting point, but only one path leads to the desired destination. Leaders must ensure that consumers don’t hit any roadblocks along the way.

Brands must also establish one unified brand message to stand guard at each possible moment of truth. Like people, companies have one opportunity to make their best first impression. If one or more channels fail to maintain this level of consistency, brands risk losing business from any prospect that enters the pipeline at said touchpoints. Analyzing the interactions that take place at each touchpoint will better equip team members to handle future engagements, as they’ll be familiar with potential problems and prepared to take the next-best action in cases where issues arise. Operations cannot possibly run smoothly 24/7, so it’s proactive and practical to teach all employees how to manage these contact channels in the case of crisis or dissatisfaction.

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to customer journey mapping or its subsequent back-end adjustments and improvements. However, its underlying value remains undisputed. If brands wish to truly embody the concept of customer-centric DNA—the pinnacle of modern CX for today’s leading companies—leaders must tailor their technique to correspond with the wants and needs of their customers. Journey mapping, though often belated, presents brands with the opportunity to gain deeper insight into every aspect of the overarching customer experience.

Customer experience management ultimately serves as the cornerstone for successful journey mapping endeavors. Without an efficient, long-term CEM strategy, it’s almost impossible to put customer data to good use. Technology has only inflated the volume of Big Data insights, so it’s up to every given company to determine their current CEM maturity level in context with today’s evolving behaviors. Employee involvement, however, can give less advanced brands the upper hand in this highly competitive environment.

Internal branding now stands as one of the greatest differentiators across all industries. Outward relationships depend upon an internal culture that not only puts the consumer first, but also puts employees n the driver’s seat. By establishing an internal culture that highlights each employee’s impact on the customer experience, customer centricity isn’t just learned—it’s lived throughout the entire organization. Internal branding brings the desire for unified messaging to the frontlines, as employees recognize that they hold the power to make or break customer relationships.

Thus, customer journey mapping provides insight into consumer behaviors, which influences the way employees uphold brand promise, which in turn, circles back to the customer experience. Everything’s intertwined, but it’s ultimately the company’s responsibility to manage and maintain CX. Customer centricity will always be the key ingredient for satisfying, long-term relationships, but it’s up to each brand whether to serve it up hot or cold.

About the Authors

Dennis Gershowitz is founder and principal of DG Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in driving service revenues and profits through the development and implementation of customer experience management (CEM) strategy and service operations improvements. Contact Dennis at dennisg@dgassociates.net

Bill Moore is VP of CRMI. He designs and delivers CEM best practices workshops, as well as CEMPRO employee loyalty, training and retention programs, that result in the increasing customer satisfaction, employee retention, and profitability for CRMI clients.

August 25, 2017August 28, 2017

The Impact of Customer Experience, the Differentiator in Today’s Marketplace

In today’s ultra-competitive marketplace, customers have more choices than ever before in how to acquire products and services. And, they expect the shopping experience, the buying process, and the subsequent support for those products and services to be as frictionless as possible.

That end-to-end customer experience (CX), which I view as the totality of the lifecycle between the customer and the provider, is now viewed by many organizations as the key differentiator between themselves and their competitors. In fact, a recent report by Gartner surmises that companies see themselves in an “customer experience battlefield.” Not surprisingly, 89 percent of the executive polled for that report believe that CX will prove to be the primary basis for competition in the coming years.

We’ve all heard and read the compelling statistics around the revenue impact of satisfying the customer. A recent McKinsey study, for example, found that e-commerce spending for new customers averaged $24.50—and more than doubled to $52.50 on average for repeat e-commerce customers. But it doesn’t take a data scientist to know that is it’s easier and more profitable to retain existing customers than it is to find new ones. As the adage says, “Customers vote with their feet.” In the brick-and-mortar world, customers simply walk out and find another business that will meet their expectations.

Today, they’re also just as likely to let everyone else know how they voted by posting that poor experience on social media. Consumers are likely to post a positive customer experience on social media about 30% of the time, but tend to post about negative experiences 45% of the time, according to a recent study conducted by Dimensional Research for ZenDesk.

In today’s digital world consumers rely on a variety of channels to interact with the organizations they choose to do business with. Understanding customers’ preferred contact channels and then aligning the appropriate resources and assets are essential to meeting customers’ expectations and maintaining strong relationships. Consider the contact center and how interaction analytics can help optimize the customer experience.

Achieving ideal customer outcomes is the result of getting the balance right between all the elements associated with customer’s interactions in your contact center. Interaction analytics play a powerful role in uncovering how to optimize a customer’s experience.

Common factors that can influence the customer’s degree of satisfaction when dealing with an organization’s contact center include:

Agent competency issues
Systematic issues (IVR, telephony, etc.)
Process issues
Unpredicted or predicted product, service or event issues
Billing issues
Technical support, password resets, etc.

Interaction analytics can uncover these issues so companies can address them. But organizations also need to recognize and respond to the unique expectations customers have based on the contact intent, such as customer support, sales, or financial services. The matrix below show some common customer expectations by function objective, along with the key performance metrics that interaction analytics measures to determine strong and weak points in agents’ activities and the impact each has on outcomes.

This is great, right? Analytics can reveal why customers are calling—and how your operations, processes, systems and, specifically, your agents are handling issues. But how can you leverage this technology to improve customer experience and outcomes? CallMiner has an online ROI calculator that can provide you with a glimpse into how interaction analytics can help optimize your contact center customer experience.

But first, let’s look at some examples of interaction analytics in action:

One company in the tourism industry using speech and text analytics was able to correlate talk and handle times and then make adjustments that led to a lift of 26% in its customer satisfaction score and increase its average revenue per booking—while simultaneously reducing its cancelation rate. As one executive in the organization said, “We turned our contact centers from an operational expense to a profit center.”

An organization in the exercise equipment industry used interaction analytics to dramatically reduce average call handle time and call abandonment rates. This, in turn, improved the company’s call/agent handling ratios. These operational efficiencies led to an 8% reduction in manpower cost per shift for headcount to manage call volumes.

The contact center is just one touchpoint where analytics can reveal opportunities to optimize CX and boost profitability in the process. So, it’s easy to see that improving customer experience across channels can lead to significant increases in customer retention rate and revenue per customer, and provide better overall outcomes.

About the Author
Brian LaRoche is Director, Account Based Marketing, and is responsible for direct and channel outbound marketing programs for CallMiner. In addition to his marketing responsibilities, he is the host and moderator of CallMiner’s popular Monthly Education Webinar series. LaRoche, a call center industry veteran, is a frequent guest speaker, panelist, and guest columnist on myriad customer service, technical, collections, sales, and leadership topics related to the analytics field.

August 9, 2017August 28, 2017

Three Barriers to Integrating CX Into a Company’s DNA

Three Barriers to Integrating CX Into a B2B Company’s DNA

One of my favorite commercials of all time is from United Airlines. In this powerful, one-minute segment, a CEO is in a conference room with all his managers. He informs them that their oldest customer just fired them because the customer felt he didn’t know them anymore. “Things have to change,” the CEO says. “We can’t hide on the phone any longer. We are going to go see every customer we have.” He then hands out United Airline tickets for the management team to visit over 200 cities beginning the same day.

This is a wonderful vignette around the power of a customer-centric strategy and how to incorporate it into the DNA of a company. This commercial was shot in 1990 during a wave of discussion and research around the value of a customer-centric strategy. From a business perspective, analysts such as Don Pepper and Martha Rogers were conducting research into customer-led strategies. Authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersma published “The Discipline of Market Leaders.” In academic research, models for defining and measuring customer focus (MKTOR) and determining the value of such a strategy to businesses were also being deeply explored.

The customer is in firm control

The net is we’ve known and been clear about the value of a customer-centric strategy since the 1990s. We have evidence and case studies that show results of a customer-centric approach include higher margins, higher client satisfaction scores, reductions in cost to serve, improved revenue growth, and an increase in employee satisfaction.

What has changed since the 1990s is the how much power and control the customer now has in the digital age. The pressure from customers being in firm control of their buying process is finally affecting the adoption of customer-centric strategies by B2B firms. Whether B2B firms lost or never had customer focus, it is becoming apparent that a customer-centric strategy is now required to win. Pivoting from a product-centric or operational-centric strategy to a customer-centric strategy pays off.

While there is a lot of excitement around the return to customer-focus, there are unique challenges to changing company DNA to be reflective of a customer-centered pivot. Three main challenges include leadership, defining customer ownership, and how marketing uses technology.

Leadership

In practical terms, customer focus must be pervasive and measured to have the desired effect. It starts with the CEO and the executive team and trickles down to every person in the company. Customer focus must move from “talk” to “walk,” and having KPIs and MBOs for every part of the company associated to customer delight are ways to measure adoption. It’s not possible to transform into a customer-centric organization without belief and behavior starting at the top and cascading to every part of the organization. Just like the CEO in the United Airlines commercial. His flight was to go see the customer who fired them.

Gut Check: Are the behaviors of your company’s executives indicative of a customer-focus?

Who owns the customer?

Coming to terms with “who owns the customer” is a battle in many companies. In companies that are sales led (like many B2B companies), the sales organization often takes great exception to marketing telling them about the customer. The sales organization has always had firsthand and often the only relevant knowledge about the customer. Those days are gone. Marketing now has the most knowledge about the customer through millions of digital interactions. Marketing takes a leadership role in understanding customers as it acquires more knowledge about them and is instrumental in creating customer engagement throughout the entire life cycle. In this scenario, marketing works with every part of the company that touches the customer to create one view of each customer and to create a flawless customer experience.

Gut Check: Do you have a defined and agreed upon customer life cycle map in which each part of the organization understands its role and all actions are orchestrated to create a flawless experience for the customer?

Technology as the enabler

Technology is at the center of operationalizing a customer centric strategy. It is the enabler for consumer and customer control of the buying journey. It is creating the pressure to pivot to a customer-centric strategy. And, it is the answer to operationalizing a customer-centric strategy. In this technology-rich environment, the marketing operations group has emerged to use technology and data to detail and provide relevant customer insights to the CMO and to the organization. In large part, it is the work of the marketing operations group that allows marketing to be the “expert” on the customer.

Gut Check: Is your marketing operations function customer-driven and do it provide key customer insights for organizational decision making?

Take action

I most often see companies tackle CX in silos and with disparate processes and technologies. I also see this same scenario within marketing departments. Once they begin these one-off projects, they begin to claim they are now customer-centric.

Nothing could be further from the truth. To integrate CX into the DNA of a company requires belief and action from the top that trickles down to every person in the organization. It requires some tough talks between customer-facing teams such as marketing, sales, and customer service around who owns the customer—and the answer should be: We all do.

Finally, it requires a customer-centric marketing operations group that is customer-focused and proves it by sharing customer data and insights for improved organizational decision making.

About the Author:

Debbie Qaqish is principal partner and Chief Strategy Officer of The Pedowitz Group, and The Queen of Revenue Marketing,™ a term she coined in 2011. Debbie manages global client relationships and leads the firm’s thought leadership initiatives.

Debbie is author of Rise of the Revenue Marketer, Chancellor of Revenue Marketing University, and host of WRMR Power TalkRadio for Revenue Marketing Leaders, which showcases marketing executives from companies like GE and Microsoft sharing advice on marketing transformation. A PhD candidate, Debbie teaches an MBA course at College of William & Mary on Revenue Marketing.

In March 2016, Kapost named Debbie among the Top 40 Most Inspiring Women in Marketing. For the last five years, Debbie has been named One of the 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management. She has also won SLMA’s Top 20 Women to Watch distinction. In 2014 FierceCMO Magazine named Debbie one of the Top 10 Women CMOs to Watch.

Connect with Debbie via LinkedIn, email: Debbie@Pedowitzgroup.com or phone: 770-331-4443. And, to learn more about what it takes to integrate CX into the company DNA, read “7 Hallmarks of Transformation.”

July 27, 2017August 9, 2017

Using Telephone Surveys to Drive Higher & Better Quality Responses to Customer Service Surveys

Surveys have always been crucial when it comes to determining the next steps any company must take to improve its customer service experience. By tapping customers for their honest perspectives, brands open themselves to information that would otherwise remain unknown.

Yet while collecting actionable information in real time drives improvements throughout the organization, the processes behind gathering such data have shifted in recent years. Online surveys have gained prominence, as such methods cost less and are easier to deploy. Online surveys typically are used to measure customer satisfaction with specific service incidents, such as the handling of trouble tickets. Multiple choice responses allow customers to comment on such things as first-call resolution (yes or no and how many contacts were needed), the agent’s knowledge and helpful attitude, etc. Transaction surveys are not meant to evaluate customer loyalty, just the degree of satisfaction with the handling of a specific recent service incident experience.

Particularly in B2B markets, telephone surveys offer invaluable insights and significantly increase survey responses to achieve statistically valid sample size. As we know, valid sample size is the key component in all survey research. Also, research shows that telephone responses provide a higher quality response in measuring the customer experience and allows capturing detailed information from key customer contacts (e.g., decision maker, recommender) on critical failures. This invaluable information can trigger action alerts used to initiate the appropriate corrective action to address key customer issues from the key customer contacts.

In addition, telephone surveys allow a company to insert that personal, human touch that online surveys lack. Such an approach enhances customer loyalty, as respondents feel they’re part of the process and that their input can effect change. Online surveys do tend to offer open-ended opportunities for feedback, but telephone surveys enable customer service representatives to speak directly with customers so they may gain thorough insight into the reasoning behind the responses as well as the loyalty based on the customer’s overall relationship with the company. While such data may ultimately be difficult to quantify, it’s this qualitative information that’s necessary to get to the heart of what might be plaguing the brand in question.

Companies must identify their market research objectives carefully before they can determine the ideal channel that will help them achieve their goals. For those looking for responses that go beyond the multiple choice styling of the average online survey, phone surveys are likely to deliver those precise results—but only if the company proceeds with caution. While telephone surveys embolden customers to speak up, such methods must be strategic and succinct.

Researchers must develop hard-hitting questions that maximize value in the shortest amount of time. In today’s busy world, few have the time or desire to spend 20 minutes talking to anyone without adequate notice. The questions, therefore, must allow both representative and customer to get down to business relatively quickly. Prioritizing time in any and all customer interactions, survey or not, demonstrates how deeply the company values its customers, for time has become currency in its own right.

Once the brand has chosen its sample, representatives will conduct the interviews to gather data. The information collected will then be analyzed in an effort to assess the primary pain points driving customer frustration and the overall highlights sustaining customer loyalty.

To further increase survey response rates, companies might also benefit from incentivizing customers to complete the initial online survey. For instance, a company might offer discounts upon survey completion to gain basic feedback. This will allow the company to ease customers into the idea of connecting via telephone. Regardless of channel, however, all companies must reward customers with a consistently superior service experience. By demonstrating that they’ve listened to their base, leaders can bolster brand loyalty and advance their bottom line simultaneously so everyone wins.

Always remember, it’s customers, not products and services, that are the source of all revenue and profits. Follow these recommendations to drive higher and better responses to customer service surveys and you’ll strengthen your efforts in customer acquisition, retention, growth and even win-back.

July 25, 2017August 9, 2017

4 Requirements for Linking CX to ROI

Eighty-one percent of consumers are willing to pay for a better experience, according to the Capgemini’s study “The Disconnected Customer.” Yet, customers don’t feel that companies are delivering high quality customer experience (CX), and one in five consumers stopped purchasing from a company after a poor experience, Capgemini’s research found.

In our own ERDM learnings from more than 16,000 hours of VoC research interviews, consumers were emphatic that short-term sales-focused tactics were irritating, brand damaging, and undermined loyalty. As empowered consumers, they expected engagement oriented communications and experiences.

Here is a representative quote from the research: “You marketers don’t understand that personalized engagement post-sale is valuable for the customer and… forges strong ties with your company that serve as a ‘grace account’ upon which to draw when there is the almost-certain problem or outreach from competition.”

Chris Hull, Chief Merchandising Officer at the iconic American luxury lifestyle brand Shinola, puts it this way, “Consumers are looking for meaningful experiences that differentiate one brand from another. One way we do this is by designing our stores to engage the five senses:

Sight – see team members build bicycles or do personalized embossing;
Sound – a warm welcome and vinyl playing on our Runwell Turntable;
Touch – well-crafted products, such as watches and leather bags;
Taste – a complimentary bottle of Shinola Cola;
Smell – the smell from our Shinola candles lit throughout the store.

This is all part of conveying our distinctive handcrafted products and has resulted in higher engagement, satisfaction, and conversion rates.”

With this in mind, here are four factors that will help you link CX to improved ROI:

1. CX strategies must align with consumer demands

Too often sales strategies are spray painted to look like CX strategies. However, customers are smart and know the difference between sales pitches posing as engagement and true CX. They resent when marketers think that customers are too naïve to know the difference.

According to Nike Chief Executive Mark Parke in comments about CX strategy development, “The important thing to point out is that changes are being driven by the consumer…. They want it fast, easy, and [they want] personal service.” Nike has implemented measures to drive personalization and has seen sales improvements in a landscape where so many other retailers and brands are failing.

2. Accurate data is essential for driving CX initiatives

As Jim Conning, managing director at Royal Mail Data Services so aptly puts it, data accuracy is non-negotiable for ROI: “CMOs and marketing directors all understand the importance of accurate customer data, but I’m not sure that more inexperienced members of the team understand the increased ROI of more accurate data.” The company’s research indicated that 34% of marketers fail to fully understand the financial impact of poor quality data; 70% of the 300 companies surveyed admit to having incomplete or out-of-date customer data; and 6% of annual revenue is being lost through poor quality data.

An important, related finding from ERDM’s VoC research: B2B and B2C customers want to shape their own customer experience by providing trusted brands with deep business and personal information in exchange for meaningful, relationship-building experiences.

ROI also requires CX-focused content

Irrelevant content hurts your brand, so stop sending spray-and-pray blasts!

This quote from our VoC research is a blunt reminder. “When I receive generic emails, it’s obvious that you do not care enough to understand my individual needs. Instead, you are trying distill my complex needs into simple generalities to make your email blast easier for you…and useless to me!”

Consider this from a Salsify Study: “If you provide superior content, and a competitive price, you have the opportunity to both close the sale and build long-term consumer loyalty.” The study found that…

88% of consumers say that product content is extremely or very important to their purchase decision
Price matters, but it’s product content that gets consumers to buy

Establish CX-oriented metrics and compensate accordingly

New and additional metrics are required to track and compensate for CX-oriented behaviors. Too many companies fail to change metrics to reflect their CX strategies and still compensate based on legacy “sell ‘em and forget ‘em” models.

In this blog post , Michael Klein, director of industry strategy for the Adobe Marketing Cloud, presents some effective soltuions that brands can implement to select the optimal CX metrics. One, from Epsilon’s Rob Cantave, especially stood out: “CRM data helps us understand what current customers are interested in seeing. Combining that with our third-party data lets us better understand what clusters of customers have in common. We present that information to the automated models and have them test and ultimately identify the product, categories, or content most likely to be of interest to returning customers and brand new unknown users who’ve been seen elsewhere in our network.”

Linking CX to ROI is a complex, multiphased, and corporate-wide pursuit. Remember:

CX requires company-wide consistency and communication so employees understand and are trained on the goals and behaviors they need to demonstrate every single day.
It also requires an omnichannel, data-driven strategy that’s based on meeting the requirements consumers indicate are important—to them. CX is useless without a consumer-focused approach because it will be observed as sales-y and meaningless.
Similarly, irrelevant content is perceived as demonstrating that a brand does not care about developing long-term customer relationships.

To achieve maximum ROI, companies need to rethink how they view CX and build impactful and sustainable strategies to satisfy customer needs over the customer lifecycle.

About the Author
Ernan Roman (@ernanroman) is president of ERDM Corp., leaders in conducting VoC research for major brands. His latest book is Voice of the Customer Marketing. He was inducted into the DMA Marketing Hall of Fame, named by the Online Marketing Institute as one of the “2014 Top 40 Digital Luminaries,” and named by Crain’s BtoB magazine as one of the “100 most influential people in business marketing.”

July 24, 2017August 9, 2017

Weaving CEM Into the Fabric of an Organization

The overall objective of any customer experience management (CEM) strategy is to evolve your organization’s DNA to the point where it is entirely customer driven. That’s not going to happen without a robust change management program.

CEMDNA Change Management is one approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state where customer experience is not a primary focus to a desired, future state where the customer is central to all decision making. The approach involves implementing organizational processes designed to encourage stakeholders to accept and embrace customer centricity in their business environment. These include:

Management coaching: Senior business leaders can’t just expect managers to suddenly manage differently because of a decree of customer centricity. Managers need to be trained on how to implement CEM within their team, as well as on any related skills. What the training will entail should be based on your CEM strategy and the specific objectives of any related CEM programs.

Benchmarking: Use best practices examples from your existing customer interactions to showcase your preferred future state. This will demonstrate to employees that customer centricity not only is possible, but also is an established, successful approach that savvy employees are already using.

Measurement: Set performance metrics, such as financial results and operational efficiencies, to guide the change efforts. Also create and track goals for leadership commitment and the effectiveness of internal communications related to the CEM change management efforts.

Process tracking: It’s essential to monitor the progress of your CEM change management efforts. This will allow you to see where you’re succeeding, as well as where you’re stalling. In case of the latter, you’ll be able to quickly uncover the cause of the situation and resolve it to allow for continued forward momentum.

Team coaching: Consider external coaching on the job and soft skills needed for customer centricity to be a part of your organizational DNA. But just as important, ensure that managers are trained well enough to provide initial and continued coaching on the skills most important to the CEM transformation and to ongoing customer centricity.

CEMDNA change management is part of the Act phase—along with corrective action and employee engagement—and one of the 12 of the components that comprise the CEMDNA Playbook Strategy.

July 18, 2017August 9, 2017

Tying Employee Performance to Customer Satisfaction

Tying Employee Engagement to Customer Satisfaction

When looking at how companies measure employee performance, one thing is clear: There’s wide variation across industries in terms of how well businesses are incorporating customer satisfaction into the mix. Generally, companies do a poor job of linking performance to satisfaction. Although we have seen improvements recently, many companies still struggle to enhance the processes linking performance to satisfaction.

One of the key factors required to link satisfaction to employee performance is having sound methods to collect the satisfaction data. Companies that have poor satisfaction measurement methods have trouble linking the results to performance because there’s either not enough data or the data is suspect. Without a reliable foundation of results, employees will resist efforts to link their performance to satisfaction.

Those companies that are successfully tying satisfaction to performance are able to do so because they have clear goals and processes, as well as quality data. Consider the following approaches for improving your satisfaction and performance management processes:

Collect enough data to support evaluating individuals or teams. If there is not enough data to measure individuals, then setting goals and measuring performance at the team level is a viable and sometimes preferable alternative.

Set measurable goals for satisfaction, rather than “soft” targets based on perception. Having weak references to customer satisfaction in a performance review does not focus employees on delivering higher levels of service.

Ensure that customer satisfaction is a heavily weighted component of performance evaluations. The weighting should have a direct impact on compensation for the employees. If possible, put a bonus program in place to reward the staff achieving the desired satisfaction results.

Tie performance objectives to employee-controllable elements, as well as overall satisfaction. These include knowledge and expertise, professionalism, quality of solution, timeliness of status updates, and other factors in an employee’s control.

Regularly review satisfaction results with the staff and include them on performance scorecards or other productivity reports. This will ensure that employees are aware of customers’ satisfaction with their current performance and enable them to focus on areas that need improving.

Following these simple suggestions will have a positive impact on your overall customer satisfaction program and drive the staff towards delivering improved results on a consistent basis. Programs such as the Service Capability & Performance (SCP) Standards can help drive improvements in this area and will help set specific measurable targets for customer satisfaction.

About the Author
Greg Coleman is a principal partner and vice president of Strategic Programs for Service Strategies Corp. He has more than 25 years of experience in the high-technology service and support field. Greg has worked with leading technology services organizations to develop and deploy global standards for service excellence and has assessed the performance of hundreds of service organizations worldwide. You can reach Greg at gcoleman@servicestrategies.com

July 18, 2017August 9, 2017

Treating Employees as an Asset

Do you consider the quality and performance of your employees as a major business asset? You should. Indeed, many firms list “our people” as their biggest competitive differentiator.

It’s also true that payroll, benefits, and other direct costs linked to employees are the number one expense item for most organizations. This includes the cost of replacing employees, which is similar to the cost of acquiring new customers.

Add to all this the fact that employees are the ones who interact most frequently with your external stakeholders, and it becomes obvious that happy, satisfied employees breed satisfied, loyal customers, suppliers, business partners, and shareholders.

Even so, most organizations lack a formal, structured employee engagement program to engage, reward, and retain employees for delivering outstanding customer service or to educate them on strengthening their CEM knowledge and skills.

Employee engagement means understanding, measuring, and improving the emotional relationship between employees and their work. It’s about more than employee satisfaction; it relates to measuring and improving items that will directly affect business outcomes. According to Gallup, companies with more engaged employees outperformed the earnings-per-share of their competitors by 18%.

Employee engagement is typically not wholly owned by the HR organization, but requires the active involvement of line management, as well. Here are two areas to consider as you work with HR to build out your employee engagement strategy:

Employee recognition and compensation –Set balanced goals based on achieving key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer satisfaction and loyalty. Recognize and reward employees individually and/or by groups. Most important, link employee compensation to achieving measurable gains in customer satisfaction.
Employee training– Commit to a continuous employee training program on customer experience management (CEM), including soft skills such as conflict resolution, as well as technical or job-based competence. In addition, take advantage of certification courses that are available in customer experience, CRM, and CEM. This advanced-level instruction can pay big dividends for your company and provide career advancement for employees.

Employee engagement is part of the Act phase—along with corrective action and change management—and one of the 12 of the components that comprise the CEMDNA Playbook Strategy.

July 12, 2017August 9, 2017

What?! Another Poor Customer Experience?

How often do you encounter this situation? You’re working with a reputable and reliable company and the event quickly turns into a fiasco. It moves so far from delivering customer success that you ask yourself if this could be the same company.

To make matters worse, it’s often a company that prides itself on delivering the highest level of customer experience (CX). Doesn’t it make you wonder how much substance or truth is behind their claim?

My recent misfortune, which I will describe shortly, reinforces the message I continually deliver to clients: Every company looking to maintain loyalty and grow financially should continually ask themselves, “Would our customer’s experience be considered easy and effective?” and “When was the last time we looked at our customer journey?”

I will share with you some proven ideas to become better connected with your customers, and deliver loyalty-building and profit-growing results. But, before I begin, I’ll set the stage with the story that precipitated this article.

I needed to contact a company for TV support. When I did, as in the past, I am addressed as a preferred customer and they thank me profusely. Oh yes, I have worked with them for more than 12 years. By now, you would think, my confirmation information, my issue, etc., will travel with me regardless of where I’m transferred during the interaction. After 4 transfers and repeating the issue each time, I was able to resolve the issue. Or, so I thought. After I hung up, the issue recurred. So, I called again…three more transfers…resolution, finally—and an email confirmation, which wasn’t part of the process the first time.

It’s about the customer experience…delivery and results

I wonder how many companies really follow through on the CX strategy they’ve put in place. Why? Think about how often companies fail to deliver a quality customer experience regardless the investment they’ve made.

It’s clear from my recent experience that the TV support process has never been thoroughly vetted from a customer’s perspective, which is where the customer journey map process would be so useful. This is evidenced by the complexity of my having to weave through multiple barriers to resolution and the company’s poor execution. It makes me wonder how many other companies own CX strategies are built on a house of cards.

The path to delivering positive customer experiences begins with understanding the customer journey

Delivering a consistently satisfactory customer experience is more challenging than one realizes. Organizations learn that there is much more to the job of engaging and retaining customers than just putting some processes in place and moving on to the next challenge. While they may recognize the need to provide easy and rewarding experiences, they’re challenged with designing, developing, executing, and delivering an integrated customer experience strategy. In fact, many businesses still do not walk the journey from their customer’s view.

Today, there are still far too many of you who feel you already know what needs to be done and how to do it without taking time to walk it from your customer’s side. Well, let me help you: That is simply not going to work!

Know how to ask the right questions about your process

The challenge is to move your game to the next level by taking an approach that links strategy, vision, measurements, technology, organization, engagement, and the like. At the same time, nail down customers’ outcomes and then design around it. You can no longer be good at CX; you have to be better—even best at it. Any less than this no longer suffices.

I like customer journey mapping as a powerful tool of choice. Customer journey mapping is a proven tool that allows you to focus on the customers’ experiences with your company. This way, you learn more about your customer: how they define success, how to deliver successful customer experiences, and how to make them happy while growing your profits.

To move from delivering a good experience to a better or great experience requires that you set aside past practices and consider some changes. These are 12 that I share with clients:

Have your processes been customer journey mapped?
Have the barriers to successful performance been identified and removed?
Has the journey map allowed a good look at your internal technology, is that technology easy to use, and does it make the right information available to the right people when they need it?
Is there organizational alignment?
Has the journey map added clarity to your rules of channel engagement?
Has the journey map provided the clarity needed to demonstrate why your silos must melt away and set the course for a mind-set that foregoes silo thinking to facilitating customer success?
Are your customer processes aligned to metrics that gather insight to move forward?
What personas are you addressing?
What type of feedback do you want to collect, and how will you engage customers to obtain it?
Is your organization robust with passionate employees who are engaged?
Has the journey mapping effort given you the needed focus on the customer segments, micro-experiences, and channel details that are at the core of your strategic business processes?
How will you measure success?

My takeaway

How you answer these questions will give you insight into whether your CX effort is built on a house of cards, like too many businesses today, or built to deliver those customer loyalty–building experiences—or, as I like to say, that aha customer moment, one that delights your customer as it delivers customer success.

About the Author
Dennis Gershowitz is founder and principal of DG Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in driving service revenues and profits through the development and implementation of customer experience management (CEM) strategy and service operations improvements. Contact Dennis at dennisg@dgassociates.net

July 7, 2017August 9, 2017

Corrective Action Planning in Customer Experience Management

Corrective Action Planning in Customer Experience Management

A natural result of benchmarking your current state customer experience against your CX goals is change. Of course, you’ll need to make changes to your customer experience management strategy over the short and long term. But, remember, an essential part of that planning is determining how you’ll respond to issues that customers raise—especially concerns raised by high-value clients. That’s what we’ll focus on here.

Take these five steps to get your customer-focused corrective action plans in place.

Prepare a corrective action plan – Corrective action plans address critical external customer issues. Formulate your plans with two goals in mind: quickly responding to key accounts based up their experience and issues that emerge; addressing internal systemic issues that negatively impact customer-related processes. The latter are often discovered in addressing the former.

Create closed-loop Action Alerts – A critical element of a corrective action plan is to “close the loop” on every action needed. Create alerts that allow you to track the progress of actions taken to resolve immediate customer concerns, as well as address larger systemic issues. This will enable you to be sure that issues are attended to and resolved. Or, they’ll alert you to take any further action required.

Build in accountability for results – Assign responsibility to frontline and management-level personnel to carry out the corrective action plans. Clearly delineate their objectives and roles in taking immediate corrective action, as well as recommending solutions to longer-term systemic issues.

Verify and communicate results – Develop a system that allows you to verify that the corrective actions taken have resolved customer issues. For immediate concerned raised by a customer (especially a key account), be proactive and reach out to other customers who may have experienced the same issue and present your solution.

Additionally, confirm internally that you’ve address any systemic problems that caused the more immediate issues in the first place. Action Alerts are essential to this process.

Once you’ve verified that an immediate concern or systemic issue has been resolved, communicate that out to key stakeholders. Those stakeholders may include customers affected by the issue, account managers, sales or customer service leaders, employees in teams related to the issue.

Review the plan – Your corrective action plan should be flexible enough to evolve over time. Examine your plan’s progress and results on a quarterly basis and make appropriate changes to the plan based on that insight.

Corrective action is part of the Act phase—along with employee engagement and change management—and one of the 12 of the components that comprise the CEMDNA Playbook Strategy.