How to align all employees with the customer experience strategy

It is very important to realise that Customer Experience and having a customer centric mindset is often a cultural process within organizations. For that reason, a majority of leaders expressed that the existing culture within the company forms a barrier that has to be taken down before they can start managing daily operations with the customer in mind.

 

There are different approaches for looking at ways in which the customer can be at the centre of the organization, and two vivid examples really spring to mind. Steve Jobs always started with the customer experience and worked back towards the technology. Secondly, Richard Branson who, in contrast to the previous example, only looks from an ‘employees-first’ point of view. His view is that when you treat your employees well, they will love their jobs and bring that same good feeling to the customers who, in their turn, have a positive feeling about the organization and are willing to do more business with you.

Employee engagement as driving factor for customer happiness

Not every organization needs to have the exact same mindset as Richard Branson to achieve happy customers, but you need to have happy employees to really make a difference. HR has an important role in becoming customer centric in all phases of the HR Cycle.

It starts before your onboarding process. During the recruitment process, recruiters need to focus more on talent or attitude and not so much on skills. Skills can (and should!) be learned and taught when your hire is settling into their job. Also, your recruiters need to recruit with purpose and really look for a good fit with the organization. And keep in mind: with every pair of hands you get a brain for free.

When you hire an employee, inspire them to pursue continuous development, participate in training sessions, courses and study. In that way you give them the power to develop what they really want. You can also make this competitive or place development in a game-setting in order to make it more fun and an enjoyable challenge to keep on developing.

Best practises in improving employee engagement

It is very important to drive cultural change within the organization as a whole. This is a continuous process that might be difficult to implement or keep alive, but it is worth it and employees will adopt some or all of the best practises. After all, they are designed to give employees a happier workplace.

In the masterclass we had fun in an assignment to create a Museum of Cultural Change, where all participants shared Best practises.

Amongst them were:

• Storytelling: share customer stories in (Board) meetings
• Awards: give employees whose work resulted in great customer experiences an award and make them feel special
• King/Queen for a week: hang a huge crown over the workplace of a very customer minded employee. Everyone in the organization will notice this and congratulate them
• Random acts of kindness: give employees a budget so they can surprise random customers with a gift
• Compliment shower: print all the compliments of customers who gave a 9 or 10 in the NPS survey, make confetti of the prints and unleash a real compliment shower over your employees at the end of a town hall meeting
• Invite the customer to the work place: just like bringing a family member to work, invite a customer over and even let them attend a meeting. See what happens in the organization and how people react
• Give the customer a chair in the meeting. Make a visual representation of your customer and assign him/her to a seat in the Board rooms. In this way, the customer is always visible.

Ways in which to reward employees in their customer centric behaviour

photo: https://www.slideshare.net/KaiCrow/asknicely-more-valuable-customers-with-nps

The first thing that may come to mind when thinking about rewarding employees for their efforts in customer excellence, may be to give them a bonus when their NPS has reached a certain level. This approach is brilliant, but be aware of possible gaming. You could also reward those who are positively named in customer surveys, give recognition to people behind the scenes and empower peers to celebrate each other’s work. Or make it easier for your employees to balance their work/life, offer benefits that reduce stress levels and treat the people who deal with tough customer experiences with the utmost respect.

There are lots of ways to encourage your employees to work on a more customer centric manner, you only have to be creative and persist in the execution! It won’t be easy, since we all know Culture eats Strategy for breakfast. But this is where success is made and where the most fun can be had.

Want to grow your Customer Experience competences?

These are only some of the highlights Milou took away from attending the Customer Experience Masterclass. Would you like to know more? Join our next CX Masterclass in February or June 2018, click here for more information or here for reserving your place

Customer Experience Framework and complete list of blog posts in this series

This post is part of a wider series about all the 6 CX disciplines that represent the CXPA Framework around which the CCXP exam is structured and that we cover in the CX Masterclass.

Find here the complete list of the other posts in this series:

1. CX Strategy
2. Customer Understanding
3. Design, Improvement and Innovation
4. Measurement
5. Governance
6. Culture (this one)

About this series

The foundations for these blogposts are written by Milou van Kerkhof following the June 2017 CX Masterclass given by Nienke Bloem and Rosaria Cirillo. Milou attended this as a newcomer in Customer Experience. These blogposts have been slightly edited and reflect only the highlights of the content of each module.

Measurement is a mean to an end, not a goal itself

Have you ever heard the following while being asked to fill out a survey: “Please give us a 9 or 10 rating to let us know you are satisfied with us”? Or have you ever heard: “When we formulate the question differently, we can improve our score” inside your company? When these questions arise, you can easily perceive that the people designing these questions are not looking to gain better insights so they can enable the organization to provide a better customer experience, they just want to have a better survey outcome.

What is the best way to translate customer perception of the experience into measurable and actionable metrics, without focusing too much on the metric itself?

Define and use a proven measurement framework

There is a wide variety of metrics which you can use to gauge the customer experience as perceived by your customers and they can be observed or measured at different moments of the experience.

How can you easily set-up a measurement system which informs the entire organization about the experience you are delivering, and at the same time helps you in driving customer excellence?

Start by following these 5 easy steps:

1.    Define what you want to measure and when.

• Relational surveys are about your company and/or brand as a whole. Once every month, quarter or year, you can ask your customers feedback about their perception of your organization or brand in general.
• Transactional surveys focus on how the latest contact with the company was. Were the customers satisfied about the order process, the delivery times and the end product?

2.    Measure what you want to know.

Forrester identifies 3 types of metrics:

• ‘Descriptive’ metrics tell you what really happened. How long did a customer have to wait until a call centre employee answered their call?
• ‘Perception’ metrics measure how the customer thinks and feels about what happened. It may take you only 20 seconds to answer the phone but the absence of any message when waiting may make the customer perceive that they waited much longer. In contrast, it may take you 40 seconds to answer but great music whilst waiting may make the customer perceive the waiting time as much shorter. A customer feels more frustrated that a problem has still not been resolved following several promises that it would be.
• ‘Outcome’ metrics describe what a customer does as a result of their perception of the experience you delivered. Will they purchase from your company again or will they recommend your service?

The key metrics that are most often used are NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) and CES (Customer Effort Score). There are numerous other metrics to use (ACSI -American Customer Satisfaction Index -, Temkin Group CX Index, Forrester CXI, etc…), so pick one that’s suitable for what you want to measure and how you want it presented internally to drive change.

3.    Collect your data. Make sure you ask the right customers the right questions at the right time.

4.    Analyse your data. It depends on what metric you used, what you are measuring exactly and how you are analysing it. But make sure you interpret the data in the right way!

5.    Share your data with the people who need to know and make sure the data is applicable to the various groups.

• Segment your NPS scores by different silos. Give the contact centre their specific NPS with a focus on coaching and process improvement and present your sales-specific NPS to the sales team. In their report, you focus on up- and cross selling.
• Use methodologies such as storytelling and gamification to increase engagement and make the sharing fun and memorable, like in Nationale-Nederlanden best practice example. 

Keep your measurements alive

After you have taken all the above steps, you have set up your measurement system and identified your baseline. You can now work on this to improve in following the close loop system which was covered during the CX Masterclass during discipline #3 Customer Experience Design & Improvement and you can work towards building all the blocks and competencies areas of an NPS/VOC Program.

Always keep in mind that the numbers are not the key focus. You need to listen to and focus on the stories behind the numbers, which are usually provided in the free text spaces. What are the key insights customers are giving you as feedback in the comments? Which patterns do you see? Which concrete actions can you take to improve either the experience you are delivering or the perception your customers have of the experience? Continue to measure and always take the appropriate action to improve your processes to increase the happiness of the customer, not just the metrics.

Return on Investment (ROI) in Customer Experience

Whenever any change in an organization is proposed, the first question the C-suite will ask is “how much will it cost and what is the return on investment?”. This is a very legitimate question, especially in relation to something as abstract as Customer Experience. You need to make a steady business case that will win over any sceptical decision maker, starting by choosing what to focus on.

So how do you prove the ROI of CX?

• Focus on one CX project/element at the time (i.e. ROI of VOC Program, ROI of Self-Service)
• Focus on 3-5 elements within two big “returns” areas

1. >> REVENUE GROWTH
2. >> COSTS SAVINGS

• Calculate ROI

Some examples of items you can take into account when calculating ROI of your CX projects are:

1. Increase revenue

• Repeat purchases
• Better cross-sells
• Reduced churn/ Increased retention

2. Decrease costs

• Fewer complaints (which cost a lot of money to resolve)
• Reduced staff turnover and sickness
• Increased productivity

Once you have your business case, you need to present it to the board! How?

According to Forrester, effective business cases appeal to executives on 3 levels:

1.    LOGIC: The rational justification for investing

• Calculate how collecting, analysing, and acting on customer feedback has demonstrated at least one type of financial benefit.
• Get help of your CFO’s office for financial metrics and models

2.    AUTHORITY: Why they should believe you

• Assemble a portfolio of past successes — even if they’ve been small.
• Get stakeholders to help make the case.
• Plug your results shamelessly.

3.    EMOTION: The “gut feel” factor

• Assemble customer verbatim from unstructured survey questions, customer panels, or social media that demonstrate pain points in the experience today.
• Analyse the feedback for common themes – and pull out the quotes that are the most colourful.
• Support verbatim with employee feedback that captures the problem.

Depending on the composition of your board, you need to decide which mix of these levels is best: do you need a logical approach to win over the C-level by presenting the numbers, or an approach based on your authority to convince them why they should trust in your judgment, or an emotional approach to appeal to the gut feeling? When you’ve done your homework well, there will be no argument about the reason why customer satisfaction should be a key focus in everyone’s day-to-day business.

Join the conversation & let’s learn from each other

What about you? Do you have a measurement framework in place? Which of the 3 metrics type we present in this post do you use? What are your best tips and challenges when it comes to proving ROI of Customer Experience? Share it with us in the comments.

Want to grow your Customer Experience competences?

These are only some of the highlights Milou took away from attending the Customer Experience Masterclass. Would you like to know more? Click here for more information.

Customer Experience Framework and complete list of blog posts in this series

This post is part of a wider series about all the 6 CX disciplines that represent the CXPA Framework around which the CCXP exam is structured and that we cover in the CX Masterclass.

Find here the complete list of the other posts in this series:

1.    CX Strategy

2.    Customer Understanding

3.    Design, Improvement and Innovation

4.    Measurement (this one)

5.    Governance

6.    Culture

About this series

This post was originally posted on Wow Now and is part of the CX Framework series by Rosaria Cirillo and Nienke Bloem.

The foundations for these blogposts are written by Milou van Kerkhof following the June 2017 CX Masterclass given by Nienke Bloem and Rosaria Cirillo. Milou attended this as a newcomer in Customer Experience. These blogposts have been slightly edited and reflect only the highlights of the content of each module

Understanding your customers Rational and Emotional sides

Customer understanding is essential in determining how you can design and provide products/services and experiences that fulfil customer needs, so you can deliver top-class customer service, improve loyalty and get great recommendations.

It’s all about how your customers perceive you and all the interactions with your organisation. Perception being the key element.

Why are they reaching out to your company? How will they feel after being in touch with you? If the customer doesn’t have the feeling you want them to have, there’s a challenge for you as an organisation.

Foundations of customer understanding: archetypes, emotions & needs

Your customers are not just a number or a bunch of character traits. They are human beings with their own problems, hopes, fears and needs. When making their decisions to buy, customers have both rational and emotional reasons.

Understanding your customers’ (buying) behaviour is one of the elements that helps to be successful.

When customers have an emotional attachment to your brand, in addition to being loyal they also become promoters of your brand.

To simplify the understanding of your customers’ behaviours you need to consider: Archetypes, Emotions and Needs

A. Archetypes

The Bradford and Bingley Personality Framework identifies four different archetypes:

• The feeler: they make decisions and take actions based on their emotions
• The entertainer: they joke around to make their problems heard
• The thinker: they are rational and process minded
• The controller: they want everything to go exactly as planned and they get worked up when it doesn’t

Just imagine the different reaction each of these archetypes may have when entering a hotel room and they smell smoke. Understanding the attitudes of these personalities for example, is critical for your front-end employees (i.e. contact centres or hotel staff) who need to manage these customers’ reactions all the time.

While each of us has a dominant archetype, this can change or become extreme, depending on the situation or the stage in which we are in life, especially in case of life changing events like a divorce or the loss of a loved one.

B. Emotions

Many different models are trying to map emotions & make them understandable within companies.

Most of these models identify 4 main emotions: Happiness, Sadness, Anger and Fear.

Recent Temkin analysis of these 4 emotions at call centers proved the impact of these emotions on call duration!

This model is good and widely recognized, yet has limitations with regards to two essential elements:

• Tends to perceive emotions as positive versus negative (on a ratio of 1-3)
• Misses out completely on the fundamental human emotion: love

Rosaria Cirillo has applied her learning from Marshall Rosenberg NVC (Non Violent Communication) and showed us how we can instead distinguish emotions in two broad categories:

• The ones we feel whenever our needs are met (i.e. happiness and love)
• The ones we feel when our needs are not met (i.e. sadness and fear). When customers are expressing sadness and/or fear and their emotions are not acknowledged or understood, or when they feel judged, this can turn into anger.

C. Needs

To be able to understand and influence which emotions the customer is feeling we need to have a clear understanding of their needs.

 

The trainer Rosaria Cirillo shared how the analysis of thousands of survey responses she analysed – run since 2005 for different companies across multiple touch points and industry verticals –  shows that an adapted version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs could be applied. There was a clear correlation between CSAT/NPS Score and at which level of needs the customer felt fulfilled during the interaction. In the most recent year she has added the emotions to the model as we can see in this figure.

Another way to look at needs is to consider the value you deliver to your customer like explained in the Elements of Value Pyramid from HBR’s The 30 Elements of Value.

Setting up a customer insight framework to systematically understand your customer

To have a proper understanding of who your customers are and how they want to be treated by your organization, you need to have a reliable customer insight program. You can achieve this using the following 4 steps:

1. Collect data:
   1. Listen to the Voice of the Customers by asking feedback, performing voice analysis of incoming calls and making sure to ‘drink your own champagne’ i.e. being your own customer.
   2. Listen to the Voice of the Employees. What are they working on that isn’t giving them any satisfaction? How can you make their job more fulfilling?
   3. Listen to the Voice of the Process. How are your processes aligned and do they add value to the customer? Do you use Lean Six Sigma or another methodology?
   4. Look at the Value of the Customer. Quantify your customer by revenue, size or any other metric.
2. Analyse your data. What do they mean and can you find any correlations or associations?
3. Document the data and make it visible and understandable. Customer journey maps and personas are two key tools that can make your insights visible and easily understandable within your organization.
4. Share your insights within your organization. Make sure everybody knows how the customer feels and how they can change their service or tone of voice accordingly.

Emotions drive loyalty and higher customer spending

When you’re reading this, you might be tricked into thinking that customer experience is only about making the customer happy and it doesn’t affect your revenue. Far from the truth! Numerous studies have concluded that a customer is more loyal to an organisation when they have a positive feeling about how they’ve been treated. For example: when a customer has a very positive feeling about an organisation, they are 7.8 times more likely to try new products and services. Think about the possible impact this could have on your P&L!

Getting in touch and staying in touch with your customer

The easiest way to get insights in the actions of thousands of customers is by analysing your website visit data or by looking at a chart of your contact centre volumes by contact reason (Check Tip: do you have such an overview in your company and, if so, who is looking at it regularly taking which actions?). Downside is that in doing so, you’re changing your customers into numbers or segments and you might forget that they are individuals. To compensate for this, numerous big companies make actual contact with customers mandatory for their employees, either by listening to calls, either by calling customers regularly either by acting as customers themselves.

The NS (Dutch Railway) asks their employees to travel by train regularly. That way they can sense the sentiments of passengers and get a stronger focus on ways to improve the journey for the customers. Likewise, the CEO of KPN (Dutch telecom provider) has a mobile phone subscription just like everybody else, so he can feel what it’s like to be a customer of his own company. Other organizations facilitate Customer Arenas where few employees listen and observe a group of customers while they discuss among themselves how they are treated and how the organization could improve. All these initiatives give great insights and should be incorporated in every organization that wants to deliver better customer experience.

Understanding your customer is crucial when it comes to customer experience. Listen, observe, get a deeper understanding of their emotions and their feedback, then you’ll make a good start!

Want to grow your Customer Experience competences?

These are only some of the highlights Milou took away from attending the Customer Experience Masterclass. Would you like to know more? Join a CX Masterclass.

Customer Experience Framework and complete list of blog posts in this series

This post is part of a wider series about all the 6 CX disciplines that represent the CXPA Framework around which the CCXP exam is structured and that we cover in the CX Masterclass.

Find here the complete list of the other posts in this series:

1. CX Strategy
2. Customer Understanding
3. Design, Improvement and Innovation
4. Measurement
5. Governance
6. Culture

Extra: CXPA exam & Becoming CCXP (will be published on the 11th of December)

About this series

This post was originally posted on Wow Now and is part of the CX Framework series by Rosaria Cirillo and Nienke Bloem.

The foundations for these blogposts are written by Milou van Kerkhof following the June 2017 CX Masterclass given by Nienke Bloem and Rosaria Cirillo. Milou attended this as a newcomer in Customer Experience. These blogposts have been slightly edited and reflect only the highlights of the content of each module