BUSTING 3 COMMON MYTHS OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

SMARTER CXSMARTER CX

The rising popularity of customer experience (CX) is parallel with the rise of consumer empowerment. The expectation of personalized and consistent experiences is now assumed when customers choose to interact with a business. “Customer experience” has become a catchall for many technologies, solutions, and concepts. In the scramble to jump on the CX bandwagon, many businesses have lost sight of the ultimate reasons to invest in it: to achieve sustainable growth, create customer loyalty, and increase profits.

It’s time to clear up a few of the myths around investments in CX to better understand how to prioritize, streamline, and triage new technologies and methodologies in the market. In this guide, you’ll learn:

Why more data-driven

insight leads to less action

Why digital channels

don’t always reduce costs

Why NPS is a

meaningless metric

3 COMMON CX MYTHS

1

2

3

Companies are in hot pursuit of the esteemed 360-degree view of their customers based on available historical, current, and future trending first- and third-party data. There are big investments being made in Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) in an effort to fully understand what customers want in order to deliver experiences that go above-and-beyond their needs.

Reality:Most businesses today aren’t able to take effective action on the good data they already have.

Without a doubt, data is needed–accurate, contextual data. But if the data is saying, “you need more data,” there’s a problem.

Investments in Big Data often leave businesses insight-rich and action-poor. Ask anyone who has done, or is in the process of doing, Master Data Management (MDM) around customer data. It’s no easy task! It can be a lengthy, ongoing, and costly process of connecting, consolidating, deduping, reconciling, and analyzing a continuous stream of data which new systems are creating. Fixing the data can be daunting, and a lot can happen while the project is underway.

Then throw in IoT. Although this innovation is on a sci-fi level of coolness, it comes at a cost. Connecting devices back to the “mothership” allows users to capture rich and unique data feeds about the customer and their use of products or services in real-time. However, these exciting “shiny-object” efforts around IoT can rapidly rally a crowd and shift critically needed talent away from their more mundane, but essential, tasks. Or worse, IoT can consume the lion’s share of the operational budgets required to scale the business.

As a CX professional, you hear it all the time: CX is all about the data. Without data, experiences can become anonymous, irrelevant, and time-consuming for the customer, negatively impacting business.

1MYTH #1 INVESTMENTS IN BIG DATA AND IOT WILL DELIVER BETTER EXPERIENCES.

The common element of investments failing in Big Data and IoT is the lack of focus on what happens after a business gets the data. Without the ability to activate and strategically apply data across all areas of the organization, it becomes worthless. This is the mecca of CX. All channels of information must be synchronized in a simple and unified User Interface (UI) for a clear, contextual view of the customer and the data associated with their unique interactions with the brand.

Keep in mind these three big questions:

Starting with these three data points might not give you the ultimate 360-degree customer view we’re all in search of, but it will be enough to deliver a better experience in the moment, when the customer expects it.

ADVICE:

1What is the basic customer information I need?

2What was my customer’s last interaction?

3What is the customer trying to do now, and on what channels?

2Why? Because they typically can handle more volume, at greater efficiency, and with less costly labor. For example, businesses often offset the cost of call centers by directing customers to an online FAQ page to allow them self-serve.

Digital also makes it “easy” for consumers to connect with a business anytime, anywhere, on any channel they want. That ease of use has changed how customers expect to be served.

Digital online engagements (chat, web, social, bot, and email) can be 5 times, or in some cases 20 times, cheaper than analog engagements (phone or instore).

MYTH #2 INVESTMENTS IN AUTOMATED OR DIGITAL CHANNELS, LIKE CHATBOTS, WILL REDUCE THE COST OF SERVICE.

Reality:Automated and digital channels can result in 100 times more interactions across all channels, in turn increasing engagement costs.

Something fantastic happens when businesses make it easy and effortless for customers to engage with them using digital: customers engage more. And given more choices, customers will choose their own unique combination of channels. Perhaps they start by raising an issue on a social network, then review solutions on an online forum before calling an agent. This unique combination is being referred to as the emerging “organic” channels.

That said, investments in automated service channels shouldn’t completely replace analog. In fact, businesses that keep investing in analog alongside digital service find that by funneling simple inquiries through resources like online automation, knowledge-driven service, and chatbots, they’re able to better focus call center teams on requests of a more personal or complicated nature.

Most businesses don’t serve those complex requests well today because they must spend time addressing a high volume of simple and basic requests. So while digital channels may not help to reduce engagement costs, and may actually increase them over time, they will allow your analog channels to be much more effective in servicing the most loyal customers by freeing agents to have personalized conversations that are more likely to convert into sales.

By nature, digital allows consumers to seamlessly switch back and forth between their unique combinations of preferred channels. Not only do customers engage more, but they’re now engaging on more than one channel–both digitally and traditionally, however they see fit.

A customer in need of service today can start on your website’s self-service pages, click into a chat session, pick up the phone to call, or even make an in-store visit. It’s up to the customer to choose their point of interaction, and it’s up to the business to ensure their CX strategy is set up to encourage support on these evolving organic channels.

It’s important to understand how your customers expect to interact with your business, which should dictate the experience you create for them across omni-, cross-, and multi-channel journeys.

ADVICE:

CLICK HERE TO LEARN THE DIFFERENCE

Are you using “cross-channel,” “multi-channel,” and “omni-channel” to describe the same thing?

3NPS provides a sense of how likely your customers are to stay loyal and recommend your brand. It’s the primary measurement of the likeliness to create advocates or detractors.

Advocates increase profits through promotion and consumption, lower costs of acquisition through word of mouth, and reduce service operational costs through acquired/shared knowledge.

Detractors decrease profits through redemption and attrition, increase acquisition costs through word of mouth, and increase service operational costs through frustration and repetition.

If executives view CX in terms of profit or loss and NPS is the measurement of advocates or detractors, then it makes complete sense why they’d measure CX through a NPS.

MYTH #3 INVESTMENTS IN CX ARE BEST MEASURED USING NET PROMOTER SCORE (NPS).

Reality:Fragmented NPS efforts are as meaningful as soft leads are in converting sales.

Typically, NPS is measured once, maybe twice, in a customer’s lifecycle and rarely measured on every channel of interaction–that’s a BIG issue. As a consumer, if you have one good experience with marketing or shopping or even service, it’s not a true reflection of your likelihood to recommend the company to your friends and family unless there was a consistent experience and the business has measured every interaction across all channels.

The best indicator of an advocate or detractor during the CX journey is the point at which the emotional value of the customer’s expectation materialized. Did the company deliver on their promise? These “moments of truth” can happen throughout the entire customer journey.

A combination of metrics along with acquisition costs and operational expenses that equal profit margins (SG&A) will be representative of real data around CX success. NPS has the power to deliver on its promise, but only if it truly represents the experience and isn’t simply another checkbox, meaningless metric.

ADVICE:Today’s CX requires business transformation and innovation. In addition to understanding the customer better, a business must understand itself better and measure that change effectively.

Embracing NPS is a great start, but as CX efforts mature, their NPS must start to unify and measure in conjunction with other metrics across all key customer journey moments. NPS is not enough alone. It only represents the “how”. How did the last interaction leave the customer feeling? Other metrics like Lifetime Value (LTV), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Cost Of Service (COS) are necessary to paint a full picture of the customer.

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