Five Steps to Improve the Customer Experience

artificial intelligence
Proper CX management requires data analysis.

The customer experience is becoming more and more important for all companies and industries. Your initiatives can involve endless tasks, from rescuing customers to improving employee training, innovating products, optimizing surveys and more.

No matter how varied your customer experience (CX) efforts may be, they have a few things in common: They all require transformational change — sometimes across your entire company — and they all have to drive business outcomes to keep your program growing.

These changes are no easy undertaking, but there are five steps you can take to best position yourself for success.

1/Assemble a team with authority.

The first step to making impactful changes in your customer experience is involving people with the authority to make those changes happen. When creating a CX action team, you should ask yourself these questions:

  • Which teams are involved in this initiative? (If it’s website related, then it should include the web development, creative, and marketing teams.)

  • Who on these teams can allocate resources and get things moving? (Project managers, team leaders, etc.)

The team members who come to mind are the ones you need to invite to your next meeting as soon as possible

2/Select the proper metrics.

It really can’t be overstated: It’s less to do with what metrics you track, and more to do with which metrics will drive business outcomes and impact the specific CX effort you’re targeting. But what does that mean? The right metrics should:

 • Be present throughout the entire journey, not just a single touchpoint.

 • Tie into business goals. What are you trying to achieve for your business?

 • Involve financial outcomes to help you prove effectiveness (because money talks, right?).

3/Collect contest & detail.

This step really has two parts: When you uncover an issue in your data, you need to collect context both internally and externally.

  • Internally: Bring together the people inside your organization who know the most about your CX project.

For example, if it’s a web design issue, you should discuss with your website team to understand why certain decisions were made and what options exist to remedy the problem. At the same time, you should talk to the call center, who can add even more context to the discussion.

  • Externally: Scores can only tell you so much. Make sure that your feedback method (surveys, etc.) directs customers to leave unstructured feedback. When you allow customers to tell you what happened in their own words, you are opening the door to deeper, more informed understanding.

4/Leverage great data tools.

To get the right data and intelligence, you need to be using the right tools, but how do you choose? There are plenty of “data tools” that promise to ingest feedback and pop out “insights,” but to be honest, those insights simply aren’t enough.

For your data tools to be truly valuable, they need to deliver more than insights; they need to provide recommendations that enable actions. You have to be able to cut through the noise to find what key drivers are really affecting your business. Then, your data will give you the advice you need to make changes and deliver real outcomes.

5/Prove Effectiveness.

After you’ve taken the steps, assembled the team, and acted on your intelligence comes the final stage of transformation: Did your efforts work? Proving the effectiveness of CX initiatives has become the holy grail of the industry, with so many practitioners struggling to put up the numbers.

Luckily, we’ve come up with a list of ways you can prove the worth of your efforts. Check your data to see if your initiative helped to:

  • Acquire new customers;
  • Retain existing customers;
  • Cross-sell or upsell products; and,
  • Minimize internal costs.

If your plans are executed well, you will be able to affect more than one of these categories and transform your business.

Jim Katzman is principal of CX strategy and engagement at InMoment.

 

 

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