There’s plenty of data supporting the power that customer experience can have when it comes to an organization’s overall performance. For example, after a positive customer experience(CX), 72 percent of customers will share their experience with at least six individuals.
There’s also compelling evidence that an improved CX can boost an organization’s revenue any where between 10 and 15 percent. After a poor CX, as many as 89 percent of consumers will abandon an organization and switch to one of their competitors.
Many organizations share that CX is a top priority for them. Forty-six percent of executives and key decision-makers report that CX is of the utmost importance to them over the next five years,surpassing factors like product and pricing. Even so, customer satisfaction index scores are approaching the lowest figures of all time. There’s a disconnect happening when it comes to customer experience strategy and the customer experience in performance.
Today, both B2B and B2C consumers are savvy. They know what products and services are out there, and they know they have a choice in where they do business. This means their decisions boil down to the customer experience. As organizations look to refine and strengthen their customer experience, how do they stay focused? They must set clear, actionable CX performance goals.
Establish a System to Track Your CX
Before you can work to improve your CX, you must have a standard established to track your progress. If you measure customer satisfaction around interacting with your brand you have a metric by which to determine if you need to refine your customer experience. As part of your customer experience performance review, you will want to select from certain CX metrics you can monitor over time. These include:
Customer Effort Score (CES): This metric tracks how much effort your customers need to exert to complete a specific task, resolve a particular issue, or hone in on one set feature of your overall experience. If your experience is simple and easy to navigate, this will foster customer loyalty and boost customer retention.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): This metric comes from asking customers a single question – How likely they would be to recommend your organization, product, or service to someone else?
Scores are based on a 10-point scale, subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. When customers answer this question by selecting a number from 1to 10, their answers are categorized as follows:
● Promoters, who are delighted with their CX and give a rating of 9 to 10.
● Passives, who are satisfied with their experience, but not enthusiastic promoters, and rank their score between 7 and 9.
● Detractors, who are unhappy with the CX and rate their interaction between 0 and 6.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): An organization’s CSAT score is reported as a percentage, and is based on rankings customers give sharing how they felt about a specific experience or interaction with an organization.
These scores can paint a clearer picture of how your CX shifts over time, and can even provide key insights on what issues to address early in the process as you examine your CX. When you are relying on actual customer data to help you understand your goals, you can create a data-driven plan. Your organization’s CSAT score can be a very useful tool in understanding the health of your current CX.
Understand the Problem Before Trying to Develop a Solution
Once you’ve established trackable metrics, you can leverage this data to understand if there are friction points within the customer journey that could be eliminated to further improve the overall customer experience. However, tracking customer satisfaction with whatever metric you choose, only provides the insights after the fact. Market-leading companies know they can’t wait to learn if an interaction is going well and make changes after the fact. Today’s customers expect curated, ideal experiences at every touch point and organizations require not only real-time insights, but also the tools to take action on those insights.
Customer journey mapping is one of the best exercises to do as a company to uncover how your customer journeys are performing across the organization, outside of functional siloes and departments. Customer journey mapping pulls all the teams together that touch the customer to lay out the customer journey from beginning to end, and the results can be surprising. It gives you new insight into what your customers feel and what they expect. It can reveal where customers run into frustrating hurdles in the customer journey.you new insight into what your customers feel and what they expect. It can reveal where customers run into frustrating hurdles in the customer journey.
As shared in CIO Magazine, “Fully understanding the problem, looking at it from different angles, and spending more time in the problem space will lead to better solution evaluation,understanding of needs, and definition of goals before purchasing your next technology solution.”
It takes an in-depth investigation and an honest look at what’s working—and what’s not—to understand where you can make impactful improvements and what goals will best serve your entire organization.
Select Specific, Actionable Customer Experience Performance Goals
As George Harrison expressed, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
When it comes to improving your customer experience, it all comes down to how clear and specific you are about what you want for your organization. What are the goals you want to achieve with your customer experience strategy? This isn’t a hypothetical question; it’s a call to come up with clear, intentional, specific benchmarks that provide an unmistakable destination.
When it comes to goal-setting, there’s only one incorrect answer—and that’s not having any particular goal in mind as you develop or hone your CX strategy. Not only will a concise goal tell you which metrics matter most, but it will provide the framework for all of your actions. With out these metrics, it’s impossible to track progress. Before we can measure progress, a goal is necessary.
As CMSWire explains: “There’s a misconception that customer experience is all about making customers happy and not about aligning with and supporting the strategic goals of the organization, whether that’s expansion in key markets or driving revenue from target segments.”
CX management should be 100% customer-focused. That requires knowing what it’s like for them to interact with your organization. Too often, companies take an inside-out look at customer experience, but actually, to get a true picture, companies need to take an outside-inview. Step into a customer’s shoes and map out every conversation, touch point, and interaction to identify what could be better. Then set goals based on those learnings. These goals should be cross-organizational, looking holistically across business lines and even to outside partner experiences if it’s truly going to make an impact.
There’s another benefit to developing a specific goal: Organization-wide buy-in. CX needs to be cohesive, which means every part of the organization needs to be on the same page in delivering it cohesively. Optimizing a few functional areas of the customer journey simply isn’t enough if this doesn’t solve issues like broken hand offs or communication gaps.
You may want to set both business objectives and customer experience objectives. Business objectives may include things like customer retention or satisfaction, purchase frequency, or revenue. These kinds of goals help you determine just how effective your CX strategy is at getting you the measurable business results you’re after.
CX objectives may be a bit harder to track because the data is not always so cut-and-dry. These objectives could be about giving customers more ways to address issues (like self-service platforms) or increasing responsiveness.
Plan to Utilize Data for Accurate Analysis
A key factor in ensuring the success of your customer experience performance goals is having access to accurate data to correctly analyze your customer experience goals. This means being able to see a customer’s journey from end to end, across every touch point in a unified way, both in the moment and after their interaction.
Customer experience management (CXM) tools are changing the way organizations manage CX by providing them with the tools they need to design and guide the ideal customer journey.
These capabilities are often missing in most CX tools. Business Wire shared that 90 percent of key decision makers reported that they are missing essential functionalities to support a CX strategy that actually drives business results, including:
● AI tools to manage risk and improve efficiency
● Stronger data privacy
● Analytical tools
What’s more, nearly 50% of survey respondents stated that their existing CXM tools don’t off era comprehensible view of the customer or a way to digest and interpret unstructured data—and another 30 percent said they didn’t have an efficient way to resolve customer issues.
However, Ovation CXM is changing the game and revolutionizing the way organizations orchestrate CX. Some companies even report a double-digit increase in their customer satisfaction scores when they implement an orchestration layer to design customer journeys and work toward specific CX goals.
Your Customer Experience Management and Business Performance Partner
One tool that makes CX performance goals even easier to set? An intuitive customer experience management platform: Ovation CXM. Not only does our CXM tool empower you to adjust and improve the customer experience in real-time (and what’s more customer-centric ordata-backed than that?), but it provides the data, conversational AI, and automation tools to unify your workflows and get everyone on your team working together toward the same goal.
Setting goals only works if you take intentional steps to bring these goals to life. Ovation CXM is the only tool of its kind to offer journey orchestration and automation tools to have full visibility of your current CX and to help you create actionable, meaningful goals.
Enjoy improved visibility, communication, and collaboration with your team, view every customer interaction and piece of data from a single source of truth, and turn your goals into a reality.Ready to learn more? Request a demo today!
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