Has Customer Experience Delivered the Goods?

With all the focus on Customer Experience over the years, and the increasing resource that organizations have put into improving the Customer Experience, what have been the results?

Trend #1: Is it really getting that much better?

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) uses an overall U.S. Customer satisfaction score as an indicator of the health of the economy. Since 1994, the ACSI Score rose from 74.8 to a high of 76.8 in 2013.

Given the focus on CX over the years and the resources allocated to it, the question becomes are organizations really getting the return on this investment? I also worry about the plateau/decline (from 76.2 to 75.2 over the four quarters of 2014). That’s a trend we need to keep an eye on before it goes down more.

Trend #2: Addressing the “How” of doing business as well as the “What” of doing business.

Most organizations focus on transactional details of the Experience, for example, hold times at the call center. Transactional details are important; they just aren’t the only important part of the Customer Experience.

Successful Customer Experience addresses how you handle the transactional details. It is not only having a better “What” of the transaction detail but also a better or deliberate “How” of the transaction. For example, how you handle the call after you reduce the hold time. This article explains a little more what I mean by the “how” instead of the “what” matters in Customer Experience.

Trend #3: Creating a Customer Experience Team for your company.

We see that the number of CX professionals attending our training programs rises all the time. More people are interested in addressing the emotional side of the Experience. Furthermore, it indicates (at least partially) a level of commitment from a company to make Customer Experience a priority. However, it is important to remember that having a Customer Experience Team isn’t enough to prove commitment. Here is a list of 8 ways to make sure that you have what you need to succeed as a team.

Trend #4: Getting employees on board with your Customer Experience improvements.

Whilst we have seen from the ASCI results that the average Customer Experience has not moved significantly, there are many exceptions to this. Having a sound philosophy and detailed plan is great, but getting the people that actually work with Customers on board with this sound philosophy and detailed plan is essential to success. RICOH Canada recently increased their Net Promoter Score (NPS) from 25 to 59 in 30 months, an improvement of 34 points using many of our philosophies. Glenn Laverty, CEO of RICOH Canada, had this to say about how he used employee engagement to help facilitate that rise:

“We beat that drum almost incessantly in the organization simply because we wanted everybody to understand the impact that they have in the Customer Experience. It became part and parcel of our ongoing communication and worked its way into the fabric of the organization culturally.”

To hear more about how RICOH accomplished their impressive climb in NPS score, be sure to attend our webinar next month.

Make Sure Your Customer Experience Is “On Trend”

In my view most of the easy stuff has been done to improve Customer Experience and now the real work begins. What do these four trends mean to the industry of Customer Experience? To me, it means that Customer Experience is more than a passing fad. Instead it is an established platform for you to differentiate yourself from the competition.