Managing customer experience has been and will always be a must for successful companies. In reality, it’s rather a ‘fake it till you make it’ activity. Let’s learn from practice.
You can find several names and abbreviations for customer experience (CX or CEX) or customer experience management (CEM). Actually when you have a business and you serve customers, you cannot avoid having a customer experience. In fact, it’s hand in hand with running a business, but the reason for having this exact function in operation is about the need of managing it consciously and systematically.
Though it is pretty fundamental in business, many times companies manage it only indirectly. And when they address it directly, many times there is a little ‘if’ associated with the topic: they are customer obsessed IF the financial results allow them to be. In other words, they focus on the long run if the short term is assured, which is kind of a contradiction in sustainable business.
Still, there is a lot going on in customer experience management, there are more satisfaction surveys and feedback than ever. Let’s take a look at some of the learnings.
Growth pressure is all around the businesses and customer experience is no exception. Organisations pursue better and better processes, higher and higher metrics. However, this approach passes by some key aspects of the context.
First of all, you cannot achieve more than 100%. Okay, it’s more of a theory as it is hard to imagine that each and every customer of a business can be totally satisfied. So, pushing the operation to a better performance seems to be plausible all the time. Then you bump into some Pareto optimum where you reach 80% of your performance with 20% of your effort. You can go for the other 20% of performance, but you might need to use so much effort that it might not be worth it in the end.
Other than the boundaries of basic maths, maintaining a certain level of customer experience can be just fine. Why is that? Performance and experience are not constant and stable, they have their dynamics derived from internal and external factors. Managing the topic is assuring the right approaches, processes and flexibility within the company and getting resistant and agile to meet external challenges. Still, the environment and the very context of your business are changing all the time, so keeping what you have built up can be a story of success.
There is no such thing that you control everything that relates to your operation, because shifts in technology, culture, politics or demographics have their powers.
There are several layers of customer experience:
What becomes a big hit in one industry can easily become an expectation in others. If someone answers the calls in the contact centre within 10 seconds, others can seem to be slow if they don’t. When there is an online bookstore player who fulfils online orders within the same day, this can become the standard later on in every industry that deals with online sales. The customers simply get used to something beneficial which they will be looking for in other cases. The first and second layers are similar in their effects, they are different in terms of the factors if they are industry specific or not.
While the third layer is a tricky one. As brands are frames, you can get different perceptions even if the content is the same. Not getting into the details of branding, let’s just have a quick interpretation of this notion. If your brand personality is more of a ruler, customers will perceive anything you do according to this filter. Any kind of kindness you make is softened by the ruler attributes you have. This makes it harder for your brand to be seen the same as a caregiver brand within the same industry. It results in two things:
One of the biggest and recurring questions of customer experience is how to increase it quickly, because companies would like to make a difference as fast as they can. Or the management is incentivized for it in the current year.
Practice shows there is no shortcut. Usually big changes happen due to profound external changes in the circumstances. Economic crises or country wide lockdown (as we saw during the Covid pandemic) can have this impact. When the experience is common and shared by many and you react to it, you become relevant to more people. Interestingly enough but also naturally, your competition can also affect how your business is perceived. Companies who have a major IT transformation or change their brands realise lower satisfaction scores just as you would expect according to the curve of change. When customers are forced to get used to something new, the reaction in total is always negative. Since these changes are in relation with the entire customer base of the given company, the impact gets profound enough so that the gap among the companies of the market in question gets bigger and bigger, the one with the change going down while the others remaining the same (or going up). These changes with general impact can pull the satisfaction big time, that’s when you see revolutionary changes in the figures.
All other actions are limited to a certain (usually smaller) group of customers, therefore your influence remains limited as well, making just evolutionary small progress. The bad news is that the majority of your activities belong to this category. While their impact is smaller, they are more of sustainable and stable changes that last for the long term. In a company culture of short term goals, it is hard to convince the financial leaders that it is worth investing in customer experience as the results pay off slowly. You just need time for fermentation and you will be happy with it.
And this is the dilemma of many who work on customer experience: how can they show the direct effect of something that is more indirect by its nature?
However, the question itself is a bit misleading. It suggests that a visible impact should be seen for each and every tiny customer centric action, which might not be the case as the nature of the game is not black and white, true or false, or on and off. It is easy to accept that if you take care of your customers in general, you will run a better, healthier business. Everyone just feels it right, no measurement is needed. It means that many businesses are somewhere between 0 and 100% in terms of customer centricity. And when they initiate a new activity, it is not launched at level 0, so the result is not that spectacular. It is more like being at level 80 and you add this new feature that takes you to level 81 (or just 80.5). Will you see a clear uptake in business performance? Probably not. But by keeping up adding and renewing the features, you make your presence and performance stable or even increase them. And that’s why it’s getting harder and harder to financially justify each step you take.
In general, surveys show that even just managing the experience by realising caring activities is good for customer satisfaction. So customers who have participated in any of these goodies have the highest satisfaction, while those who only know about it (without active participation) still have significantly better satisfaction compared to those of no relation to any of these. If so, that’s your proof and you have to believe that the fermentation is on its way and does its job.
I am kind of against benchmarks, because how the majority executes them they lack the fundamental parts that make one action successful and they take just one or two aspects and try to make us believe that the same can be feasible in our case. While looking behind the scenes we often get the reasons why our case is different. So benchmarks are more for idea generation and not for silver bullets.
This doesn’t stop organisations from comparing the incomparable. International companies tend to have a common measuring system for customer experience in every local market they operate in. They spend a lot of money to have a joint picture on something which cannot be any more different. Subsidiaries have so many differences in their attributes: history, market position, portfolio adjusted to local needs and even the culture of a given country has an effect on the responses for the same satisfaction question. So comparison makes no sense, you cannot be sure that the 48 NPS (net promoter score) in one country is clearly better then the 46 in the other.
You cannot rely on improving the metrics alone and you cannot use benchmarks. What can you do then?
The goal can be beating yourself all the time and the achievement of the past doesn’t mean you cannot go down. As expectations are ever changing, experience is not a constant state but rather an intention, and that’s how getting better always makes sense.
One way to know you’re on the right track is to take out the factors that make your performance blurry. You can create a dynamic reference point which reveals the true improvement of your progress. For example, if you have several sales channels and their shares can vary, you can exclude the effect of changing shares by recalculating the metrics.
As channel shares change, the total NPS is the same (36 and 36), however, both store and online improved respectively (40 → 44 and 20 → 28). If you want to compare it properly, you take out the channel share effect by creating a new reference point as if in the past the same channel shares would have been as in the present. This way you get a recalculated score of 30 for the past and your 36 in the present show a clear progress.
Conscious and consistent management is what defines a successful company. Dealing with customer experience in a structured way is already a huge step towards being great at it. And you’ll get better along the way.
