Wendy Harris of WAG Associates recently had a conversation with Czarina of Imtiaz Consultancy about customer experience management for start-ups.
Imtiaz Consultancy are a people business working with companies to deliver exceptional customer experiences. By providing expert-led consultancy, strategy and training, they support organisations to create memorable and consistent customer satisfaction interactions.
By Czarina – czarina@imtiazconsultancy.co.uk
Customer Experience Management for Start Ups, don’t neglect this
Customer Experience Management is the new currency in business. Offering a proactive and personalised service builds trust, loyalty and advocacy. Therefore, creating and maintaining a positive customer experience must lie at the heart of any strategy or delivery design.
Achieving customer experience management success is wrapped up in 3C’s:
• Customer Satisfaction
• Communication
• Collaboration
Customer Satisfaction
When it comes to gathering data, businesses are obviously keen to hear the opinions of their customers as we all recognise their feedback is as precious as gold dust.
However, with everyone adopting the same approach, have you received surveys and thought “Not another one!” or “I know it’s important but I’m a bit busy right now so I’ll park it and do it later”…
Designing good surveys is not only about the questions we ask but also about when we ask them. So choose your timing and method carefully to optimise the response rate.
Identifying potential problem areas before there are any major failures is imperative for longevity, leveraging this information to evolve your brand. When you get this right, customers reward you with their loyalty and do your marketing for you.
Show your customers you understand them, you value their data, and you can demonstrate that you’re using this to create a better overall experience. This means the experience must be personal; what’s meaningful and relevant to one customer may differ greatly from another.
Customer dissatisfaction can harm a brand’s reputation, increase customer churn and affect your bottom line.
Social media reviews can be powerful reference points for your business and play an integral role in your online presence. Whether you like it or not, brands are defined by what customers say to each other about them, not what a brand says to customers. Monitor and positively respond to all third party reviews to demonstrate you are engaged and caring, regardless of the nature of the feedback.
Communication
The absolute foundation of business success lies in communication with the customer. Being open and transparent in your communication helps to build trust.
When this is not executed effectively, customer churn inevitably follows. Ineffective communication is the number one reason for customer dissatisfaction. Clear, transparent and timely interactions with the customer are required across the entire end-to-end customer engagement.
Real-time personalisation is a critical element towards building loyalty. To achieve this, effective data management practices need to be implemented. If you don’t have an effective CRM system, now is the time to invest!
Collaboration
Collaborate with partners who complement the products and services in your portfolio. This will strengthen your proposition and make you more attractive to both new and existing customers.
Choose partners that share the same values as you. This will make collaboration a whole lot easier. It’s a necessity and an approach that must be favoured over competition to achieve a consistently high customer experience.
The aim of every business is retention, loyalty and advocacy. When you get this right, you have happy staff, happy customers and increased profits. This is when the customer experience magic happens!
The customer experience bar is set by the experiences we have in our day-to- day lives. As a result, design awareness is on the increase, with patience and attention spans on the decrease. Therefore, a great customer experience needs to be delivered start to finish.
In order to monitor and improve your customer experience efforts, key metrics need to be implemented to build a data-driven business. The following are the most widely adopted measures of customer satisfaction and sentiment.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Measured between 0 and 100, NPS reflects the likelihood of customers recommending your business to others. In most cases, a single question survey is sent to your customers, and the Net Promoter Score is calculated based on the results.
Using a scale of 0 – 10 from extremely unlikely to extremely likely, any scores between 0 – 6 are considered ‘Detractors’, indicating there is dissatisfaction in these respondents. Scores of 7 – 8 show your customers are satisfied but not shouting from the rooftops and therefore deemed ‘Neutral’. Those scores of 9 – 10 are from customers who are delighted with your business, classed as ‘Promoters’.
On a scale of 0 – 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to family, friends or colleagues?
NPS = % Promoters – % Detractors
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
CSAT is a measure of customer sentiment used to help businesses understand how customers are responding to their products and services.
After a transaction or interaction, customers are asked to answer a question rating their satisfaction level. This is usually on a standard scale of 1 – 5 from extremely unsatisfied to extremely satisfied. The higher the percentage, the more satisfied your customers are at that particular time.
Many businesses use CSAT as their main measurement for understanding how their customers feel about their brand and the service they have provided.
How satisfied are you with your product or service?
CSAT Score (%) = Sum of all scores / Sum of maximum possible score
Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES measures how much effort the customer had to expend in their interactions with your business. Following the completion of their request, the customer is asked to rate how easy it was to resolve their issue. This is typically on a scale of 1 – 10 from very difficult to very easy.
Detractors, Neutral and Promoters fall in line with the NPS scale.
This metric is important for understanding customer satisfaction because it directly relates to individual, team and organisation effectiveness. Hence, a high level of effort can indicate customer dissatisfaction with your services which could result in churn.
How easy was it to resolve your request today?
CES = Total sum of scores / Number of responses
The above metrics are all useful to create benchmarks and build improvement programs. The true merit in requesting this feedback is the supporting commentary provided with the score. This can provide invaluable data to drive actionable insights.
In all cases, closing the loop is the follow-up action to demonstrate you have listened to customer feedback and taken positive action to improve your products and services.
If you are interested in developing your customer experience management strategy, why not book a free 30-minute discovery call or visit our website for more details about our services.
