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In my first blog in which I discussed effective steering of customer experience, I introduced a model containing 3 elements: customer satisfaction, customer contact and customer signals. In this blog, I’d like to share my experience with the design of surveys to measure the steps taken in the customer experience journey. By doing so, I offer a concrete method for justifiably choosing which activities have the most impact on customer experience.
Customer experience journey as the basis
The first step in customer signals management is to make an effective integrated analysis on the basis of all available customer information. Nowadays, many organizations use the NPS method in their customer satisfaction survey (see also my blog on steering NPS). In concrete terms, the NPS method means you ask the NPS question and then only ask why a customer would or would not recommend you. The selection of reasons from which customers can choose is crucial, in order to truly put the results to good use.
3 steps towards the right choices
Step 1. Steps in the journey as root causes
Here, you often see companies focusing on their channels. In my experience, it’s more effective to focus on the steps in the customer experience journey here (requesting a quotation, taking out insurance, asking questions, etc.). The first level of choice (root cause 1) is the step taken in the journey, and the second level of choice (root cause 2) follows on from each step. Level 1 concerns “Answering questions”, for example. Level 2 then concerns: response time, friendliness of employees, etc.
Step 2. Determine most commonly named steps
Driver analysis enables you to determine which factors have the most impact, based on statistics. Unfortunately, this is not possible using the NPS root causes method, which in that sense is actually a type of qualitative survey in disguise. So in order to get a sense of the significance, you can look at the number of times that a customer process is named, either positively or negatively. The more often, the more important it is. In order to confirm its impact, you can either apply all your other types of surveys or can ask customer service employees whether they recognize the significance sequence. Does this result in the same basis?
Step 3. Final check based on customer data
As a final check of your choices, determine how many customers take all the steps in the customer experience journey on an annual basis, as shown by your systems. How many prospects become customers? How many customers ask a question? Etc. A customer process undertaken by 10 customers annually will have less impact than a customer process undertaken by 100,000 customers. On adding these sources together, you learn exactly which steps in the journey have the greatest impact on the total customer experience.
Clear steering
By subsequently applying more frequent surveys to measure each journey step in detail, using all the tools available nowadays, you arrive at a perfect framework for effective steering of your customer experience.
