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Many organizations struggle with the challenge of effectively steering their customer experience. In fact, my thesis showed that 1 out of 3 customer service employees believed the customer input to be insufficiently used for gearing services to customer needs. So how should I process customer contact moments? How can I be sure that what I’m doing will satisfy the customer? And how can I learn from all the signals I receive? In the end, these are the three elements which count in order to effectively steer the end-to-end customer experience.
Customer contact
Effective processing of a customer contact moment mainly lies in the correct facilitation of the employees with whom customers have contact. Do they have the right information at their disposal? Do they have the right skills? Do they have sufficient authority to actually solve matters? Etc. When considering customer contact pur sang, reliability and empathy are particularly high on the list for a good customer experience.
Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction naturally goes further than the customer contact alone. Although the so-called ‘moments of truth’ are extremely important, it’s also essential to look at the total service picture. What are the primary points in the end-to-end customer journey which play a role in customer satisfaction (or NPS, commitment, loyalty, etc)? What is needed here is the right combination of surveys. Surveys regarding the end-to-end customer journey (the purchasing process, for example), but also more specifically, for example, the satisfaction with telephony. Equally important is the distinction made between surveys aimed at discovering drivers and surveys to measure appreciation. The driver survey is not needed more than once annually, while performance measurement is needed much more often. By effectively analyzing customer satisfaction drivers, you know exactly which knobs can best be turned to optimize customer experience.
Customer signals
Once you have a complete picture of all customer contact moments and customer satisfaction surveys, you know exactly which signals customers are giving: which aspects require immediate action in order to improve services? This is the core of customer signals management. The main challenge lies in identifying which aspects have the most priority, from both the customer and the organization point of view. Effective customer satisfaction analysis supports this process and, in combination with the customer contact moments, allows you to determine exactly which aspects have the greatest impact on customer experience.
By combining these three perspectives, your organization is able to continuously positively influence your customers’ experience.
