Metrics, metrics, metrics. The word gets thrown around a lot. How do we establish and define them, let alone use them? And which metrics are actually useful and yield the best results for our businesses?
All hail the Customer Effort Score (CES)!
Customer Effort Score, established in the HBR article “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” is a metric that allows companies to determine how to reduce the amount of effort customers have to put in to achieve their intended goal. Businesses measure CES by asking just one question: “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?”
The HBR study led to the development of CES because of these two conclusions: First, customer loyalty is built by reducing effort—defined as the work they must do to get their problem solved—not through over-the-top customer service. Second, focusing on reducing effort alone can lead to lower customer service costs and higher customer retention. By assigning ratings from 1 to 5, with 5 representing very high effort, CES measures the effects of how companies can create a more effortless customer experience.
http://customerthink.com/make-it-easy-how-to-improve-your-customer-effort-score/
In part 1 (Going Beyond Lean Thinking to Define Value) of this column, I challenged how the lean tenet regarding delivering value to our customer has been practiced. I discussed the imperative need to understand your customers' needs without just asking them and shared that observation is key in this process.
Clearly understanding what the customers value and why they value it helps with waste elimination. There are three wastes that are most prevalent when we don't understand our customer.
http://www.industryweek.com/operations/serving-your-customer-observation-and-feedback/
User experience (UX) design is the process of building relationships between products and prospects or customers through a digital or physical experience that involves engineering, marketing, graphical, industrial and interface designs. UEGroup CEO Tony Fernandes in an interview with CMSWire called UX design an “interactive brand experience that takes the place of establishing credibility and connection in the way that logos and taglines did in the past.”
https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/what-is-user-experience-ux-design/
Is your webshop built using Lightspeed’s ecommerce software? Then we’ve got great news for you. All-in-one feedback analytics software Mopinion and ecommerce software provider & global leader in Point-of-Sale systems, Lightspeed have joined forces. The result? A new app integration in the Lightspeed app store which enables Lightspeed webshops tMopinion software now available in Lightspeed app store o easily capture feedback from their online visitors using easy-to-install, customisable feedback forms. The webshops also have access to advanced reporting and analysis capabilities that will provide them with the insights they need to improve overall performance and the user experience of their webshop.
https://mopinion.com/mopinion-software-lightspeed-app-store/
People live in their own functional domains. They have their responsibilities, their metrics, and they can become defenders of their domains. Though from the best intentions, internal competition ultimately creates the reactionary boundaries that we have come to call silos, which harm an organization in ways that are becoming increasingly fatal.
I won’t spend an inordinate amount of time on this because we all know and dislike silos. We have built an awareness of the problem, and we have an accurate model, so our task is to put our heads together and figure out how to stop them.
As it turns out, customer experience unlocks a radical capability of mapping the customer journey. This sounds innocent enough, I’ll admit, but if you look deeper you will see that this fundamental process is anathema to silos. To destroy silos, all you need to do is focus on changing customer journeys.
https://customerthink.com/break-silos-with-this-secret-customer-experience-weapon-cascading-collaboration/
Implementing the insight from research into your Customer Experience strategy and acting accordingly is a different story.
Just because your satisfaction levels have fallen may not be due to a faulty product as first predicted – you might need to look a bit deeper to discover that actually, the customer service hasn’t been satisfactory or the website is too confusing when purchasing items.
Whatever it may be, the common denominator doesn’t always mean it’s right. So, the data is in front of you, but what next?
http://customerthink.com/how-to-understand-the-truth-behind-customer-feedback/
Surveys might be undermining every customer experience improvement you’re trying to implement. While that may sound counterintuitive, according to a 2016 study of customer perceptions by CEB (now Gartner), 75% of customers agree that their survey experience influences their overall impression of a company ("Closing the Customer Feedback Loop," Gartner's CEB Leadership Council). In short, customers see their survey experience as a component of their customer experience; it’s another touchpoint that impacts their overall relationship. Yet, the increasing ease with which surveys can be created (sometimes without regard for best practices or sound research methods) has led to an ever-increasing number of feedback requests — threatening the quality of those survey experiences and potentially eroding companies’ brand image or increasing customer friction. As a result, organizations must reflect on their survey practices and ask, “How do we adapt to effectively capture customer feedback while improving the customer experience?”
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2018/03/how-salesforce-is-leading-customer-feedback.html/
Earlier this month I attended Social Media Marketing World, the largest conference on social media marketing in the world. Over the last few years, customer service has shifted from traditional phone support toward social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others. Dan Gingiss started the Social Customer Care Track and interest has grown exponentially. The room I spoke in this year was three times larger than last year’s room, and we packed the house.
https://customerthink.com/how-to-turn-social-media-customer-service-into-a-marketing-strategy/
A few years ago, if you were a small business looking to grow, you would have been at a disadvantage when it came to technology-enabled transformation, due to high costs and limited options. Today, the story is completely different. With the rise of cloud-based SaaS applications, technologies that were reserved for businesses with big budgets are now available to small and medium businesses (SMBs) at a fraction of the cost. This makes digital technologies far more accessible and scalable for SMBs. In addition, capabilities available through these applications have also increased exponentially.
Let’s look at some of the ways in which small businesses can use digital technologies to their advantage.
https://www.firstpost.com/business/why-leveraging-data-can-be-a-game-changer-for-small-and-medium-businesses-4417589.html/
Organizations use a variety of data collection techniques. While some are polished and highly effective, others are a jumbled mess and the results look worse than a teenager’s bedroom. If you’re in the latter, good luck trying to make sense of it.
Some organizations have clung to using paper forms. Yes, a form that was created at some point in history and has survived many generations via the copy machine. This means customers and employees are still using a long outdated process to collect data. Paper forms can lead to a truckload of errors – mainly due to poor handwriting, lost forms, paying someone to accurately type the form information into a database, which can lead to typos – thereby rendering the data inaccurate, and the time required to manually input this data possibly worthless. And this could represent a single department in a large organization. If several departments use this same methodology, the error rate may increase by a magnitude.
If this is your data collection process towards building a stronger relationship with your customers, you could be starting off on the wrong foot. If it takes too much time to respond to customer inquiries, or if you can’t because the data is incomplete, you’re probably going to have an uphill battle on your hands if your goal is to impress the customer.
https://customerthink.com/how-companies-can-initiate-customer-relationships-through-smart-and-actionable-data-collection/
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