Extreme makeover: Three remarkable customer experience recoveries

Forrester's Harley Manning examines what measures Office Depot, Sprint and Fidelity Investments took to turn around their customer experience and reap financial rewards.

For those still in need of convincing of the correlation between customer experience and financial results, “Outside In: The Power of Putting Your Customers at the Center of Your Business” presents a compelling argument.

Co-authored by Forrester Research experts Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine, the new book not only provides statistical evidence by comparing total returns from a portfolio of customer experience leaders to customer experience laggards, but also via case study examples demonstrating how brands cut costs and/or increased revenue through CEM programmes.

Boasting more than 80 case studies and examples from 15 industries in 16 countries, the evidence is overwhelming, with brands including the likes of Boeing, FedEx, JetBlue and Virgin Media all demonstrating improvements in fortune following customer experience overhauls.

Voice of the Customer: The six stages of setting up a successful programme

nAs Voice of the Customer programmes mature, expectations are rising rapidly. Teams tasked with building a Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme today, whether from scratch or as an evolution of an existing customer feedback project, are expected to deliver results that drive business change and generate significant ROI. The reason for this is clear; delivering an excellent customer experience is the most effective way for both B2C and B2B organisations to differentiate themselves from the competition – and a VoC programme is vital to improving the customer experience. 

Successful customer experience management (CEM) provides the insight required to increase revenue through reduced churn, improved cross-sell and the ability to better attract new customers. VoC programmes also help to reduce costs by improving processes and creating greater consistency. Finally, taking a customer-centric approach to every facet of the business drives cross-functional change and makes a real impact on organisational culture.

Customer loyalty programmes: Time to factor technology into the formula?

Loyalty programmes need more than emotional engagement and financial rewards, indicates a new report. 

The traditional formula for customer loyalty success is one part emotional engagement and one part transactional engagement. But a growing body of evidence is demonstrating that the chemistry of customer loyalty is volatile, and the precise balance of ingredients is in a constant state of flux.

Furthermore, a new report indicates that not only is the traditional balance shifting, but other new factors are increasingly playing a part in this complex concoction – something that brands seeking to capitalise on loyalty programmes should take note of.

The Customer Loyalty Report 2012, conducted by The Logic Group and Ipsos MORI, is an annual survey looking at the current customer loyalty landscape, focusing on understanding what motivates customers to be loyal and how best loyalty should be rewarded in today’s environment. The findings reflect the tough economic conditions consumers find themselves in, with Ipsos reporting that 47% of British adults claim their current financial situation is ‘weak’ and 26% expect it to be weaker in six months’ time.

Customer Effort Score (CES): A New Perspective on Customer Satisfaction

A while ago, our Chatham client delivery center in Ontario, Canada helped a major automotive company change the way it measures customer satisfaction. With CES (Customer Effort Score), we began looking at the “effort” that customers expended to get their issues resolved.

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: ARE WE MISSING SOMETHING?

Delighting customers has been the backbone of contact center management for many decades. Companies spend millions on front line training to ensure agents offer a delightful/pleasant interaction. As important as customer service training is, what rarely is measured is the effort that customers had to put in to get their issues solved (e.g., call backs, transfers, voice mails, dealer visits, etc.).

A recent study conducted by the Customer Contact Council, a division of the Corporate Executive Board, of over 75,000 customers found repeating messages in the results:

• Delighting customers does not build loyalty, reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does.
• Acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer experience, reduce service costs and decrease customer churn.

Customer satisfaction then is the result of an effortless resolution to their concerns. What happens along the way only adds/subtracts from the end result.

There Is No Single Best Measure of Your Customers

Single-question customer metrics have become very popular. Companies all have their favorites. Some go for the traditional Customer Satisfaction measure, others the now famous Net Promoter Score. The most recent addition to this panoply is the increasingly popular Customer Effort Score, which tracks the amount of time and effort that customers have to put into solving after-sales problems.

Each claims to be the one metric that managers need to measure, monitor, and act on, because it promises a better correlation with business performance than any other existing measure.

Reduce customer effort

Words such as “loyalty”, “engagement”, “community”, and “experience” describe a largely false relationship between customers and organizations.

“The IBM Institute for Business Value found that 60-65% of business leaders believe that consumers follow their brands on social media sites because they want to be a part of a community,” Patrick Spenner, wrote in Forbes in July 2012. “Only 25-30% of consumers agree. The top reason consumers follow a brand? To get discounts – not exactly ideal for a company’s bottom line.”

Are in-store technologies revolutionising customer experience?

Driven by smartphone growth, MyCustomer.com examines the emergence of in-store retail technologies and their ability to deliver a seamless shopping experience. 

The proliferation of smartphones is changing not just customers’ expectations of how brands communicate with them online, but also offline. Always connected, technologically sophisticated customers are demanding seamless integration with their online touchpoints whilst shopping in-store.

In a bid to keep customers engaged and stay ahead of the trends, traditional retailers are turning to new technologies such as near field communications, augmented reality, image recognition and interactive TV. Recent research from Motorola Solutions revealed that 51% of store retailers are directing budgets towards in-store technology to improve customer service whilst 22% are investing in technology to fend off competition.