Customer touch points play a major role in creating and maintaining a great customer experience and customer satisfaction. They are a huge source of data. But do we collect it? And do we understand customer experience data? How do we make use of it? How to make actionable data driven results out of it?
What we mean by actionable data driven results?
Either we like it or not, our employees, products, services and activities “speak” to the customers, even if we intend it or not. Letting things happen might not be the best customer experience strategy. A good starting point would be to control the process. Controlling the customer experience requires at least awareness to certain points that we will further describe.
By data driven actionable results, we mean that we understand and control these points (that we will further explain), we collect data, measure their impact and make decisions upon it, so that we can improve customer experience and business results, based on such data.
The Customer Process
Think of everything that is related to the customer as a process. Whenever a customer gets in contact with your business you must ensure she passes a certain journey delivering the best experience you can offer.
It starts with your logo on a billboard, your name on your website, the answer of an e-mail and it continues with your furniture, your employees, their qualifications, customer communication, standards, products and services quality, how many times per day you clean your bathrooms and so on. I can go on forever.
Everything should be connected and designed in such a manner to maintain and enhance a great customer experience. Like a good algorithm. With start and end points, with customer loops and different exits. It starts by customer call or inquiry and sometimes it doesn’t even finish with product or service delivery. It is a complex task and should be always improved. We call this a customer process.
Your customer process should be the starting point of your everything – “customer”.
Customer Experience Assets (CEA)
You cannot have a great customer process without your Customer Experience Assets. By CEA we mean every single touch point that you can control and can influence your customers overall. It basically includes everything that customer interacts with or helps customer interaction. Start by making a complete inventory of your customer touch points, then think about it with a new perspective in mind.
Think of customer experience as a permanent investment, therefore you need to invest in certain assets if you want your business to thrive. As assets usually have an evaluation, you CEA should be evaluated taking into account:
- the initial investment value
- investments made in upgrades and maintenance
- perceived value delivered to client
- perceived customer satisfaction results
- customer attention from time and span point of view
Where does your CEA focus your customer attention? Attention grabbing is one of the most important element of a well controlled customer journey. This is a key attribute in understanding future customer retention and customer engagement. In our opinion, designing your CEA with attention in mind is an important step in the process.
There is more. And by more we mean the data it feeds back to you for decision making purposes. It should provide enough quality data to allow you make good customer experience and business decisions.
Collecting customer experience data
A well designed customer process delivers good quality data regarding customer interaction with the process. In some cases the process might be similar or it can accompany the sales funnel or sales steps, but it can be independent. There is no predefined formula.
It is important though that each important step feeds some data from the process into the business in order to help with the decision making. If you are not sure what kind of data you must feed, you should at least count the number and the type of interactions. It might prove priceless when analysed.
Not all the data can be used for analysis right away, but collecting a manageable amount of data is a good step in controlling the process overall.
Back in Business
It makes no sense to think about data and processes if you do not use it to improve customers lives and company efficiency.
All data we collect should be properly and consistently analysed. But the analysis is not the end point.
The purpose of the entire system is to help your company make better decisions. Please bear in mind that any decision should at least positively impact the following:
- Overall customer experience and satisfaction
- Business performance and efficiency
Both of them are equally important and ignoring one of them may result in losses of customers and money.
Some food for thought
The article is trying to describe a rather complex work in an easy to understand approach. It is not an easy task.
Now we almost arrived to the end of our thought, but we do not want to leave before some final questions to help you better understand the way you can influence the customer experience. So here we are:
- Do you have a well established customer journey? How much of it can be described as a controlled customer proces?
- Are your employees aware of the process and their role in the customer experience? Both in the process and in general, as this is a major point in maintaining the business.
- Are you aware of and do you control your CEA?
- What is the data that your CEA provides and how often do you analyse it? It is well known that nowadays, most of the business is data driven.
- Do you make use of the data you collect?
- Do you like this article? If yes, please tell us what you liked and share our article so that we can create more similar articles and more people can benefit. If not, help us understand what to change so that we are not making the same mistake in the future. Tell us anyway! You can even ask for help or more information on the subject by using our contact form that you can surely access it here.
Using our experience we can help companies develop high quality customer processes, improve on customer experience assets, collect data and analyse it.
Thank you for reading and connecting with us.