Customer Service
Key quality monitoring strategies for improving CX and loyalty
Customer experience (CX) is about knowing your customers and applying the understanding to exceed the customers’ expectations. Consistent and constant evaluation is imperative to know the problem areas and what elevates the experience. Let's look at how to determine the quality of CX.
Defining the Metrics for Customer Experience
The nature of customer satisfaction data is such that getting accurate estimates, identifying exigent areas, and measuring the ROI is difficult. Therefore, businesses should carefully identify and measure KPIs relevant to customers' journeys. Measuring metrics with a focus on different customer segments and business outcomes is essential. Gauging the ease and engagement of CX will pinpoint the touchpoints that need improvement.
Automated Quality Monitoring
CX should be seamless across all channels. Whether the touchpoint is via a website, app, chatbot, or call support, it must be a frictionless journey. CX issues might go unnoticed because most customers do not raise a complaint. They just "quiet quit," making it necessary for organisations to discover the problems before customers do. Automated quality monitoring minimises disruptions and can be active and passive. Active monitoring involves participating in user activities and simulating them to know the reliability, quality, ease, and overall experience from the customer's point of view. Passive monitoring gives an observer's high-level overview of the number of interactions, prevalent faults, average responsiveness, and other statistics.
Intelligent Analytics for Customer Journey and Digital Experience
Businesses get customer feedback in various formats: emails, chat transcripts, website reviews, social media, surveys, calls, and more. AI technologies can mine this data to provide valuable insights regarding customer experiences. Sentiment Analysis using NLP and speech recognition can detect the emotional tone of the feedback without bias, and get objective and actionable insights. The analysis can be used to personalise responses based on the tone of the interaction and to detect urgent matters that need to be escalated to human support personnel during a digital interaction in real time. Understanding the image and public perception of the brand is possible by monitoring the web and social media for articles, comments, and stories. This insight is crucial in understanding the impact of user experiences and past marketing campaigns and deciding future campaigns' objectives and direction.
Establish Benchmarks for Customer Satisfaction
Organisations need to keep in mind the quote by author Bob Hooey: "If you don't take care of your customers, the competitor will." It highlights the importance of referring to industry-wide benchmarks and measuring your customer experience against that of your competitors. Setting standards at every step of the customer journey helps derive CX’s progress trajectory. It measures the effectiveness of actions taken and the return on investments. Internally, the organisation should use a CX maturity model with benchmarks at every stage to assess and guide the evolution of CX. Formulating customer experience using such a framework establishes an organisation-wide mindset of adherence to excellence in pursuing customer experience. It provides a roadmap that all customer experience initiatives can follow to create a coherent and comprehensive experience.
Mystery Shopping
One way of doing periodic quality evaluations for both digital and physical channels is to conduct mystery shopping. Mystery shopping involves a third-party firm that provides trained individuals to act as customers and audit the CX. It could be a shop check, a call, a website customer journey, or an app assessment. The channel would be reviewed against predefined parameters. Mystery shopping firms offer a gamut of detailed audit reports and unbiased insights which can be used to rectify shortcomings, provide targeted training to employees, and review adherence to processes by franchisees. Mystery shopping could be the stitch in time that offers long-term benefits by preventing customer churn and enhancing customer loyalty. AI-based solutions can now augment mystery shopping by using video and image analytics to analyse footage of face-to-face interactions and of the customer journey to review and gather insights about CX. Businesses must ensure compliance with data protection and privacy regulations while utilising these solutions.
Measure EX
Employee experience (EX) is directly connected to customer experience, and measuring and monitoring EX is vital to maintaining high customer experience. Moreover, customers prefer to align with organisations known to value and take care of their employees. Mapping the employee journey as part of measuring EX helps identify gaps and inconsistencies in employees' skills and knowledge that could directly affect customer experience. Another finding could be outdated or faulty policies that could impact employee attitudes and customer engagement. For example, if employees were uncomfortable with a newly introduced POS system, it could result in long billing queues, leading to a significant dip in customer experience.
The key to ensuring market share is superior customer experience. Monitoring and measuring customer experience with technology as the enabler should be at the forefront of any business growth strategy.
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