Customer World

Turning customer pain into customer gain

The CMO Council just released a report on how companies are losing opportunities to turn customer pain areas into new business opportunities. The report highlights the following facts:

There are critical deficiencies in the way companies measure, optimize and leverage customer experience to drive loyalty, improve brand value and increase business performance and growth, including:

• Insufficient availability and aggregation of real-time customer experience data across touch points that should be shared across the organization
• Poor use of customer interactions to collect insights and intelligence or maximize up-sell and advocacy opportunities
• Lack of Internet processes and systems to track online word of mouth and drive customer advocacy
• Intermittent or deficient monitoring of customer experience that fails to provide true and timely insights into problems and opportunities
• Too few compensation programs tied to customer experience, loyalty and satisfaction gains

CMO Council executive director Donovan Neale-May says "CMOs must assume ownership for the customer experience and establish enterprise-wide measures and disciplines to ensure continuous improvement. We are missing a major opportunity to turn customer pain into competitive gain at every touch point through better use of web and contact center technologies and processes."

My view: This has been an area of intense focus amongst the marketing community for the last couple of years. I am always surprised to see that there is always insufficient customer experience data across enterprises. This is one piece of data that does not seem to have changed for quite some time now. For example, the report highlights that only 38% of companies gather insight from customer engagement situations! It always makes me wonder where is the gap between intent and execution. I believe the best way to do this is to start small. Don't start with a big bang approach. Pick-up areas for quick win, show to key stakeholders that it works and there is business impact. Expand as you get a lot of stakeholders buy-in, as this is very critical in making customer-centric programs successful in enterprises.

Customer disloyalty metric - Customer Effort Score(CES)

I read an interesting article prepared by the conference board on a metric that they are recommending for measuring customer disloyalty!

According to Matthew Dixon, managing director for the Customer Contact Council, the Customer Effort Score (CES) is based on a single question that determines the degree of required customer effort during a service request.

Instinctively, I find this metric appealing when I take into consideration my own interactions with service providers. Sometimes, when I deal with a bank, the effort required from my side to get my account details, get some new service activated or get wrong transactions reversed is so time consuming, it almost looked like they are doing a favour with " my money"! It always triggered a thought in me to change the bank. So is the case with mobile phone service or utility providers where literally there is no face to talk or interact and everything is handled over the phone or internet and literally I am at the mercy of IVRS systems, tele-execs with set scripts & process in front of them.

What would be interesting is to see how do they define effort for each service category as it will be very different for every category and  weightages that they give to an effort which leads to the most disloyal behaviour.

But, this is a good starting point for companies to start defining and tracking CES scores of their customers and looking at attrition!