3 CX Fundamentals You Need to Know (and Do), Starting Now
We live and work in an environment – and an economy – of continuously rising customer expectations. In an age of disruptors willing and able to fulfill just about every consumer whim, you face growing competition, often from unexpected quarters.
As a result, your customers expect more from you with each passing day.
To make things more challenging, the very nature of customer expectations is changing, too. Today, it’s no longer enough to deliver a solid product or a superior service. Your customers want and demand that their every interaction with you be satisfying as well.
To put it a different way: To be a CX leader, you need to be a CX expert.
Whether or not you’re ready to create a senior CX role on your leadership team (to own, drive, and oversee your CX strategy), the truth is, everyone on your team needs to become a CX expert.
Here are the 3 basic rules to get you started:
- Commit: CX is no longer nice-to-do. It’s must-do.
Launching a CX strategy begins with a shift in mindset. Measuring the impacts of your customers’ interactions with you, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and making improvements won’t be quick or easy. But the longer you wait, the further you’re falling behind your competition. - Measure the Journey, Not Just Individual Transactions:
The key to creating better customer experiences is to measure the impact of customer interactions across all touchpoints. That’s a tall order and, honestly, you’ll get more reliable data if you put a seasoned CX professional in charge of your CX data gathering and analytics. But even if you’re on a shoe string budget, you’ll have a better understanding of what’s working and what needs to change if you map out the entire customer journey and pay attention to every channel, every point of interaction, before drawing conclusions. - Start with the Big 3: NPS, CSAT, and CES NPS: Net Promoter Score
Usually measured on a 1-10 scale, this data point measures how wiling your customers are to recommend your company to others. Ideally, you’ll ask all customers this basic question after key interactions or experiences across all channels. Analyzing responses allows you to understand whether customers are “promoters” (those scoring you at 9 or 10), “passive” (those at 7 or 8), or detractors (everyone who scores you at 6 or lower). NPS is a helpful predictor of customer loyalty.CSAT: Customer Satisfaction Score
Easy to understand – but slightly tougher to gather and analyze, your CSAT scores are derived by asking customers to tell you – again on a rating scale – how satisfied they are with your product, your service, or with any interaction they have with you, in person, online, or over the phone. These ratings are more transactional than NPS, making it tempting to isolate and react to individual responses. But the real power of CSAT scores is how it helps measure the overall strength of your customer base’s satisfaction with you as an organization.CES: Customer Effort Score
Probably the least understood of the big 3 scores, the CES helps you identify points of vulnerability in your customer loyalty. If your customer believes they had to put more effort into doing business with you than they should have to spend, you need to know that. You need to fix that.The truth is, you may be performing at the same levels of speed, efficiency and quality that you did 10, 5, even a couple of years ago. But if your competition does it faster, better, or cheaper than you, you’re suddenly comparing unfavorably.
CES questions are typically asked after a customer care interaction. They help you measure the value your customers place on their relationship with you and have been shown to be effective predictors of return purchases.
Take it to the Next Level
At Skybridge Americas, we’re invested in helping you improve your customers’ experience by providing exceptional customer care on every call. If you would like to know more, please reach out. We would love to learn about your business goals and how we can help you grow!
by Bobby Matthews
Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing
Skybridge Americas
bmatthews@skybridgeamericas.com
Find out how Skybridge Americas can help you delight your customers and grow your business.
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