Improved customer experience can have huge and widespread impact on success against broader business objectives – such as increasing revenue and improving customer loyalty. But only if they’re focused in a way to drive biggest bottom-line impact.
I’ve worked with companies across various industries examining customer-initiated feedback to uncover CX pain points. In presenting my findings to clients, I have learned there is no “one size fits all” approach to prioritizing and acting on feedback.
“What are the main issues my customers are talking about this month?” is a question CX teams typically ask. Often, the issues resulting in the most feedback are the most significant and – once resolved – will have the biggest overall business impact. But that isn’t always the case, so prioritizing effectively is extremely important.
For example – faced with the below dilemma – which issue below would you tackle first?
Before you answer, consider the following:
- The 45 respondents who were trying to checkout had an average of $50 in their cart – that would be $2,250 in lost revenue.
- Moreover, this is customer-initiated data, so these numbers only reflect a fraction of customers likely experiencing the underlying problem. In other words, this $2,250 is actually probably a lot more than $2,250 in reality.
So what issue would you tackle first?
… Probably the scenario where only 45 respondents could not checkout, which resulted in a $2,250 lost sales, right? At first glance, you may think the banner issue with 273 respondents should hold higher priority. However, after analyzing the feedback, the most reported issues may not always be the most important from a commercial business perspective.
VoC teams face decisions like this every day—balancing the need to maximize the customer experience, revenue and minimize resources.
So how do you prioritize the CX improvement action you should take? If you are experiencing data overload, ask yourself these two main questions.
1: Who are the internal stakeholders who can actually make a difference?
Many companies struggle with this one. They’ve collected feedback from their customers but never manage to carry out a crucial step: selecting internal stakeholders to be accountable for taking the action necessary to drive improvements.
A recent Forrester report states just that, “No matter how much effort you put into collecting VoC, the insights are still only as good as what stakeholders in the company do with them.”
Never has a truer word been spoken.
Often, one department will claim, “oh, but that’s not my responsibility, it’s X department’s job.” Well, that very well may be the case. But what happens if the other department says the same thing? What happens to the feedback then?
It sits there. Unattended. As the issue persists, customers become aggravated and leave the site to give their business to your competition. And who would blame them? (If you think your organization could use help assigning accountability to internal stakeholders, OpinionLab’s collaboration capabilities may be worth exploring!)
Regardless, teams across your business need to work together to ensure the issues highlighted by your customers are acted upon quickly and effectively.
2: What are my resources?
When defining action items, consider the resources you have available. How many teams and departments will it take to correct the issue? How much time will be devoted to finding a solution? Once you’ve determined the best course of action, will your organization see a significant return?
Consider the Resource Prioritization Matrix below when allocating your resources. You’ll need to ask yourself two main questions:
- How many individuals/teams are needed to fix each issue?
- How much money will your company save once each issue has been addressed?
Take the previous UX scenario with the banner/header and credit card UX issues. As discussed earlier, the credit card issue will have a higher dollar impact than the banner issue, which means it gets placed higher in the matrix.
Every organization will differ, but let’s assume several teams need to be engaged to address the banner issue and its dollar impact is lower. It therefore gets placed further to the right within the matrix.
Go through this exercise for all your action items to plot them on the matrix. This provides a great framework for how you think about how the tasks you face are different from each other and in turn how they should be prioritized.
Most initiatives sparked by VoC insight will require capital, time and people. Knowing your company’s limitations and its available resources will allow you to 1) prioritize realistically and 2) take action that has the biggest impact.
Next Steps…
You want to make changes that will have the biggest business impact, right? You therefore need to be clear on your goals and focus action in line with that vision. You need to recognize that you can’t do everything.
So rally up your teams, assign accountability and ownership to your internal stakeholders. Know what you want and the resources you have to get you there.
