Can’t Buy Me Love or Superior Customer Experience

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Oneness of CXSuperior Customer Experience cannot be delivered without the well orchestrated cooperation of all departments of a company. Yet, this cooperation is very difficult to achieve. The primary reason for the existence of organizational silos is operational efficiency that allows companies to scale their growth. The opposite side of the coin is a lack of unified vision and, as a consequence, the inability to work toward a common goal. This problem has caused many calls for “breaking down the silos“, but I would like to discuss a more constructive approach. Revolutions rarely produce positive ROI for anybody, but their instigators.

There are two approaches commonly discussed to a solution of this problem – heroic leadership act of salvation or/and buying more technology. Neither approach is likely to yield a significant change, in my opinion.

Buying an exercise machine does not improve your health – change of your lifestyle will. Buying marketing automation or big data technology does not improve your company’s prospects for long term profitability growth – delivery of superior customer experience will. Change, before you have to.

Modern organizations are managed by metrics and the dreaded silos are so efficient because they are focused on measurement of isolated sets of results. To continue with the health analogy – measuring blood pressure will not prevent a heart attack unless, the patient is prepared to balance his diet and physical exercise. Similarly, measuring customer satisfaction will not prevent erosion of the company market share, unless the company is prepared to balance it’s operational KPIs and holistic customer experience metric.

The impact of each department within an enterprise on overall customer experience is often neglected and poorly understood. While each one has established metrics to measure its performance, only Customer Service/Support departments are obsessed with measuring customer satisfaction. However, even Customer Service rarely gets it right:

  1. Their obsession is not about holistic customer experience, but about customer satisfaction with customer service.
  2. Their operational KPIs are often cost efficiency focused, and in direct conflict with customer experience goals.

That makes Customer Support department metrics largely irrelevant to the other departments of the company.

A Customer Experience metric is a single measure of how customers perceived their overall experience with the company. However, there are multiple reasons why that perception has formed in their minds. Discovery and measurement of these underlying attributes of the customer experience offers an opportunity to link these attributes to those departments which impact the attribute scores. Below is a crude illustration of the concept.

Link CX with departments

Samples of verbatim used by the customers should be examined to make the linkage more relevant and accurate. Additional sources of internal relevant information such as product returns and customer support ticket volume/complexity would be critical for triangulation on the actual impact of the attribute on the overall customer experience.

This approach is not limited to B2C companies. Just ask your business clients to describe their experience doing business with your company. Let them do it in their own words and resist the temptation of introducing surveys or other company bias inducing formats. The analysis of their unstructured feedback could produce similar charts. The key is to record multiple experiences of your customer’s employees from different departments. Their experiences could be quite different about different attributes of your relationship.

Breaking the silos is an undesirable and unattainable goal. Alternatively, re-examination of operational KPIs of every department for their impact on delivery of superior customer experience will bring the change we seek.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Gregory Yankelovich
Gregory Yankelovich is a Technologist who is agnostic to technology, but "religious" about Customer Experience and ROI. He has solid experience delivering high ROI projects with a focus on both Profitability AND Customer Experience improvements, as one without another does not support long-term business growth. Gregory currently serves as co-founder of https://demo-wizard.com, the software (SaaS) used by traditional retailers and CPG brand builders to create Customer Experiences that raise traffic in stores and boost sales per customer visit.

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