How customer experience insight can drive your organisation

The following is an extract from a recent interview with Oakleigh Wood, regarding his reflects and views on what contributes to making a World Class Customer Experience, the interview was conducted by SNAP SURVEYS.

“The worst thing is for a client to receive 100% positive customer experience results,” says Oakleigh Wood, MD of Customer Service Measurement Ltd. “There’s always room for improvement and if customers don’t feel comfortable to give negative feedback, the organisation can’t learn from its mistakes and raise its game. In business today, inertia is not an option. Negative comments are the jewels of opportunity.”

Delivering customer insights

CSM are customer insight experts.

“We sell research and deliver commercial insight,” says Oakleigh. “We work with senior management teams who appreciate the way we come back with strategic action points that can help drive an organisation forward, rather than a hefty folder of findings that will simply gather dust on a shelf.”

CSM has used Snap Surveys as a research tool since it started in 2002. Recent projects include:

• Helping Oracle save £12 per call across 93,000 calls, by measuring the quality of customer experiences in five customer support centres around the world. CSM identified the level of customer support which customers were happy to receive, and thereby lowered the cost of servicing calls.

• Carrying out research for Cobra beer which dashed the myth that Indian restaurants in the South preferred bottled beer while those in the North preferred draught. By giving customers more options, the company anticipated a 40% uplift in sales.

• Testing customer satisfaction for retailers selling Pandora, the Danish jewellery range. CSM engaged with 350 retailers and gained an 83.5% response rate to its survey investigating service delivery. As a result of this work, Pandora created a new brand promise to retailers to strengthen the company’s service ethic.

Customer experience: the big picture

“You can’t measure customer experience in isolation,” comments Oakleigh. “Until recently, the marketing team owned an organisation’s brand. However, customers now have an astounding level of influence. They experience every touchpoint of your business and communicate their views quickly and visibly using social media tools.”

“The challenge for organisations is to communicate customer insight to senior management – ensuring strategic decisions around the vision, brand and culture are aligned to the customers’ needs and experience. If you simply measure customer experience without taking in the broader view, you’re acting in a vacuum.”

“At CSM, we’re particularly interested in how organisations use the results of customer experience surveys as a fundamental building block to influence what’s happening both inside the organisation and externally.”

Over the last six months, CSM has developed a new way of integrating customer experience measurement to help CEOs achieve their goals.

The Bigger Picture

Customer Experience Wheel

Start with your vision

The purpose of any organisation has to be bigger than making money. The first step is to ask yourself: why does your organisation exist and what does it want to achieve?

For example, CSM’s vision is to gather and share knowledge with commercial impact and to love customers.

Build your brand values

By building brand values that reinforce your vision, you are creating a blueprint that demonstrates how people in your organisation can live and breathe the vision.

For example, one of CSM’s brand values is ‘more for less’. Employees live this value by producing customer surveys that not only provide metrics but also deliver insights that can positively change a business – two outcomes for the price of one.

Recruit the right people

Having established your vision and brand values, you are ready to recruit people who reflect these values. For a service organisation, this means taking on people who have a real desire to deliver ‘wow’ customer experiences, rather than those who are simply technically capable of fulfilling a specific role.

It is often easier to teach technical skills than cultural values.

Develop a customer-focused culture

In Oakleigh’s view, businesses in the US frequently excel at customer service. However, in the UK, all too often organisations don’t reward service and customers don’t complain enough. Take the example of Zappos- an online shoe and apparel retailer based in Nevada, USA. They recruit outgoing, bubbly people who are attuned to good service and are therefore able to create and power a customer-centric culture.

Design your service experience

This is the area where it is vital for an organisation to gather knowledge about customer experience and feed it back to the management team. By discovering what customers need and want, you have the essential material that will enable you to create a service experience that answers those needs.  Oakleigh has some great ideas and examples in this area, but not enough room to share them in this article.

Create a stunning customer experience

Imagine the scene. A father goes up to a cast member at Disneyworld and asks, “What time is the 3pm parade?” The unhelpful response would be: “3pm.” However, Disney staff are trained to detect the question behind the question. They appreciate that a parent at Disneyworld is probably trying to find their way around and dealing with over-excited children. So they might say: “The parade is in 10 minutes. If you stand over there by the popcorn machine, you’ll be two feet from Mickey when the parade goes past and you can get a great picture with the castle in the background.”

It’s all about de-coding customers’ real needs, and putting resources and training into delivering beyond their expectations.

Measure

Once you have set up the organisation to deliver outstanding customer service, it’s time to measure the customer’s experience. Measuring in isolation changes nothing.

Reflect

The next step is to reflect on the insights that the measurement report provides.

Change

When you have reflected on the results, you need to implement changes. Otherwise, there will be no improvement. If you are new to change Oakleigh suggests you read Kotter.

Vision

After implementing the necessary changes, you return to your vision and the learning cycle starts again.

Stepping back to move forward

To deliver a world class customer experience which results in loyal customers who tell their friends and colleagues about your organisation, you need to step back and reflect on where your organisation is on its journey. It’s easy to get caught up in day-to-day operations.

If you want to stand out, you need to pull everyone in your organisation into a common mindset. This means removing silo barriers from IT, HR, Sales, Marketing and Operations, etc and finding ways to bring teams together to gauge what customers seek and how you can all deliver it.

Your CEO or MD will need to drive this, but customer experience is not a department or one person; it involves everyone stepping up to the mark and proactively looking for ways to improve the experience.

If you have an interesting challenge, email Oakleigh direct at

oakleigh at csmsurveys dot com