This week we’ll take a deeper look into the tactics organisations can apply to help them keep ahead and sustain their customer performance. We’ll walk through the 5 common stages of the customer journey from before the customer interacts to when everything is all done & dusted.

Before we start though, why is this important?

The organisations who we work with have tough outcomes to achieve. They have their regulatory commitments, which can mean quite an asset and process focus for them. A side effect we often see to these regulatory commitments is lots of singular efforts and systems that sit across customer’s experience. This can lead to time and effort having to be spend on complaints, service recovery, and additional incoming contacts like live chats, emails, or phone calls.

What we’re really trying to do here is mature organisations mindset from being “compliant” to “intelligent”. More in-control and deliberate when it comes to their customer experience

Awareness

This is of course the hardest part, that cultural shift from reactive to proactive. Feeling busy and fixing problems can feel rewarding in the moment but isn’t the smartest way of working. The thing we’re always trying to walk our clients towards is a place of calm & stable performance. There are natural things we can connect to; their purpose, their authentic leaders affecting their culture, or the region & geography they might serve.

At this stage of the journey, even before customers have interacted with an organisation there are some simple questions we can ask, setting the foundations for calmer, more in-control, deliberate customer performance:

• What do we measure day in day out when it comes to customers? Is it just those negative things like complaints or is it deeper?
• What about our commitments to customers. Things like KPIS, CSAT, incoming contact or regulatory commitments we might have already?
• What about those hygiene factors, are we already measuring customer effort and resolution as well as CSAT?
• What about those early indicators things might not be going well for customers? A surge in contact above the normal water level, or how visible things like repeat contact or escalations might be?
• How are we asking & collecting feedback from customers? Functional Vs Human – “on a scale of……” or “Did we make it easy?”
• Tone: Do we sound like customers, or do we sound very technical and formal when we communicate?
• Culturally, do our colleagues have easy and frequent ways to raise their issues and blockers to getting things done (in a safe, supportive way), just having a dedicated in-box or standard meeting agenda isn’t enough

There’s also a chance here for team to look at our people. Things like attrition, skills to do the job, absence and so on, but framed in a way we’re setting ourselves up to keep our promises first time.

Consideration

As we move across the journey, the emphasis now turns to being in control and leaning into those data points that tell us we need to act quickly. It’s a good way of revealing where we’re making things difficult for our teams to get things done.

• Jeopardy management and line of sight. Are teams armed with the visibility of their timescales and the ability to step in if anything is at risk. How carefully have we understood, and defined what Amber should be? (that vital window to be able to put things right before they go wrong or fail)
• Are our teams connected to their customer performance, and how frequently or live is that data?
• Accountability, are complaints siloed to a separate team, or are leaders immersed in their journeys and processes, do complaints and customer’s low scores sting?
• Culturally, how do we treat low customer scores and complaints? Do we see it as a chance to put something right or is it just a missed target?
• Timescales, do we rely heavily on regulation to dictate our timescales. Do we inadvertently put customers in the slow lane or treat them urgently?

Decision

We’re right in the middle of the action here, so having the ability to walk in the customer’s shoes (and the real world) is extremely powerful. Its too easy in the day job to just see the customer as numbers in a dashboard. Getting our leaders to actually walk the customer journey can help to reveal where we might make things difficult for them.

• How many clicks? Getting leadership and decision makers to walk the customer journey can be an important part of building the case for change
• How hard do we make it? Do we ask customers how easy we make it, or how they’d prefer to do things? Where can we optimise or change the process to match customer’s expectations
• Solo/bi-channel only? Does our channel offering match how customers want to interact with us? Do we make things like Livechat as easy as possible to find, or force customers to have to pick up the phone during narrow opening windows?
• How good are we in setting customer’s expectations up front? Do we share more of what we know about how long things really take (end to end), or are we passive in our wording?
• How often are our most senior team walking in our customer’s shoes?
• Speed of resolution. Time and again reports tell us that speed of recovery of low scores or complaints has a massive impact in recovering their CSAT score, how swiftly are we responding to those?
• How quickly to we send feedback and respond to those scores, not just the very low ones?
• How visible to we make customer’s comments on our work? Or do they simply exist within a portal in a system? How can we make them sting or feel great for our teams to read?

Service

As we near the end of the journey, we have to ask ourselves how well we harness the data we hold, and what it leads to, and if we have ways to swiftly make improvements or remove blockers to getting things done for both colleagues and customers.

• Root Cause. Organisations can fall into the trap of over complicating root cause analysis, and in turn siloing it off into a different team. It can be an extremely simple process attached to customer contacts, a simple customer and company root cause can be a simple way to very quickly create a powerful listening post for future changes
• It can of course be a much richer exercise, but make sure we’re feeding that great insight into action, and not being so focused on the exercise it forgets its purpose: making things better for colleagues, customer, and the process itself.
• It gets more compelling too as you pull in those other data points: regions, journeys, steps in the process, specific teams, or products. All helpful in focusing any improvement efforts and contexting the insight
• We shouldn’t just be focused on negative contacts like complaints when it comes to root cause, applying it across business as usual contacts can help create that early warning, or supercharge the case for change

Advocacy

Organisations can often fall into the trap of forgetting the part of the journey that most affects a customers sentiment: those final touches. This critical moment in the journey can help protect a CSAT result.

• As the dust is settling. We often have a period of time, especially in the utility sector where repair work has completed but there’s still that time before everything is back to normal (reinstating the ground, or removing any equipment), keeping up the momentum on communication efforts here is extremely important, it can help us reduce any incoming contacts, but also better sell the hard work the teams do day in day out.
• Closed loop. Do we check back with customers after we’re done? Making sure they are happy, or to help spot anyone who still needs us? This can also be a compelling message to protect CSAT too, deliberately making sure customers know everything is all done, and we’re still there for them.
• Customer research as part of business as usual? It might sound complicated, but a great way of getting additional insight swiftly is reaching back out to customers who have provided feedback, or during their feedback asking if they are happy to answer a bit more and ask really focused questions. Much quicker and cost effective than carrying out external customer research.
• Harnessing colleagues. What are we doing to harness the power of our colleagues to highlight the urgent needs to for change or highlight underlying context behind poor customer performance.

In conclusion, what’s the key takeaways here?

What we’re really doing here is trying to answer a really simple question every day, without emotion or ego: Are we in control?

The side effect of framing it across the end to end experience can help us reveal: cause and effect. Helping us make sure we’re addressing those ‘cause’ measures, and not getting busy firefighting ‘effect’ elements.

When it comes to our clients, there’s 3 things we’re really helping them become:

• Human and in real-time
• Proactive and deliberate
• A force for good harnessing colleague and customer’s voices

By Alex Russell-Rutherford

Alex Russell-Rutherford is Senior Consultant & CX Lead at Skewb. To speak with him about this topic in more detail, you can connect with him on LinkedIn.