What is customer experience?

Customer experience refers to how customers perceive their interactions with your company.

This definition is simple but manages to capture all the key things, and it is still as relevant now in 2019, as it was 20 years ago. Customer experience is constructed in direct or indirect interaction with your company, but it always involves the subjective response of the customer. Therefore, you can never fully determine it.

Direct contact typically takes place during the purchase, use, and service. It can include customer that visits your website, or social media channel, to do some research before making the purchase decision. It is impacted not only by the quality of your product or service but also by the expectations the customer happens to have towards them.

Indirect contact can mean word-of-mouth recommendations or criticisms your customer happens to hear, advertising, reviews, etc. Therefore, it is built as a sum of how customers engage with your brand.

As a company, you can influence, but not perfectly define what your company’s customer experience will be like. The experience involves emotion and unexpected behaviors. The perception is never exactly as you anticipate. But no company can afford to give up in the face of unpredictably.

Building a good customer experience is not easy. In an often-cited Bain & Company study, only 8% of customers said they received a superior customer experience, while 80% of the companies surveyed believed that the experience they were providing was superior.

This is a stark contrast indeed!

This is where customer experience management comes into the picture as a key way to close the gap between these two numbers.

What is Customer Experience Management?

Customer experience management (CEM or CXM) has too many definitions. For us, it means tracking and understanding your customers’ experience, acting on that understanding, and closing the loop with the customer.

To start managing your customer experience, you have to answer the question:

How do you track the customer experience?

Customer experience is partially a subjective matter. It is not fully in your control as it involves the emotions your customer has when interacting with you, either directly or indirectly. Therefore, you need to ask. You need to listen to what the customer says.

There are many ways to collect customer feedback, and several customer experience metrics to use. Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is one of the most powerful methodologies. With the two questions, the NPS method includes, you get both a quantitative metric to follow and good quality text feedback to draw insights from.

After collecting feedback, you need to also understand it.

If you have 30 customers, you can just read the feedback through and get a good idea of what your customers think. If you have 3000 customers, it will get somewhat tricky. But if you have 30,000 or 300,000 customers, you’ll need advanced tools to aggregate the feedback and analyze the text.

If you are not able to see the wood from the trees, you too easily end up listening to only those who shout the loudest. (Or only those whose opinions you happen to agree with.) Make sure you focus on the analysis phase properly. Collecting feedback and not doing anything with it, is worse than doing nothing at all.

After understanding what drives your customer experience positively and negatively, it’s key to close the loop. This means acting on the feedback, e.g. fixing the issues customers have pointed out.

It also means getting back to your customers in one way or another, to let them know that you have heard them, and have made decisions based on what they had to say.

What to Focus On in 2019

The expertise field of customer experience has been constantly developing over the years. 10 years ago, we were talking about digital transformation, rise of social media, and mobile interactions. Now Customer Experience involves modern AI technologies and hyper-personalization.

We asked 15 leaders and practitioners of Customer Experience Management what they thought Customer Experience would be in 2019.

Here are our findings.

Shep Hyken, Cx expert and bestselling author of The Convenience Revolution

@Hyken | CX blog

“Customer Experience has moved from being focused on customer service to the entire experience a customer has with the company. That means every interaction, large or small, and that includes any and every interaction the customer has with the organization’s employees, the packaging of products, the experience navigating through a website, advertising/marketing messages via traditional and digital, interactions on social media, etc.

In the coming year(s), organizations, big and small, will recognize that CX is as important as anything else they offer their customers.

Furthermore, customers are not comparing the companies they do business with to direct competitors anymore. They make comparisons to the best service and CX they have ever received from anyone and any company.

Customers are growing increasingly smarter when it comes to CX, and that’s because rock-star companies teach them what it is, and now they expect that from everyone they do business with.

So, how is all this shaping up for 2019?

Beyond the digital customer experience, there will be a big push toward creating a more convenient customer experience. Customers expect the company will sell a good product and deliver a good service experience.

The next level is to be easy to do business with. The company that is easiest to do business with will win. Convenience will help you stand out and disrupt your competition.”

Jeanne Bliss, Cx Practitioner & Pioneer, Keynote Speaker, and Author

@JeanneBliss | blog

“Customer Experience must be about leadership. In 2019, I am working with leaders around the world to elevate the accountability and responsibility of leadership teams.

When “CX” is measured by actions to “fix” problems (a good start), but not paired with a change in the company’s behavior for how they go to market, enable employees to thrive and honor customers – then it is not sustainable.

The work ends when the project ends, or the person pushing it moves on, or leaders find another priority. This is much of what we are seeing as CX is dipping inside organizations.

Without uniting the C-Suite and making elevating behavior, modeling behavior, and permitting people to act differently…companies will not fundamentally change.”

Ian Golding, CCXP, CX Consultant and Trainer

@ijgolding | blog 

“Customer Experience is very simply explained as everything an organization does to deliver the ‘end to end experience’ to a customer. From advertising; to PR and media; to sponsorship; to websites and apps; to physical interactions (stores and branches); to products; to documentation; to employee behavior; to communication; to Customer Service, etc…

In 2019, the ‘noise’ surrounding CX will continue to increase as more and more industries facing disruption seek to differentiate themselves ‘beyond their products and services’.

However, the CX profession will have to continue working hard to ensure that evolving digital technologies are used to enhance the customer experience and thus make the delivery of experiences more cost-effective, rather than seeing technology as a way to replace human beings and save money!”

Maurice FitzGerald, keynote speaker, and author

@customerstrateg | blog

“At a macro level, customer experience is the overall impression or image your brand creates in the minds of your customers. That impression is of course far greater than any individual experience.

Of course, your overall brand image exists primarily at an emotional (rather than rational) level. Once established at that emotional level, rational thoughts, and actions have only a small effect at any given time.

Technology development means that 2019 should be a breakthrough year in two areas, one obvious, the other less so: The obvious one is that advancements in Natural Language Processing will finally allow correct automatic interpretation of customers’ written and spoken feedback. The two biggest current gaps are the correct interpretation of pronouns and context.

The less obvious breakthrough is in the automation of loop-closing. If we can correctly interpret what a customer is writing, why could we not simultaneously tell them what we are already doing to work on the suggestion they are making, or automatically pop up a solution to a problem they are describing.

This will at least partly address the big issue of customers providing feedback and never hearing anything back.”

Jeremy Watkin, Director of Customer Experience at FCR 

@jtwatkin | blog 

“At the core of customer experience work is the ongoing process of making the experience better for our customers. It’s awfully difficult to do that without first gathering feedback both from our customers and the people serving our customers.

This gathering process not only helps discover a rating or metric (like Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, or Customer Effort Score) but it also uncovers the drivers that negatively impact the experience.

Once these are known, the real work begins of aligning people, process, product, and policies in such a way that measurable improvement occurs. And this IS hard work!

Looking ahead to 2019, it’s exciting to see the continued improvement of the technology required to gather feedback and monitor real improvement. As this happens, CX work becomes all the more accessible to folks in a variety of roles within organizations.

Isn’t that the point of CX — to break down silos and get everyone working together to bring about continuous improvements? I think so.”

Sue Duris, Customer Experience, and Digital Marketing Consultant

@SueDuris | blog

“My favorite definition of CX is also from Forrester that goes “Customer experience refers to how customers perceive their interactions with your company”. It not only includes the what’s (interactions) but also the how’s (perceptions, feelings) of the customer experiences.

For CX to even exist you have to be customer-centric. It just doesn’t work otherwise. It surprises me how many product-centric businesses are out there that even with some small mind-set shifts can easily migrate to customer-centricity.

I see a few trends happening in 2019:

• • Companies finally getting the message that employee engagement drives CX. We’re going to see much more EX and CX alignment,

  • Much more alignment between Customer Success and Customer Experience. Each can help the other to optimize the CX,

  • Emerging tech is going to help bring more maturity to CX programs. Emerging tech is going to continue to augment CX, not replace it, and it will become more of a gap filler so brands can go deeper with customer understanding so they can go deeper with personalization. Some of the emerging tech that is going to drive this include AI, IoT, blockchain, and immersive (VR, AR, mixed reality). “

Peter Gustavsson, CX Strategy Consultant

“Just a few years and a short breath ago, CXM rocketed off together with digital transformation and was expected to interrupt businesses as a terminator from the future, but today it has left “digital” behind and transformed itself into a blur of good intentions.

From to, the commercial perspective, it’s clear that CXM cannot only include technology nor how to operate these new gadgets. It’s obviously crucial not only to embrace organizational structure, managerial routines, and systems, as how offers are planned and bundled, how content is developed and presented, and how effects are targeted, measured and appreciated. It’s equally important to align top management executive teams in traditional line organizations, to coordinate cross-functional processes, be prepared to challenge corporate culture and traditional ways of working, to take on a customer focus, and by no means forget that eventually speed in flexibility is vital.

Technology is still at CXM heart during 2019. It’ll help to achieve capabilities for omnichannel personalization, marketing automatization over all touchpoints, and lifelong individual customer experience management, also in legacy environments.”

Lyndon File, Director of CX & Advocacy, G Adventures  

“I believe 2019 will see many developments in the field of Customer Experience. First, I am convinced that there will be a swing toward making all interactions more human. I am all for having robots help us identify trends and provide basic information. But having a real live human provide a personalized interaction will be a thing in 2019.

Also, tied in with this is the idea that customers expect instant gratification. They want to know the answer to their query now. Not this week, not tomorrow, not even later today. NOW.

Companies that have the scalability to provide a personalized instant engagement will be winning the CX game in 2019.”

Nate Brown, CX Director, Co-founder at CX Accelerator

@CustomerIsFirst

“Customer Experience means a great deal to me. It’s really all about being intentional to make people’s lives better and easier…which is a cause I can get behind. Brands that refuse to put in the time, energy, and resources to create great Customer Experiences are demonstrating a great deal of selfishness. Some companies can float by on a level of innovation for a period of time, but the lasting brands are those who consistently value their customers.

I believe in 2019 we will see the Customer Experience function garner a significantly wider span of control. Historically, many Customer Experience professionals have little to no ownership over the critical factors that make up the Customer Journey. Examples of this would include Employee Experience, Product Innovation, and Marketing.

When Customer Experience is reduced to simply Voice of Customer and/or Customer Service, it’s nearly impossible to take a holistic approach. When CX has control of or at least significantly greater influence in these areas, we can truly make a difference for the people we serve.”

Martina Koch Olsen, Customer Success Specialist, Pleo.io

“One thing I do hope more companies will focus on improving in 2019 is their omnichannel support system(s). In my experience, there’s been a high focus in the past few years on companies’ presence across channels, yet many don’t have a system where information can easily be passed on from one channel to another (and from one team to another). Sometimes they work completely in silos.

To me, great customer service is not just about resolving issues fast. It’s very much also about the experience of the service itself. A great omnichannel system can help you move your customer’s experience from okay to great!”

Kari Korkiakoski, CX Consultant and Founder, Futurelab Finland

“I think customers’ expectations are getting higher and we even see drops in survey results. This is not a project, CX should be the purpose of your company.

The year 2019 is about emotions. Focus on that! Define targeted emotions through customer journey.”

Adam Toporek, CX Consultant, Author, & Speaker

@adamtoporek | blog

“To me, customer experience is more than a business discipline, it is a way of life for customer-centric organizations. Customer experience represents the most powerful lens for looking at the totality of a customer’s interactions with an organization and trying to maximize not only the value of each individual interaction but the customer’s overall journey.

In 2019, I expect to see both big advancements and significant headwinds for customer experience as a focus in organizations. The experience will be increasingly more integrated with improving technology like AI, and this will dovetail with budget pressure and the demand for demonstrable ROI from leaders. CX leaders will have more pressure to prove the financial results of experience and to produce those results at lower cost.”

Kaye Chapman, Comm100‘s Learning & Development Manager and Community Organiser at CX Accelerator

“I’m definitely seeing CX leaders looking to adapt faster to changing customer preferences and getting their operations ready to adopt automation and bot technologies. From building stronger knowledge bases to aid human and bot knowledge to providing great service over new channels, the CX industry is becoming ever more strategic and aligned to customer needs.

I’m sure in 2019 we’re going to see a lot of messy implementations of new technology and processes, but I hope that amidst the rubble of CX disasters we’ll see organizations getting really innovative and providing service in ways that just weren’t possible a year ago.

I’m especially excited to see more and more organizations adopting chatbots that provide quick, quality answers in appropriate places in the customer journey and which show that bots, when properly designed and trained, can be a real asset to customer service operations.”

Linda Ruffenach, EVP of Operations at GlowTouch Technologies

“The customer experience conveys the true essence of a company’s brand. It may be the only live in-person experience an individual has with a company. No matter how good the marketing and sales, it can all be lost if the actual interactions with the brand do not align.

Customers are looking for convenience, quality, and confidence that their issues are being resolved and their information is secure. In 2019, I expect to see the continued focus on the end-to-end customer experience.

Companies will continue to provide options for customers that allow a resolution to customer inquiries through multiple channels, including AI and self-service. Innovation in AI and self-service can be a real game-changer, but it is critical that the personal connections with a company’s brand are not diluted along the way.

Customers with a positive personal connection to your brand will remain loyal, buy more stuff, and become advocates for your brand.”

Vincentas Karciauskas, Customer Success at Airtame

“Customer experience for me is everything the customer feels about the company. So not only the experience with product or design but also experience with communication, replacements, marketing.

Customers should feel comfortable to communicate, enjoy to use the products, not be afraid or limited to ask questions, and find answers. All this creates a unique customer experience and keeps customers loyal to the company.

I think in 2019, the CX industry will need to find new ways to innovate. A lot of things that industry is doing now is a bit older or getting there, therefore innovations and ways to improve it will be key.”

Gustavo Imhof, CX Keynote Speaker and CX Manager at Lowell

“Customer Experience has had many, many definitions over the years. Most of them are either impracticable (theory of everything type stuff) or bordering on naive (it’s being nice to the customer).

My stance is that customer experience as a profession, as a strategy, is about the measurement, monitoring, and management of memorable experiences customers have. I make this distinction on them remembering things because only something the customer can remember will actually influence their future behaviors – and therefore business success. Working on anything else is a waste of energy, time, and resources, plain and simple.

A successful customer experience strategy harnesses the understanding of what the customer remembers and how to design memorable experiences to spark rapid and sustainable growth.

I feel 2019 is some sort of a crossroads year. Some businesses will be faced with the decision on whether they are ready to truly embrace customer experience as a strategy and face the challenges of legacy systems and cultural transformation. The businesses who are more advanced with their transformation will come to terms with the fact that ‘digital transformation’ is just one facet of a successful customer experience strategy, and will finally embrace a more holistic view of the customer experience.

That’s what 2019 will be about, true business transformation through people, not AI, AR, VR, or any other acronym or technology.”

The post What is Customer Experience According to 15 CX Experts appeared first on Lumoa.

Previously we have shared how you can build a customer experience management processes in your company. We continue diving into the secrets of the most successful tech companies and this time we talked with Michael Redbord, General Manager, at Hubspot Service Hub about how HubSpot does things, their failures, successes and the most common practices.

Michael started at HubSpot when they were slightly less than a hundred people (now HubSpot employs more than 2000!).  During the last 10 years, HubSpot has gone far in building a truly customer-centric culture, a fantastic product, and the community, that many love and are proud to be a part of.

Navigate the blog post ->

• Chapter 1. Everyone and everything is customer experience.

• Chapter 2. Revenue and growth is a function of happy customers.

• Chapter 3. Understand the Power of Net Promoter

• Chapter 4. Act. Right now!

• Chapter 5. Approach promoters and detractors differently.

• Chapter 6. Scale your company, scale your customer experience management.

Chapter 1: Everyone and everything is customer experience.

It’s simple. Customer-centricity is one of the core values of HubSpot.

Customer experience touches every aspect of the company’s work including the back-office functions: HR, legal and finance.

“At the end of the day, everything, that you do inside a company, creates some effect outside the company.”- concludes Michael.

You might want to check the culture book of HubSpot, as it just concludes and confirmed customer-centricity from the operations deep inside. What the recruiters are looking for in every potential new HubSpot team member are two things: if they are result-oriented and customer-obsessed. It’s summarized with a very precise idea: “For every decision, we should ask ourselves: what’s in it for the customer?”

Chapter 2: Revenue and growth is a function of happy customers.

“Most companies aim to grow with some financial metrics. The philosophy, that we developed over the years, is that revenue and growth is a function of happy customers. It’s not about selling or upselling but delivering exceptional value.”

HubSpot realized that when a customer starts using the software, there has already been a long journey to this point from initial discovery, blog articles or marketing, and sales e-mails. Getting a user profile is not the day #1 of HubSpot for that customer, it might be the day 30 or 100 of their customer experience.

If you’re inspired by HubSpot, you might want to check our webinar to find out how to spread customer-centric practices in your company.

Chapter 3: Understand the power of Net Promoter.

For the company, measuring customer success at each customer touchpoint is crucial. If you use HubSpot CMS you would know this immediately. As an active user of HubSpot you would deal with on average one customer survey per week about a variety of new features (which are released extremely often) or about customer support.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the metric #1 when it comes to Customer Experience Management at HubSpot (here’s top reasons why you will want to start using NPS), yet Customer Effort Score (CES) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) are frequently used as well. The NPS is also what the whole company aims to improve all the time. “We’re trying to improve our NPS target constantly. We are working incredibly hard against it, but the number is not the focus.

We are setting goals to improve NPS for this product by 10 points this year as it’s effective and motivating people… even if we all know, that the pursuit of the number is not really going where we want to end up.”

If it’s not the number, then what should you measure?

“The number I think is useful, but I can’t act on a number. Somebody gives me a six, okay. Then somebody gives me a two. Then somebody gives me a ten. I don’t know what to do with a number. All of the value in actually improving a given customer’s experience, or even understanding in aggregate, what customers think of our experience is from the written feedback.”

Chapter 4: Act. Right now!

For HubSpot, it’s crucial to act on customer feedback as soon as they receive it. Customer feedback on customer support-related touchpoints is 98% of the time very positive. The key is to capture the other 2% and to correct, remediate the experience. “If a real person sends an email and asks what went wrong – customers are very happy to share their feedback in detail”

Despite capturing customer feedback from the individual touchpoints, HubSpot collects customer feedback to measure the overall customer journey.

“We follow up as much as possible after we receive customer feedback. At the same time, we are a little more careful than just sending emails to everybody. I think not every NPS response warrants a conversation if the nature of the conversation is delicate. I believe that you have to be careful with how you handle survey feedback and it should always a human being who is going to do it.”

If a person identifies that they don’t want to be responded to, would the feedback be ignored? Not in HubSpot. The company addresses all the feedback in strategic and long-term planning and development. (Find out how you can do it too!)

“If you got feedback from a customer and they took time to give it to you and then you go work with them to improve that thing that they didn’t like, that’s it – you’ve just improved the customer experience. Like there is some magic in there, they told you a thing and then you worked on the thing and it doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. At the moment for that one customer you already improved customer experience. The best way to improve the experience is just to take an action, whenever you can. All other forms of analysis and kind of longitudinal stuff are important in the long term. You can actually get a ton of value in the near term, just by picking up the phone, the right person with the right context, having the right interaction…”

Chapter 5: Approach promoters and detractors differently.

Getting your customer to respond to the survey is just a beginning. Period.HubSpot aims to approach both detractors and promoters and address their feedback. “We actually would do some pretty extraordinary things, whenever we can. If the CEO sees the comment… CEO doesn’t care that it’s not part of your job to do a certain thing – you just do it. Right? NPS has this trump card effect, it causes people to do things they might not otherwise do.”At HubSpot, the team focuses a lot on segmentation of promoters and detractors. What are the themes of their comments? Who is going to answer those comments? How long have they been a customer? What products do they own? Are they from a certain country? Or do they speak a certain language, whatever that is? Answering these questions helps to improve the lives not only of that one particular user but the user journey for that customer segment. Creating user stories helps to identify the key problems for the accounts and the team is ready to address the issues and improve the journey.

Although the company puts more effort into communicating with detractors, promoters are not left alone. “Some of them we’ll reach out to because they have specific positive feedback and we are like – this is so awesome. Like we are going to print out your comment and put it on the wall and that makes them happy and it engages in the conversation and lets them know their feedback is being heard. I believe that that kind of stuff improves your response rate, which is important.”

NPS helps HubSpot to identify the real advocates of the brand.  Those are the people who participate in case studies, reference calls or simply tell their friends, or colleagues about HubSpot.

How does HubSpot identify their advocates? ”We don’t automate this stuff, because it’s too sensitive, too important and it’s valuable to have a real conversation. It could be like “Hey, I saw that piece of feedback you gave, that was awesome. So glad you really liked the experience, did you know that we have this program where you can get some stuff from us and we can get some stuff from you and it’s like a give-give relationship, are you interested?” If they are, then we invite them to the group. Some people are more active than others, but basically, those advocates are incredibly valuable for our business.

I do think that our advocacy program is a bit of a secret weapon. And we believe that word of mouth, social proof and what your friends and colleagues think is probably more important than what a company’s marketing department says, what their blog says, what their own case studies say. Advocacy for us is capable of doing things that we are not.”

Chapter 6: Scaling your company, scale your customer experience management.

HubSpot has been growing tremendously fast during the last years. When Michael started in 2010, HubSpot was a scaling startup with over 80 employees. Many functions were still mixed and since then the company has become much more structured. The company has gone from hiring one customer support representative a month to hiring 20+. Things changed, yet customers remained loyal.

How? “The thing we did wisely without knowing it is that when we were smaller, we really worked on the human elements, so we focused on recruiting, we focused on culture, we focused on shared knowledge. All those things made a huge difference in our ability to scale. Many are seeing the benefit of using more systems and things like machine learning and more sophisticated technologies. For us, the foundation of all is really the people, our employees and customers, and a very human approach.”

The post Peek inside HubSpot’s customer-centric strategy: how to build a customer-obsessed culture   appeared first on Lumoa.

In the customer experience field, Bill is often praised for growing Slack with the Net Promoter Score. Bill calls himself a “self-emitted NPS geek” and is a true advocate for better customer experience. We had a short conversation earlier this year to find out what is the secret of these companies (hint: customer experience).

1. What does customer experience mean for you?

 “I noticed in life that incentives drive people. My dad used to say to me: “having a small incentive is all you need for people to change their behavior.

When I started to buy a lot of software as a CMO, I noticed that there were so few great customer experiences. If I would want to watch a video I would have to fill in 20-field forms, then I would get called and keep getting harassed. And when I would finally buy the thing, I’d be “Ok, how do I use this?” and everyone would run away.  If I needed support, I couldn’t find anyone, I couldn’t find the links to helpdesks and it would take me three weeks to get a response. I was confused: this was absolutely the worst experience. Why were all these companies and teams doing this?

And I thought about it. The traditional metrics that are assigned to teams are the number of leads or number of deals closed. Customer success is often judged on how much more did they sell to customers, support is judged by how little is spent on support…

We are just minting out all these horrible experiences and yet like we want to go faster, we want to get more people to recommend us, talk about us and buy more… I thought that we can re-write all the metrics toward experience-based metrics and encourage employees to give a better experience.

I like NPS, it’s the sum of all these experiences that you have. It’s not just product marketing experience but your experience in from marketing, sales, support, legal to how fast the pages load. It’s everything, right? At Slack, we intensively used NPS and CSAT, we surveyed everyone, and we had a very specific methodology. You have to be proactive and when people responded, we would reach back out to them. It was an incredible learning experience. I fully recommend it.”

2. What is so special about Net Promoter Score?

“NPS gives you so many incredible benefits that it can fundamentally change your company growth. With NPS you can fundamentally change your company’s direction. If you’re a customer-driven company, and you’re not measuring NPS yet, that is one of the best things you can do to finally transform your company.”

3. Would you reach out to every single customer with an NPS survey?

“I like the methodology starting with the simple premise that we really want to help people to know how to use us. If there’s an issue we want to provide the addressee before they turn, we want to be minting our promoters, so we want to understand everyone in the company.

From just a pure marketing and sales point of view, you need to understand who the champions of your accounts are. They are your best advocates and they are the ones who are speaking on your behalf and introducing you to other people.

They are going to go to battle for you internally. You are never selling to only a person buying from you, they have to get through legal, procurement, IT, compliance. I believe that you should survey everyone.

Now with that said, I don’t like surveying anyone more than twice a year. You have to be careful about that, and at the same time automate the surveys so that they are always happening and you get feedback in real-time. It is extremely important to have an understanding of how every single person or organization feels about you and be corrective about that. Use all the data that comes from the NPS surveys to shake product roadmap and to improve your service.”

4. How do you increase the response rates of NPS?

“I found when you run really generic bad surveys, they sound like a canned robot wrote it. Who would want to answer “Flight 374 requests feedback”? I noticed that unsurprisingly people are not responding much to those. Also, if you write surveys that have 50 questions in it, people generally don’t respond to those either.

I learned the best surveys that people respond to are those arriving from a unique person. When we wrote an NPS survey, we would actually say “Hey! This is Bill. I am the CMO from Slack. Your feedback is really important to us and I read every one of your comments.” I did read them.”

5. Did you go through every single feedback comment even if there were thousands?

“Definitely. I think that a huge part of the role of CMO is to understand your customers’ pain points. The best thing with NPS is its one-sentence question “How likely are you to recommend, in this case, Slack, to a friend or colleague?” on a scale from 0 to 10.

The most important thing when you run the surveys is to ask the “why”-question. And once you get to all those why-questions you understand what the top reasons why people love us are (also, the top reasons why people hate us).

And many times your job in marketing or sales is to describe the company and a lot of times marketers tend to use their own more visionary words. If you just put it in the words that customers are saying, you will get a lot further.

For example, for Slack, it could be: “I feel that I am more productive, I am getting less email, I have more transparency with my company, more alignment…” We try to use the phrases they use to help us shape our value proposition.

On the flip side, we used a lot of the reasons why the detractors did not like us to shape our roadmap. And at the time we were building a lot of advanced features, but the feedback was just “Hey, you know I want the upload to go faster, I want your basic search to work better”. In the end, we decided to fix those more basic things. The data that customers give us is so important: it helps in shaping your value proposition, your messaging, your product roadmap and it’s just so valuable to just understand how your customers feel about you.”

6. How would you encourage promoters?

“One of the most important things is to just understand that these promoters are your fans, your champions, the folks that love you and are spreading the good word.

They are really an incredible part of your growth story and you have to understand who these people are, and show them some love, give them a platform to share their word. At Zendesk, we asked people to write a public review or sometimes we invited them to come to the office, meet some of the team. Sometimes we asked them to be interviewed for our next roadmap or to make a testimonial for us.In some cases we even said something like: Hey I’ve noticed that you love our product, would you mind introducing us to another department that you think would be a good fit for our company?”

There are so many great ways to kind of step into that evangelism and I think it’s just critically important. You want to understand and help these accounts, find who are these people, what are the problems they are facing and fix them.

One of the things that we and a lot of software companies would run into is how many cycles do we give towards fixing bugs vs. just developing new features. Of course, new features are always shiny, beautiful and everyone wants them, but the bug is like the pebble in your shoe, a little annoying at first but when you walk with it for a week it would be extremely uncomfortable. NPS gives you the answers.  Sometimes you may need to pause on building out new features and take care of some of these bugs that are causing a really bad experience.”

7. Last question, how would you measure ROI of customer experience management with NPS?

 Let’s say you have an average NPS score of 10. Now you embark in this customer-centric philosophy, you address a lot of issues, your delight your customers. So your score goes up to 40.

This means that if you have ten people in the room, in the past, when the score was 10, only 1 person was actively recommending you out of 10. Now your score is 40 and you have 4 people that are actively recommending you.

Then model this, find out how your advocacy actually increased. You can measure that by sending out the survey to the new users asking, “how did you hear about us?” People trust other people and so the word-of-mouth is converting much better and probably has a higher CLV, better deal size. Now you can attribute all this growth that is coming into investing in experience. If you look at the most successful companies in history, just from the purest perspective they all have like incredible NPS scores: Amazon, Netflix… These companies are fanatic about their experience and crazy about their NPS scores. We should all look up to that.”

The post 7 Questions About Net Promoter Score Surveys – Bill Macaitis appeared first on Lumoa.

“CX transformation is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity” – states Forrester, one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. It’s predicted, that by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator when making consumer choices.

Let’s find out what the field professionals actually experience.

We asked 15 experts these three questions to figure out what direction industry is taking:

• How do you see the future of customer experience?

• What are, in your opinion, the top challenges in customer experience that companies should be aware of now?

• How to overcome those challenges?

Now, luckily for everyone and especially for the customers, more and more brands put more and more effort into improving their customer experience.

So, what should we expect in the nearest future?

More brands will (and should) bring up customer feedback to the decision-makers in the company, and with the help of some new amazing technologies, we’re changing the way businesses see their customers.

Read the full answers of the experts below. Our guests have multiple years of experience in managing and consulting customer experience management in global companies and now lead their own businesses helping companies make customers happier.

Some hints: big data, omnichannel, personalization, AI and organizational culture.

Ian Golding, CCXP, CX Consultant and Trainer

@ijgolding | blog 

“CX is at a very interesting point in its evolution. There is no doubt that across most industries, the end-to-end CX has improved over the last twenty years. Much of the improvement has been driven by advancements in product innovation and digital technology. However, I also argue that despite that, too many consumers continue to endure ‘random’ or ‘unexpected’ experiences as a result of the inconsistent delivery of the end-to-end customer journey.

Too many organizations are still focused on ‘making money first’, with the customer coming a distant second. That is why although CX is evolving, it is doing so far too slowly – hence the need for CX Professionals and anyone with a passion for CX, needing to continue building a revolution within companies to get those business leaders who still do not understand the fundamentals of CX to wake up and smell the coffee. As more industries continue to be disrupted by smaller, more agile, niche specialists who are better able to meet the needs and expectations of customers, larger, legacy businesses are at serious risk of losing relevance with their customers and potentially ceasing to exist.

In my opinion, three things that are essential for CX include:

• Restoring trust – 2017 has seen more examples of organizations continuing to fail to meet basic customer expectations. In Europe, the Ryanair debacle is the most prominent case of all. In 2018, all brands across all industries are going to have to work hard to restore trust with the everyday consumer.

• Value for Money – we live in a world where disposable incomes continue to be challenged on an annual basis. Consumers will continue to look for brands that offer the best value for money for the ‘end to end’ experience. That includes how much it costs to deal with things when they go wrong.

• Honesty and transparency – the brands that continue to do what is right for their customer, when things go right and wrong, are the brands that will continue to flourish in 2018 and beyond.”

James Dodkins, CX Revolutionist, Keynote Speaker and Author

@JDODKINS | blog 

“I see the future of customer experience being ‘hyper-personalization’, moving away from process standardization and towards experience personalization. Understanding that each customer and each experience will be different every time and creating your business to incorporate, embrace and excel at this.

The biggest challenge, in my opinion, will be trying to meet all of these new customer demands within industrial age organization structures, structures that were never designed to deal with ‘customer experience’ let alone the customer experience of the 21st century.

How to overcome those challenges? Stop organizing by function and skill set, start organizing by ‘ability to deliver customer success’ create ‘experience teams’ of people with different skills and different core competencies that can manage the entire customer lifecycle and reward them together for the achievement of customer success, not completing tasks and activities.”

Blake Morgan, Customer Experience Futurist, Keynote Speaker, Author

@BlakeMichelleM | blog 

“The future of customer experience is around providing tailored and personalized customer experiences. Customers want you to know them. At this point, we have the technology and data prowess to actually know our customers – and predict their needs – but we still aren’t there yet. With advanced data and personalization, we should be able to provide truly personal and omnichannel experiences to customers. As more companies figure out how to do this, in the future customers will demand it or leave.

The first challenge is the focus for most companies on quarterly profits. Once we stop obsessing over wall street and quarter to quarter how we are perceived – we will be able to achieve transformational growth. But that requires being misunderstood for long periods of time. Consider the words of Laurence Fink, co-founder and Chief Executive of BlackRock with 4.6 trillion in assets recently said, “Today’s culture of quarterly earnings hysteria is totally contrary to the long-term approach we need.”

How to overcome those challenges?

Talk to your board. Find someone to champion customer experience at the c-suite and give them influence and resources to actually get things done”.

Chip R. Bell, Customer Loyalty Keynote Speaker, Trainer, Author. 

@ChipRBell | blog 

“We will continue to struggle with the proper balance between technology and people. Many organizations are currently enamored with the promise of technology and big data. However, research shows most customers still value an emotional connection with the people fronting the organization.

With rising customer expectations, good service is no longer good enough. Customers want unique, special and innovative. Organizations will want quantitative justification of their investment in great customer service. Organizations will continue to look for more effective ways of gaining real-time customer intelligence rather than rear-view-mirror methods like surveys. All will take leadership deeply committed to customer experience as a significant marketplace differentiator.”

Adam Toporek, Customer Service Expert, Speaker and Author

@adamtoporek | blog 

“The future of customer experience will involve finding ways to use technology to create and maintain positive emotional connections with customers. Despite the human brain’s remarkable inability to distinguish the artificial from the real, organizations will still need to find the magic balance between technology-faced and human-faced experiences.

The shifting sands of artificial intelligence will keep many organizations on unsure footing in 2018. For larger organizations, the top customer experience challenge will be figuring out how to strategically invest for the present while staying nimble for the future. For smaller organizations, the challenge will be figuring out how to gain and sustain competitive advantage in the face of larger competition that is able to use technology to deliver faster, more personal experiences at significantly less cost.

For larger organizations, the best path is to focus on the current experience while keeping an eye on the future. You don’t need to worry about being left behind in five years if you can’t keep your customers for the next five weeks. Smaller organizations need to maximize their competitive advantage by delivering experiences that larger organizations can never truly emulate, no matter how good their technology.”

Diane Magers, CEO at CXPA 

@DianeMagers 

“Customer Experience has been a catalyst for organizational change.  As we understand the customer’s varied interaction with our brands, their needs and wants, it has shaken the foundation of many organizations – the way they work, how they make decisions, how they collaborate, how they use data, how they build products and services. The focus on acquisition, scores and fixing issues has been replaced with outside disruption, market ecosystem expectations (i.e. Blockchain, GDPR) and coordination. This will push more aggressive change driven by Customer Experience professionals.

• Organizations will have to rethink how work gets done. Organizational alignment will be most critical – both internally and to the market and customer expectations.

• A talent shortage will be evident.  Not just talent in general, but workers with cross-functional skills, collaborative and design skills.

• Data, digital and technology transformation will be critical and many organizations have only scratched the surface to keep from becoming just a functional utility.

Successful organizations will drive deep, orchestrated transformation rather than just fixing customer issues or tracing scores.  It will require experienced professionals to help drive more collaboration and alignment of operations, measures, metrics, processes, governance, workflow – true and real strategic organizational transformation.

Aggressive action will be required for many organizations – business model changes, more extensive rigor on digital enablement, the acute awareness of customer behavior in the market and knowledge of ever-changing impacts on organizations (i.e. data security, gig economy, AI, machine learning).”

Rüdiger Pläster, Executive Managing Director at ORT Medienverbund 

“I do see a bright future of all facets of CX. Never underestimate the customers’ expectations in CX. It will be growing and growing. Once the customer had a positive CX, it will set a new benchmark. It will also be thrilling to see how UX, customer centricity and empathy will be connected to the field of AI. 2018 will be the year of CX and AI.

Finding talents that understand the challenge and will be able to work on the ongoing convergence of analog and digital, will be still the top challenge. Also, companies really need to transform their structures to reflect customer-centricity. This includes breaking down silos, which is still an issue. Let’s think in customer touchpoints instead. As I often refer to in my presentations: CX is not a package tour, it’s an expedition.  

Don’t underestimate culture. Plan transformation, reflect what business case makes it necessary, and take your co-workers and customers with you, that’s what we are doing. Start experimenting, build your hypothesis, fail fast and learn – and start all over again. A lean and agile culture will definitely support you in that matter. We call it a discovery and delivery track – internally we call ourselves the “dual track agency.”

Jeremy Watkin, Director of Customer Experience at FCR 

@jtwatkin | blog 

“Customer experience doesn’t begin with awe and delight as much as we love reading about this on social media. It’s about bringing all groups within an organization together with a focus on making each experience more effortless for customers. This is hard work but it’s that work that ultimately brings about happy, loyal customers. More and more companies will focus on having top leaders who are instrumental in bringing everyone together.

We will continue to hear more about artificial intelligence and chatbots in the coming year. When it comes to using technology to allow customers to self-solve issues, some companies automate too much and some don’t automate enough. These new technologies are here to stay and we’re wise to vet and implement them carefully, testing frequently to ensure they are truly improving the customer experience rather than detracting from it.

How to overcome those challenges?

Three words: Voice of Customer. With any changes and enhancement to the product or service, it’s critical to keep a finger on the pulse of the customer. Customer surveys, deep dives into customer service contacts, and conversations with key customers are great ways to fuel continuous improvement. I’ve asked many customer service professionals and customers alike for their feedback and have never had a shortage of insights for improving the customer experience.”

Lynn Hunsaker, CEO and Head Customer Experience Consultant at ClearAction

@clearaction | blog

“Customers’ discernment of providers’ motives will continue to sharpen in the future. Customers are being educated about customer experience by providers and fellow customers, and as employees within provider organizations.

Top challenges for providers are (a) to be smarter than competitors about customers’ realities, (b) to rally all functional areas to improve customers’ realities, (c) to make customer-centered management a way of life.

To overcome these challenges:

• treat customer experience excellence as a context for every job role company-wide,

• foster true outside-in perspectives: not how can more customers recommend us, but how can we be flexible toward empowering our primary customer segment’s priorities? (which leads to more recommendations, by the way),

• identify patterns in customer experience data from all sources to create greater insights as the impetus for managers to make changes for the greater good, to motivate collaboration, and to inspire customer experience excellence as context for everything the company does,

• facilitate collaboration across functional areas and business units to prevent silos, bridge silos, prevent recurrence of issues for the whole customer base, and create mutual value for customers (internal collaboration is the surest path to strengthening customer trust),

• strengthen the momentum of customer experience excellence as a way of life by embedding customer-focus in all company rituals (planning, reviews, capital expenditures, budgeting, succession, hiring, recognition, decision-making, handoffs, etc.)”

Peter Lavers, Customer Experience and CRM Expert

@PeterLavers | blog

“Customer Experience is here to stay! Companies do marketing, sales and CRM – the customer does the experience! If your business isn’t interested in CX then it’s effectively saying “we don’t care who buys our product, as long as somebody does” – this WILL find you out in today’s connected, empowered world.

One main challenge for the next year is short-termism. It distresses the market, resulting in oversupply and brand devaluation; it leads to bad decisions for quick sales that ultimately damage trust; it educates the customer on how to ‘beat the system’ e.g. only buy when there’s an offer; it can lead to illegal or unethical practices such as ‘pulling sales forward’ to meet targets; it rewards counter-cultural behaviors and makes scorecards meaningless; and it inevitably runs out of steam because there are only so many tactics to deploy!

Short-termism is mostly the result of a product-centric and “numbers focused” culture, which inevitably results in a “race to the bottom”. Customer centricity is the answer, backed with a credible customer profitability lens that gives an alternative view to traditional product sales/market share KPIs.

Another is silos – unless there’s a perfect collaboration they lead to inconsistent or competing objectives, marketing, service and measurement. All too often it’s the poor customer who ends up having to stitch together the disconnects in their experience by re-keying and re-explaining their requirements or situation.

Silos are often the result of the same product-centricity as above, this needs to be fixed from board level downwards, with equal accountability and collaboration between the heads of customers, product, and omnichannel.”

Jane Treadwell-Hoye, CCXP and Managing Director at epifani

“The future of CX is at a crossroad.  There are many organizations embracing a people-centric approach to business (be it employee engagement on CX or on developing strong CX programmes) but there remains a large number who fail to fully grasp the need for change.  Many of the traditional ways of doing business are under threat from smaller, faster, more agile disruptive businesses so organizations need to be more focused on truly understanding their customers, delivering better experiences and engaging in new ways.

The top challenges that companies should be aware of, I see are:

• That senior leadership teams view CX as a passing fad or a short-term campaign and do not truly understand the enormous value a customer-centric approach to business brings – be it engaged employees, retained customers with an increased share of wallet or new customers.

• That few seem to understand that CX is a long-term programme of transformation that cannot be measured in 12-week quarterly financials. Any organization taking on a CX programme needs to recognize it’s hard work and will take time – it’s worth it and you need to celebrate the wins along the way – but there is no magic quick fix.

• It’s too easy to overlook the employee engagement and try to deploy CX outside of a holistic organizational approach. Your people deliver the customer experiences so organizations need to look at how to ensure everyone is brought along on the CX journey and understand the role they play in the customers’ experience.

• It’s more than just digital. Digital is but a channel to the customer but a truly customer-centric approach embraces the customer at all touch points in the journey.

• It’s not about software or a number – if you focus only on the NPS score you will never deliver the game-changing customer experience.

How to overcome those challenges?

• Recognize your business is about the customer and not you. Listen more, understand their pain points, validate ideas and co-create with your customers.

• Be prepared to pilot new things – try, fail and learn fast before trying again.

• It starts inside the business – communicate, communicate, communicate and educate, educate, educate. Get everyone to see their role through the customer’s lens.

• Celebrate small successes and share stories. Become better storytellers – we are, after all, people dealing with people.”

Melinda Gonzalez, CEO at Melinda Gonzalez Advisors, CX Consultant

@RealMelindaG | blog

“I see the future of CX as bright, vast, and continuously evolving. Technology advances will continue to inspire new innovations in customer experience. But, most companies will still continue to struggle with CX fundamentals.

CX is a tough business. It requires patience and the ability to maintain a “long view” on business results, especially in solving larger systemic issues. It will continue to be challenging for CX advocates to get meaningful organizational and executive support if customer centricity isn’t already a part of the value system.

Ensure strong C-suite investment & buy-in (exhausting as it can be). Customer experience starts with a strong customer-centric culture, and that tone is set from the top. Assess the business to identify the people, process, & technology/infrastructure blockers. Is customer centricity already part of the company DNA and culture? Are there efficient processes in place for analyzing customer data or communicating customer insights? Is the ecosystem of customer engagement tools and technologies integrated and seamless, or are they siloed? Always leverage quick wins wherever possible, but a strong operational framework for CX management is critical to long-term success.

Also, new tech solutions such as AI and machine learning have been getting a lot of attention. And why not? They have many great CX applications, and it’s always exciting to work on cutting-edge solutions! But if not applied to a strong operational CX framework, technology can distract and actually move leadership and employees farther away from understanding customer emotions, motivations, and expectations.

Customer engagement technologies should be introduced once an operational model for managing the customer experience has been established and embraced. If the basic program investments aren’t in place, tech solutions will only be a hindrance. What are the basics of a CX program? Understand customer needs, measure the right things, identify the root cause of challenges and opportunities to improve, and, most importantly, take action!”

Matt Dixon, Keynote Speaker, and Author, Global Head of Sales Force Effectiveness Solutions at Korn Ferry Hay Group

@matthewxdixon | blog

“I see the end of the traditional customer survey as we know it.  AI and machine learning make customer listening and Voice of Customer analysis—at scale—suddenly possible in a way it wasn’t before.  This means two things: (1) CX leaders will need to shift their teams from “survey administrators” to true internal consultants responsible for identifying and rectifying CX issues and (2) we will see break-through advances in CX happen with greater regularity as companies embrace these new technologies and their CX teams take up the mantle of CX reengineering on a large scale.

I think the biggest challenge is that CX has revolved around a set of assumptions—for instance, that customers will reward them for moments of delight, that customers want a relationship with the companies they do business with, that customers prefer live interactions over self-service, that customers want empathy when things go wrong, that customers want choice, etc.—that have rarely, if ever, been called into question. They are sort of the “pillars of faith” in CX.

While there’s been plenty of research in recent years to suggest that many of these assumptions are misplaced, CX leaders still refuse to acknowledge that they may have gotten it wrong—perhaps because there is so much pressure to embrace the conventional wisdom within their own companies or because they’ve lacked the data about their customers (thereby falling into the “we’re different” trap).

Stop surveying your customers and start listening to them.  You have more Voice of Customer data at your fingertips than you could possibly imagine—and it comes in the form of recorded phone conversations between your frontline staff and your customers.  Voice data—analyzed by AI—is the next great frontier that will enable a level of customer understanding heretofore not possible and will equip CX leaders with the insight they need to overturn many of these age-old assumptions and achieve CX break-throughs that will deliver significant improvements to customer loyalty.”

Vicki Amon-Higa, CCXP, CX Coach and Consultant at Amon-Higa & Associates

“Customer Experience will be a key driver of growth for companies going forward — it will continue to be an ‘and’ game of great products that deliver the outcome customers need AND a great experience end to end so that customers can find and buy those products as well as easily start using them and get the help they need to continue to get the benefits from them.

 A delightful customer experience alone is not enough and great products alone won’t get found and purchased. Marketing and Product Organizations need to play well together to create these experiences and be the catalysts for this growth, together.

The top challenges I see are that everyone wants Customer Experience to be the latest and greatest … it is a continuation of the quality journey started in the USA after the historic ‘If Japan can, why can’t we’ wake up in the late 1970s. It is an evolution of more and more aware customers who are influenced by their B2C experiences and expect the same, if not better from other experiences as a customer.

To overcome these challenges, we need to stand on the shoulders of those giants before us and continue to play with each other, it truly is a team sport! “

Raul Guillermo Amigo, CEO and Founder at Umuntu CX Design, Speaker and Author

“CX is called to be one of the strategic pillars of modern business administration.

Marketing, Customer service. Market research, Customer understanding, Service & process design, Brand positioning, and Revenue generation will be functional to this new area of the company.

In my opinion, the next big challenge for CX are:

• To step forward from the basic Customer understanding, and take it to an ongoing flow of insights feed Customer Operations and Marketing,

• To build a unified vision inside the organization about what customer experience is,

• To ensure CX turning it into an actionable area of the company

• To create a culture where all employees are part of the solution and not part of the problem.

To overcome those challenges, you have to have an experiential framework per customer segment to explain the meaning attribution process, enriched with an AI tool to update it. Create an internal CX certification program to ensure the common understanding of what is and how to manage the customer experience. Apply design thinking to turn voice of the customer into design input and involve upper management to create a corporate strategy around CX.”

The post Customer Experience Challenges According to 15 CX Experts appeared first on Lumoa.

In doubts, I wanted to reach out to the thought leaders and influencers to know what they think of NPS, or rather, according to the best traditions of NPS, if they would recommend NPS to a fellow CX colleague. I’d love to specify from the very beginning, we focus on the Net Promoter System, not only on the Net Promoter Score (that actually changes a lot).

Now that we’re on the same page, I could go deeper into our small research. All the leaders were asked the same two questions:

1. How likely are you to recommend Net Promoter System to your CX colleagues? (on a scale 0 to 10, where 0 is not likely at all and 10 is very likely)

2. Why did you give that score?

We have received 31 answers from 31 recognized thought leaders, consultants, and great doers from all over the world across industries. Then we divided the answers according to the categorization of NPS – into promoters, passives, and detractors. 2 answers are marked “in doubt” because the participants provided the range of scores or no score at all.

Having mentioned that, I couldn’t help but calculate the Net Promoter Score of the Net Promoter System. 15 experts are very likely to recommend Net Promoter System to their CX colleagues (they are marked as”promoters”) and 6 wouldn’t do that (“detractors”).

That makes the NPS of NPS 32. 

Nevertheless, you probably already know that a score is just a number. What matters is why the score is as it is.

I let you dive into exploring the thoughts and opinions of the leaders and experts.

Jeanne Bliss

Customer Experience Practitioner & Pioneer, Keynote Speaker, and Author

Why? “I would recommend NPS but only as part of a listening path methodology.   Not as the only system used.  Companies need to employ multiple sources of information to tell the story of customers’ lives. And to prevent score chasing. The maturity of the organizations ability to use this rich information and leadership greatly determines the outcome of this or any listening system truly driving culture change that leads to improved customer and employee experiences.”

Blake Morgan

Customer Experience Futurist, Speaker, and Author

Why? “NPS is simple, to the point, and quick. This will tell companies if they are doing a good job or not. If they are not doing a good job they can quickly fix the situation with the customer.”

Ian Golding

Global Customer Experience Specialist and Certified Customer Experience Professional

Why? “Whilst I would like to say 10, in reality, it depends! If the recommendation question makes sense for the nature of the business, its industry, and customers, then I would score a 10. If it does not make sense, due to the question being inappropriate for the business or industry, I would say 0! As a rule, I would always suggest collecting NPS as one of several metrics (including CSAT and Customer Effort) unless there is a compelling reason why you should not. I would NEVER rely on NPS as the only measurement of customer perception.”

Jeannie Walters

TEDx Speaker, Customer Experience Expert, Trainer, Consultant, Podcaster

Why? “Tracking feedback of any kind helps leaders recognize when things are going well and when they are not. BUT it’s important to understand while this is a good tool, it’s not the only tool. Understanding different results and how they can blend together to help you see the big picture is critical. There is no perfect metric. People are nuanced and context is critical to really understand what customers want you to know! So while I’d recommend this as a tool for those who want to gather the right feedback, I wouldn’t say it’s the only one. Leaders need a toolbox to see the entire picture.”

Peter Lavers

Customer Experience and CRM Expert

Why? “NPS is NOT the answer to everything like some would have us believe – especially in corporate / B2B key account management where long-term trust and relationship quality are key. I’m also concerned about a) it’s a poor diagnostic, b) it turns a customer’s story into a number, and c) that the arguments for Customer Effort Score also have merit. So the answer is that I MAY recommend NPS, depending on my client’s situation & strategy.”

Sue Duris

Customer Experience and Digital Marketing Consultant

Why? “For organizations just starting with CX, NPS is a good gauge of loyalty. First, implementing NPS is fairly simple, you ask the NPS question along with its followup question (why did you choose that score?) Second, it’s a quick way for you to get a feel for who your promoters, passives, and detractors are to perhaps do some segmenting around that and develop campaigns to help convert detractors to promoters. Companies shouldn’t stop there, though.

NPS isn’t a one-and-done endeavor. NPS should be taken at regular intervals so you can monitor performance. Watch the trends. Is the number improving or declining? Focus on why and how the number is changing, and what is attributing to that change. This will give you the intel on how to take action to improve your relationship with the customer and improve their experience.  Treat NPS as part of a greater whole. NPS should be a part of your overall CX dashboard. Include NPS with CSAT, CES, FCR, employee engagement, emotion, etc. Based on your business, you may have additional KPI’s that you might want to add to your metrics dashboard. You won’t be able to see a complete picture of your customer experience without looking at all metrics. You want to see a complete view of your customers, what’s going on, trends, etc. to be able to identify actionable insights on which you can take action to improve the customer experience.”

Janne Ohtonen

Director of Customer Experience Management at Openet

Why? “This question cannot be answered with a single score as it depends on what my cx colleagues would be working on. My answer would be depending on their objectives, industry, products, the from a and services. For example, if they worked for the travel sector, it would make sense to ask NPS. But if they sold toilet paper, then I don’t believe NPS would be the best metric as it’s not likely people will be recommending TP to their friends and colleagues. Sure, NPS question is a hypothetical one (“How likely would you be to recommend…”), but I believe the best use of it is in situations where it is relevant and can be used literally, too. NPS System is not fit for all applications, but it is compelling when used right. However, nothing stops you replacing the question with something more appropriate for your business and using similar kind of systematic approach to serving the customers better through it. For B2B companies this answer gets even more complicated, but I’ll leave that for later, perhaps over a pint some day…”

Julia Ahlfeldt

Customer Experience Consultant and Strategic Leader

Why? “Overall, the NPS metric has been a positive addition to our profession, but it is not without faults, and it is sometimes used incorrectly by businesses. On the positive side, NPS provides a consistent methodology to measure consumer affinity for a brand. It can be used across sectors, and its prevalence has helped CX professionals garner the support of business leaders. On the downside, some organizations have latched onto NPS as the only CX score that matters, which can be counterproductive. NPS is a helpful strategic barometer for consumer opinion, but it doesn’t tell us why consumers are happy or unhappy. It’s also a lagging indicator, meaning it doesn’t help teams proactively flag and address customer experience issues in real-time. All of this goes to say that NPS can contribute to a brand’s customer-centric evolution, but the metric is not a silver bullet and should be used in conjunction with other insights. NPS can provide clarity on the status of CX efforts, but the voice of the customer lights the way to improved customer journeys.”

Chip Bell

Customer Loyalty Keynote Speaker, Trainer, Author

Why? “It thinks NPS has done a great job of elevating the topic of customer loyalty to C-suite conversations.  As NPS has found its way into leadership metrics, it has sharpened the focus on the customer’s evaluation, thus the importance of delivering superior service.  The other side, however, is that it can lull leaders into thinking it is all about the “score” and getting customers to indicate their “intent to recommend.”  Frankly, who cares what customers say they intend to do; what matters is what they actually do (behavior).  Also, there are many more factors important to understanding the customers’ evaluations other than their answers to “the ultimate question.”  Working with a large client we found that 1/3 of their customers indicated they would “never recommend,” no matter how intense their loyalty.  Working with another client we found the NPS question yielded a score in the low nineties (a call for celebration), yet a parallel question, “Have your recommended…” was in the low forties.  It was a wake-up call to leadership.  Finally, there are research studies that question the validity of the science behind NPS.”

Steve Towers

Customer Experience & BPM Visionary, Keynote Author, Board Advisor & Judge

Why? “The bias inherent within NPS makes the scoring highly subjective. Plus, NPS samples are insufficient i.e. of the total customer base how many responses would we need across a range of touchpoints to make NPS statistically valid? NPS is often misused to bonus people, creating sub-optimal customer experiences and the score begging problem again.

NPS can be likened to taking the temperature in weather forecasting. It is a bit of data, however, in weather forecasting, there are so many factors (wind, direction, strength, barometric pressure, humidity, dew points, etc.) we must measure to understand (a) what is the real weather, and (b) what does that mean going forward. Using NPS is like predicting the next ice age based on today’s temperature taken in isolation.”

Thomas Laursen

Chief Consultant at Customer Agency, NPS Certified Associate

Why? “Whether it is NPS®, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Effort Score, or something else, I would always recommend collecting customer feedback to gain insight about how customers are impacted by the experiences you leave with them.
Obtaining a score is less important though. It is just a number and will change nothing for your organization. Only if you choose to act on customer feedback, will you be able to achieve positive results that impact the customer experience. The Net Promoter System provides the opportunity for you to act by closing the loop on both a tactical and strategic level. But there are other important aspects to consider as well if you strive to create great customer experiences. Some of the aspects I work to uncover as a consultant are these: Is your organization ready to embrace change? Have you identified where to focus on the customer journey to create the biggest impact? And are you able to concretize your actions and finally monitor the impact of those actions on the customer experience? Addressing these questions is paramount, certainly, if you want to use customer experience as a differentiator.”

Mike Wittenstein

Management Consultant and Managing Partner at Storyminers

Why? “NPS is great for companies who are just beginning to look at their customer’s experience and don’t know where to start. An NPS score is like a pointer. If you use it, it will point you to problem areas that matter to customers—but it doesn’t do the work for you!

Many people think that getting a better score is the point of NPS. It’s not. Creating a better business that delivers more value to customers is the real point. As recent industry surveys show, NPS scores don’t reward companies that ‘game’ the system. NPS scores reward outcomes, not efforts.”

Adam Toporek

Customer Service Expert, Speaker, and Author

Why? “Too often people use NPS as a standalone metric without using the many pieces of the puzzle needed to make it successful. However, the Net Promoter System — which includes things like the timing of surveys, transactional versus relational NPS, and closing the loop — can be an effective approach to improving customer experience. Of course, no single metric can ever give a comprehensive view of an organization’s customer experience and no single system will be the perfect match for every organization. Context is everything, but when used well, the Net Promoter System can be a powerful tool for customer experience improvement.”

Abdalla Elbadawy

Customer Experience Manager at HUED, Leading Consulting Firm in The Arabian peninsula

Why? “Conceptually, NPS is a good indicator for starting CX measurement discussions considering its context whether it’s on a product/service “operational” or a brand level “strategic”, nature of the product “service-good continuum”, frequency of customer interaction with the company, frequency of NPS measurement rounds, etc. But, NPS can also be misleading if it’s not a part of a more comprehensive VoC program amongst other measurement tools and metrics, and ideally this VoC program to be part of a complete “Market Information System”.

On another note, NPS has also been a target for criticism from both academic and business worlds and that’s why I believe Satmetrix’s NPS needs to be redesigned and

I believe they started to do so.”

Dougie Cameron

Customer Experience and Contact Centre Consultant

Why? “First of all let me say that I think NPS is better than nothing for measuring customer experience, but it is far from a panacea. For that reason, I would score it a 6 which is, of course,100% worse than a score of 9 in NPS maths. Obviously, I scored it 6 precisely to show the folly of this metric.

My main problem with NPS is that it is pseudo-science packaged as a sophisticated tool. Let me explain myself.

Anyone who has run an NPS system will know that, unless it is used over very large samples and trends averaged over long time scales, then it is an exceptionally volatile measure. And do you react to every bump in a volatile measure? Of course, you don’t.

Why is it so volatile? Because a 6 is worth 100% less than 9 and is worth the same as zero – such a highly geared measure will always be impossibly spiky.

Organizations that are focused on this metric tend to be NPS-obsessed rather than customer-obsessed. They are literally looking in the wrong direction – buried in spreadsheet analysis, always on the back foot, trying to understand “why?”. How can you understand what is happening to the customer experience with a spiky trend? You can’t!

For me, the mean average of a 5 point scale is a better directional indicator of customer experience over time. Outliers still need attention but the simplicity gives executives and the front line the best timely indication if things are getting better.

So, NPS is better than nothing. But only just.”

Andy Hanselman

Customer Experience Expert and Speaker

Why? “I love the simplicity of NPS and it’s a great way of ‘taking the pulse’ of a business when it comes to customer satisfaction. The best businesses build it into the way they do things and get ownership at every level, and that’s the key. It’s about integrating it into ‘the way we do things around here’ and it’s relatively easy to do that compared to other feedback mechanisms.  Business leaders tell me that they also like the fact that they can compare their scores to other ‘benchmark’ businesses and this brings a tangibility to it.  Interestingly, I encourage businesses to combine NPS with one other question: “Are you / were you COMPLETELY happy with what we’re doing do/did?” followed by “Why / Why not?” It’s a tough question, but helps get real insights into what customers think.”

Shep Hyken 

Keynote Speaker and Bestselling Author

Why? “I love the simplicity of NPS. The Net Promoter Score (not to be confused with the Net Promoter System) gives great insight into intent to recommend based on experience. You can assess if the experience was met or exceed expectations, was just average or less than stellar – with just one simple number. But, that is just the start. The “system” helps you gain understanding and take action on the number (the result of the survey). Knowing the number is one thing. Knowing the “why” behind the number and how to use it to gain a competitive advantage is another. I’ve been a Fred Reichheld and NPS fan since the mid-1990s when I first read “The Loyalty Effect.”

Ted Rubin

Leading Social Marketing Strategist, Keynote Speaker, Brand Evangelist

Why? “I think companies desperately need to understand how consumers think about them on a regular basis. Customer Experience is now, more than ever before, the key to success. Brands need to start measuring and looking at how a strong Social presence affects their NPS quarter to quarter. Getting better returns from social involves creating a social-by-design strategy that incorporates three core elements into the process…

• Community: A Network Gives You Reach, But A Community Gives You Power! Networks Connect… Communities Care!

• Conversation: Old marketing was dictation… new marketing is communication. Change from Convince & Convert to Converse & Convert

• Identity: If you are only focused on the Money… You risk completely overlooking the People.

For existing products, it is defining how existing social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) can support achieving business goals (ROI) and grow or communicate the value that is accrued by a brand due to nurturing a relationship (ROR, Return on Relationship). NPS can be a key to this understanding and evolution.

Being social drives engagement; engagement drives loyalty and advocacy, and both correlate directly to increased sales.”

Jim Tincher

Journey Mapper-In-Chief, Heart of the Customer

Why? “Let’s start with the score. NPS isn’t a score: It’s a religion. Participants advocate that it’s the one true score and that those who don’t follow it don’t get it. There’s nothing wrong with the score, but there’s also nothing magical about it. However, like any good religion, NPS does give you guidance to do the right thing. In this case, that’s the Net Promoter System – the process to follow up with people who are unhappy and work to fix that.

Organizations can have great results if they are disciplined in following the system. But the same can be said for companies using the Customer Effort Score or even old-fashioned satisfaction. In fact, MaritzCX conducted a study (Customer Experience Maturity Leads to Financial Gain) that showed that which score you used had little impact on your results – it was how you used the scores that mattered.

To summarize, there’s nothing wrong with using NPS. But there’s nothing particularly magical about it, either. What’s critical is the discipline to focus more on engaging customers than to chase a specific score.”

Mitch Lieberman

CRM Industry Advisor, Speaker, Award-winning Blogger

Why? “Satisfaction is determined by the Experience as seen through the lens of Expectation.” NPS is a combination of two things: a measure of my personal satisfaction with a particular product or service AND whether or not I want to then recommend it to someone else. I have been part of organizations that use NPS and where it shows pretty lines on a chart, it does not correlate with either loyalty nor revenue.

I will state up front that I am not a big fan of NPS because it is overly simplistic. The first problem, within the definition “would you” – there is one word is the difference between a passive opinion when asked a question and the more important question that should be asked “will you” active. People are social and emotional, the nature of who we are, simple. When one does some primary research, it is clear that not everyone who expresses satisfaction with a product or service will recommend that product and not everyone who recommends a product is satisfied with it, this is especially true for luxury items as well as my example below.

Example: I recently had the interior of my house painted. I was extremely satisfied with the outcome. The finished project exceeded my expectations, the project was completed within budget, but it did take a bit longer than expected. In the end, there is no chance I would recommend the company; the owner did not treat his employees well, it had nothing to do with the product or service.

Summarizing the example as it fits or does not within NPS; The emotional elements (emotional job) of the interactions with a product or service are among the most important contributors to whether someone is satisfied (the customer experience exceeded expectations) with the product or service. Satisfaction is much closer to repeat purchases and loyalty, thus to revenue – therefore, with the increasing commoditization of certain types of products, it seems that a better approach would be to track satisfaction separately.

Recommending a measure such as NPS to another organization requires a deep understanding of their product, service, customers, and those customers jobs, both practical and emotional.”

Jeremy Watkin

Director of Customer Experience at FCR

Why? “I’m fairly neutral in my view of NPS for a couple of reasons. First, before recommending it to a colleague, I want to understand what their goals are. If they want customers that are willing to recommend the company to a friend, then absolutely I’d recommend NPS. There might, however, be certain companies and situations where Customer Effort Score or Customer Satisfaction are more appropriate. Another reason I’m neutral is the customer feedback loop. The feedback we receive from customers and the means by which we close the loop with them is quite possibly more important than the method used to collect it. Furthermore, be sure the survey is integrated within your customer experience and simple and to the point in order to maximize the response rate.”

Sean Crichton-Browne

Head of Global Partnerships & Customer Engagement at MarketCulture, Keynote Speaker, Workshop Facilitator

Why? “I have seen NPS used well by some companies that do it across the entire company internationally and externally. I have the seen others use it in silos and where they want to use it which can manipulate the score. Imagine I am an insurance company and will only score those that we agree to pay and not those that we don’t. NPS is only an indicator of whether or not the company is moving in the right direction and it takes customers to respond to make it work. More don’t respond than respond. If I collect only the scores, it does not tell me what I have to do to fix it. I think a lot of companies hide behind the score and really don’t do much to fix it.”

Davide Chiavelli

Customer Experience Management and Analytics Consultant at CIQUAL

Why? “NPS is proven to be directly correlated with companies’ growth, so its use is a very sound business practice (Bain made quite a few studies on it, on top of the fact they invented it as a metric!)”

Jane Treadwell-Hoye

CCXP and Managing Director at epifani

Why? “NPS is merely a single point-in-time measurement tool and yet many people bank their entire customer experience strategy on this. Too few organizations focus on the verbatim comments, ie the actual voices of their customers, and fixate on the number. Senior Leadership teams are easily distracted by the number and fail to appreciate that it’s the tangible actions that you take, based on the insights you gain, that drive the changes that will improve the number. Focus on the experience you are delivering the number will take care of itself.  I am also always keen to ensure that any strategy off the back of an NPS program includes targeted approaches for all 3 answer groups – the detractors, the passives, and the promoters. You must have clear plans of action for each group as activating your promoters and recognizing the power of their advocacy for your brand is as essential as addressing the issues raised by your detractors. If you focus on the experience you are delivering the number will take care of itself.”

James Dodkins

CX Revolutionist, Keynote Speaker and Author

Why? “NPS surveys (as well as many other feedback mechanisms) are self-selecting. They are retrospective. They aren’t specific enough. You mostly get extreme results. The results are easily swayed and turning complex emotions into numbers is a very inexact science. Nothing shows a customer how little you care about their actual situation faster than trying to reduce their feelings and emotions to a number that fits into a predetermined scale.

Basically, it doesn’t matter what discipline or what platform you use to measure customer feedback, if you need to measure how well you are delivering a customer experience through feedback surveys you are doing something wrong. If you truly know, your customer, their needs and successful outcomes you would already be measuring the things that contribute towards satisfaction and loyalty in real-time, during the experience.”

Michael Redbord

Vice President and General Manager, Customer Hub at HubSpot

Why? “NPS is simple benchmarkable, and consistent. The key is in *how* you use it. When leaders overfocus on the score, NPS can become a frustrating corporate goal setting exercise. When leaders focus on the process of feedback, you end up putting the customer first. And, in fact, putting the customer first is what makes his score go up over time, too! Many, many organizations aren’t set up to broadly intake, deeply understand, and fully action customer feedback – NPS can be an excellent vehicle to put your customers first if done correctly.“

Andrew McFarland

Senior Vice President, Chief Customer Officer at Black Box

Why? “Two notable advantages to NPS are its simplicity and notoriety but what I appreciate most is that NPS is judgmental and predictive.

NPS is judgmental because it assigns a value to each response. The usefulness of NPS comes from the research that has gone into correlating scores with marketplace value. Customers who rate you low (detractors) harm your company while those who rate you high (promoters) help your business.

As a comparison point, consider traditional surveys. Scores range somewhere along the good – bad continuum and a company might compute an average score of 8.8 and declare victory. But how valuable is 8.8? And what about the customers that pulled the average down? This method fails to indicate how good or how bad.   The other key value of NPS is its predictive nature. Because of the words “likely” and “would recommend” the question asks about intent and is forward-looking. Traditional surveys help understand how your company did but fail to tie past performance to future results. NPS bridges that gap to give companies a powerful tool to transform their businesses.

Regardless of which system Customer Experience practitioners use they must ensure their company is aligned to deliver an “intentional” experience they choose to deliver to the customers they choose to serve. Otherwise, the “accidental” experience will be reflected in entirely predictable survey results.”

Steve Curtin

Author of Delight Your Customers, Fan of Exceptional Customer Service

Why? “I value the NPS because it’s based on an easy-to-understand question and produces an easy-to-interpret score. Too often, organizations overcomplicate the process of gathering customer feedback by asking too many questions and accepting the abysmal response rates that result from the survey’s complexity. And then, once obtained, the feedback is often marginalized by ignoring the survey respondents, the feedback itself, or both. While other worthwhile indicators of customer experience quality exist (E.g., intent to return/repurchase, value for the price paid, customer effort, etc.), if you’re going to ask one question, I think the NPS question is it.”

Hayk Asriyants

Top 100 changemakers in Central and Eastern Europe

Why? “There’s several frameworks, metrics, and other tools to measure and manage customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, but Net Promoter Systems stands out among them with its comprehensiveness and universality.  It can be used in both B2C and B2B settings, but it also comes in handy for HR and OD professionals to improve the employee experience — even the candidate selection and recruitment process.

Net Promoter System has another important advantage as it engages the whole organization — from frontline to senior executives. It recommends processes to promote the individual learning based on feedbacks received after interactions with customers, and it also helps prioritize cross-functional initiatives aimed at improving the customer experience.  Last but not least, it’s a dynamic, constantly evolving framework. Its authors (who have generously “open-sourced” it) and tens of thousands of practitioners are in a dialogue through research, podcasts, and informal online communities.”

Bill Macaitis

Advisor & Board Member, former CMO of Slack and Zendesk

Why? “I am a huge fan of NPS. NPS gives you so many incredible benefits, like the simplicity or the base for your incentive system. With that, you can fundamentally change your company’s direction. If you’re a customer-driven company, and you’re not measuring NPS yet, that is one of the best things you can do to finally transform your company.”

The post We Asked 30 CX Influencers if They Would Recommend the Net Promoter System appeared first on Lumoa.

Many startups think that customer experience management equals unnecessary work and financial costs. However, more and more startups that emphasize the uniqueness of customer relationships are growing faster than ever. Some of the familiar names include the two fastest growing companies in the world, Slack and Intercom.

What unites these two amazing companies?

You might already have guessed that customer is in the heart of all their operations.

To understand that better, I talked to Jeff Gardner, Head of Platform Partnerships, former Director of Support and Customer Success at Intercom. Jeff joined Intercom as the 4th employee, customer support engineer, in 2012 and since then has built a large customer support and customer success team. Worth mentioning, that Intercom has been investing in building customer relationships from day 1 and believes that customer-centric strategy is what every company should follow.

I wanted to learn what stands behind Intercom’s mission “making business personal” and how other tech startups could use their experience.

Lesson #1 Bring value to your customers

Often, many early-stage startups totally miss out with their product, as they go way off too deep to “delight and impress”. In reality, they end up having a product that doesn’t bring much value. That means that the company spends tons of time and money on a product that people don’t necessarily need. Often, many early-stage startups that skip proof of concept steps totally miss out with their product, as they go way off too deep to “delight and impress”.

You have to work together with your customers to build a product that answers their needs. Let it be functional rather than have an advanced visual design.

Lesson #2 – Everything is going to change. All the time.

“I used to tell my team – if you don’t like what we’re doing right now, it’s fine. Just wait for 6 months and we’ll be forced to change it anyways.”

Intercom used to reorganize, redefine, redo everything they do about every 6 months. In the early days, it was even faster than that. If you’re comfortable with that level of change and you are ready for “imperfection”, it’ll be a great journey for both you mentally and for your business. Jeff shared that providing 80% of solutions is often already enough for most startups most of the time.

Lesson #3 Measure customer experience. Constantly.

You should constantly measure customer experience. Constantly ask if you’re doing a good job for your customers. Are you not only deliver a value and a good product but also looking after your customers properly? Do you treat them as humans, building relationships? Are you proud of how of how you dealing with them?

“Use all the metrics you want, but in the end, it comes down to “How many customers would you be terrified to run into someday in public? Would you be afraid that they attack you after you said something in support message last week? Would they give you a hug?”- Jeff jokes.

Lesson #4 Don’t be afraid to make radical decisions

Perfection comes hard way in a startup and everything that you do, not excluding customer care could relate to that. “You need to know that you will have to let some customers go every now and then. You need to know that you will let down some customers, over time. And that’s going to be ok.” Pricing raises another discussion. Customers often get angry if you change prices, but these changes are necessary parts of growing a business. “If you’re going to take more perspective, it will be a lot easier.”

Lesson #5 Metrics help to understand the bigger picture. Feedback will let you dive deeper into it.

“At Intercom, we use NPS to measure customer loyalty and CSAT for customer support. Those are two important numerical drivers for us. We also think a lot about churn and retention. If customers are sticking with us, it’s a good sign that they are happy and are getting something out of our product.”

Metrics are used to see the bigger picture, to understand generically how things are going. Very quickly those metrics lead you to start asking deeper questions, so you have to start digging into the NPS and CSAT text feedback. Jeff mentions, that they also actually talk to their customers to understand better what drives customer experience.

“I think NPS is a very helpful number. If you have a system in place when you frequently ask your customers, you will have an idea of how valuable your product is. At the same time, I do think that the most important and, at the same time, the hardest is to analyze all the comments that come together. It is not enough just to answer to the comments, you need to categorize them and then deeply understand what’s going on with every category. Is there a variance within it or does every person say the same thing? Only then NPS becomes much more interesting, as it becomes much more qualitative. Now you can start a conversation “Should we do that to improve this?” instead of just looking at the number and asking “should we just turn this feature off?” You understand the motives better”

Lesson #6 Everyone is responsible for customer experience

People are giving or not giving value to your product when they have a good or bad experience with it for whatever reason.

It could be a bad customer support, or the product didn’t work properly, it could be buggy, or fundamentally they were not getting enough value for the price they were paying – all these things are part of customer experience. “It’s a false myth that customer support, customer success or customer experience teams are the only ones responsible for customer experience. The product team, for example, is also very responsible for customer experience. If the product team builds something which is crap – obviously, people will have a bad experience with it.

It’s important to remember that it’s not only the customer-facing teams are responsible for customer experience, it’s the entire company.”

Lesson #7 Scale sustainably

Intercom has been growing extremely fast and their challenge is how to scale. “In any business where you’re growing quickly, it is hard to grow at a pace which is sustainable and good for the people within the team. It could be easy to outsource and hire a support team of 500 people, but it will never result in great customer support or in people that feel a real connection to the product. You will lose the core of support – caring.”

Intercom has spent a lot of time on hiring, especially in the early periods. Now there are a lot of people on the team (20-30 out of 100) who are able to interview and hire. That makes hiring a lot easier and faster. They also put a lot of time to onboard new employees. People who join customer support team get almost 2 months to understand how it all works. The onboarding starts from baseline training like reading and learning and goes to pairing up with the most experienced employees. “We know that after 2 months, they’ll be ready to do a really great job.”

Lesson #8 Build omnichannel solid experience

Over the last 18 months, Intercom is testing a new approach to support and sales teams. They have basically been united into one large customer-facing team. “The real benefit is that we see all customer journeys, all customer experiences as one thing. Usually, support and sales don’t talk to each other. Now we’re actually one team, so it’s easier to get in one room and say “this type of customers should skip support, and go directly to our relationship manager, so let’s make sure that happens smoothly” or “this type of customers should never ever see sales, because they’re too small and sales gets in their way.” It’s nice to think holistically and decide which kind of experience we want to build for this type of customer and how to put that into place.

It worked really well for us because of how customer-centric our sales leader turned out to be. Sales are still very sales-focused, and Support is still very support-focused but we now share lots of the stuff that overlaps, like a great ops team to help to forecast demand, planning headcount, etc.”

Lesson #9 Customer support is not a cost

Jeff also shared a recent case of how customer support helped to significantly boost business metrics: “We have known for a while that most of the conversations that a customer will have with us happen within the first 24-48 hours. Almost all the conversations happen within the first 3 months. Then we looked up what were these conversations about and the main topic turned out to be onboarding, understanding the product, understanding the features, and really a lot of questions on how to get make the setup properly with all the installations and integrations.

Our support has been fairly fast – we answered in under an hour 24/7 for years. Now we decided to give instantaneous live chat support to brand new intercom users just for that early period in order to get them through that setup phase and help them see value in our product faster.

What we did is that we set up A/B test for all the sign-ups that were coming in: one half of the group had under 1-hour standard email support, the other half of the group – the new live chat support for the first 3 months.

The results have been amazing. both the business metrics like conversion rate improved, and CSAT and NPS of those people also largely improved. It was clear that those customers enjoyed our product more, went through setup and saw value in our product much faster, they became happier customers, stick around longer and paid us more.

A lot of other companies think of live chat style interactions as a very expensive thing. This time we could say that it helped us to earn extra money, we couldn’t have gotten otherwise.”  Check this article from Intercom to find more about how real-life support drives higher conversion.

The post 9 Lessons Of Growth And Customer Experience From Intercom appeared first on Lumoa.

To stay ahead of the time and to be successful, it is crucial to follow the newest trends in CX. There’re great professionals who feel the customer pains and embrace their successes. We introduce a new column in our blog – “Experts in the Spotlight” with our first guest, Jim Tincher.

Jim, CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional), is a founder of a CX consulting agency, Heart of the Customer, and sees the world in a special way: through the eyes of customers. Jim is a big fan of customer journey mapping and helps companies of all sizes – from startups to largest corporations to improve customer-focused results.

We had a talk with Jim on the future of customer experience and current trends in the field and wanted to share our findings with you.

State of CX – where are we going?

“Since I started, customer experience and, specifically, customer journey mapping have become much more popular than before. The challenge is that you have to adapt, learn very quickly and grow with it.

Right now, companies are working on bringing value through customer experience. How can we drive business value through customer experience? It’s relatively easy to start “doing Customer Experience” in a company, but how can you ensure results that will benefit both your business and your customers?”

The paradox of choice – too much or too little?

“In America and also in Europe, the individual choice rules consumer behavior in many aspects. Everyone wants to feel unique and make their own unique choices. The companies follow the customer desires – so they provide us with a variety of choice. At the end of the day, sales numbers fall because customers are lost and overwhelmed.”

Jim referred to a famous jam study, conducted in 1995 by Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia University and the author of “The Art of Choosing.” In a supermarket, the professor with her students set up two jam testing sessions. Every few hours they switched from demonstrating 24 jams to 6. After customers tasted the jams, which on average in both cases were 2 tastes, they received a discount coupon to buy the jam.

As we know, larger choice drives higher satisfaction rates. 60% of all shoppers stopped at a booth with 24 jams and the number dropped to 40% when there were only 6 jams presented. The surprising discovery was that when six jams were presented, 30% of shoppers purchased, whereas when 24 were offered, the purchase rate was only 3%.

“Customers want choices, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to choose.” – Jim concludes, – “When you analyze customer satisfaction, more choices will usually win, but when you check the business results, managing fewer choices works better. Although it’s important to have those choices available, you need to filter them down to a manageable size, then give your customers what they need.”

The future of feedback analysis – text and voice analytics.

“Collecting customer feedback might seem very easy, but it all escalates very quickly if you don’t have a system in place. Make sure the right people are following the process and the feedback is curated in a sustainable way.

Some larger organizations might immediately get 5.000 to 10.000 individual comments. How do you manage that? Are you going to read through every each of them? Probably not. How can you make sure that all of the comments are reviewed in such a way that they have an impact on your business? You need technology that can sort them out.

I am a big fan of text and voice analytics. There’s a recent study in the automotive sector that the more surveys your customers receive, the less they spend on your services. So, companies need to be smarter about how to collect feedback. We’re moving away from the standard “give-me-a-number“ survey and are going towards “how-did-you-feel-about-the-service“, open-ended questions. Text and voice analytics dive deep into that and essentially, if you wish, create a score based on how customers actually felt. Hopefully, that system will change the way we analyze feedback in 5-10 years.”

“Text analytics help you to hear the real voice of the customer.”

Jim mentioned another case, study of Jiffy Lube, an oil change provider in the United States. The company used an NPS® survey, yet they couldn’t tie the scores to any business results. Once they analyzed the text, they found if their customers wrote words “ease” or “efficiency” at least 1% more often, the revenue went up by $14k. When customers mentioned words such as “management” or “respect,” sales were lower. “That’s where text analytics really help – you understand what your customers are actually saying, not only the numbers they happen to click on the survey.“

It’s not about the score, but the system: NPS.

“Plenty of customer experience professionals refer to NPS as very predictive, while others completely disagree. I say that it varies by the company or the industry. For example, we worked with the financial services company and asked the standard NPS question: “How likely are you to recommend [company] to a friend or colleague?” A surprising amount of people said they don’t discuss finances with their friends or colleagues. As a result, the scores were low, even though the customers actually liked the service.”

Recently, Bruce Temkin found out that 43% of CX professionals prefer NPS to other metrics, but also 42% of those consider NPS just “another metric”. “We’re stepping away from the idea that NPS is “the only” metric and thinking more like it’s “just another” metric.”

“For me, the main problem of NPS is that people focus too much on the wrong ‘S.’ They think about the Net Promoter Score instead of the Net Promoter System. Companies miss out when they just focus on the score and don’t go deep into the text responses. Text analytics let you see all kinds of customer motivations, and show you whys.

If you want to bring customer feedback into your organization – requirement #1 is to have a broad cross-functional team. Have all your employees involved so that they’re interested in and active in the process and you don’t have to push your organization alone. If you want to be successful, you should think strategically, find the right people to join you, and also learn the best practices from others (you could check Jim’s blog for great insights! – author’s note). Follow the changes and trends in customer experience, I do believe we’re going to see more of text and voice analytics at work.”

The post Text Analytics as Future of Customer Experience? We Asked Jim Tincher. appeared first on Lumoa.