The Corporate Woman » Customer Experience

Part 1 – Metrics: Customer Satisfaction and/or Customer Loyalty

Tabitha — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:19:59 +0000

I thought I would begin this discussion with the same place most people start thinking about a customer experience based program – what do I measure? Some version of this question is the most frequent one that I get from people and companies starting out on their journey. And I’d like to offer a straight forward, easy answer but really the answer is… it depends.

Let’s start with Customer Satisfaction vs. Customer Loyalty (including NPS) – what are you going to use it for?

Customer satisfaction is all about us – the company/product/service/employees – how did we do?
Customer loyalty is all about your customers and their behavior – what stories will they tell about you? What will they say when someone asks them what they think about a company/product/service?

Picking one or the other (or using both) starts with knowing how you will use the data once you get it.

Customer satisfaction – great for repeatable events (like customer support or field service) that need a customer based metric on the scorecard and to drive repeatable excellence in the customer experience.
Customer loyalty – great for determining what stories customer’s are telling about you. Good at showing (or even predicting) customer lifetime value. Excellent source of customer feedback for product or brand improvement suggestions.

Once you’ve decided how you want customer feedback to apply to your business, it becomes easier to answer questions like “how often do I ask?” and “what method do I use to get the customer’s feedback?” or even “at what level do I ask the question (brand/product/service)?” **We’ll get to these questions in my next post in this series.**

I’m big on actionable information. I like to know what business questions customer feedback will answer or what business problems customer feedback will resolve. It helps me find the right focus for applying customer metrics. My program team is service oriented – we are here to help our business partners across the company and improve the customer experience at the same time. This is important because it is feedback from the customers and my business partners that help fuel how I design a program.

These are my thoughts. What do you think? Share your experience with me.

A delay and an apology…

Tabitha — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 23:40:44 +0000

Well, I confess that I have gone awry in my writing as of late. My apologies for that. My confessions of ineptitude are mere excuses (life got in the way, shoulder injury, poor sleep, etc…) and I shall do my best to do better This week, I will kick off my thoughts on the core of a successful customer experience program and I look forward to hearing from you as we go. Onwards to Part 1 of the discussion!

The core of a customer experience program

Tabitha — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:31:10 +0000

With so many customer experience programs beginning, many people are asking, “Where do I start?” It’s a question that I have heard often enough that I thought I might do a blog series on what you want to focus on in the first year of your customer experience program. And it might be interesting for those of you who are already well under way in your program.

Here are the areas we will cover together in the next couple of weeks:

Strategy:
- Appetite for risk
- Customer focus
- Embracing innovation
People:
- Executive buy-in
- Employee engagement
- Company culture
Metrics:
- Satisfaction and loyalty
- Customer retention
- Customer lifetime value

I look forward to hearing what you think as we go through these topics.

Chief Customer Officer – My Dream Job

Tabitha — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:30:08 +0000

I have been recently reading the Forrester article titled Customer Experience Executives’ Top Priorities for 2010 and one of the things that jumped out at me is that concept that “Chief Customer Officers will become as common as Chief Marketing Officers”. Interesting thought to those of us in the field. It’s a dream job for me from a career perspective. The chance to continue advancing in the career I’ve come to love is exciting. Companies who embrace customer experience as a discipline are understanding that customer insights are a potentially untapped asset within their company and digging deep to understand your customers makes them happier and your company more financially successful long term.

What do you think? Is Chief Customer Officer going to become a popular position?

A confessed customer experience geek

Tabitha — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:32:14 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to listen to Robert Stephens, of Geek Squad fame, and I was fascinated with one particular image he shared, which I immediately and shamelessly appropriated. I loved hearing him speak and then he showed a Venn diagram (shown below) and really won me over. Yes, I do enjoy a really good Venn diagram. Come on, be honest who doesn’t love them?

The ultimate venn diagram.

I loved this because it resonated with how I think – really fit me and the way I think about customer experience and what I am fortunate to be able to do as a living. So here I am – openly confessing that I am a customer experience Geek! And what a great way to describe the definition of a geek (although I confess to a smidgen of social ineptitude on occasion, so perhaps it’s not always a perfect fit).

So when intelligence and obsession focus on the customer, you get what I love to do. How about you? Are you a geek? If so, what kind?

**UPDATE** It appears that some are asking about the Venn diagram itself. As in – “what goes in the bit where social ineptitude and intelligence meet?” Answer: Apparently, dweeb. I do not make this stuff up, I promise!

Jun 8, 2010 – Image updated to include “Dweeb.”

When predictability is good or “How to Train your Dragon”

Tabitha — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 23:20:37 +0000

My husband and I took our seven year old daughter to see the new 3D movie “How to Train Your Dragon” this weekend. http://www.howtotrainyourdragon.com/ We thoroughly enjoyed it – funny, sweet, well designed and yes, predictable. I found it interesting, hearing some of the negative comments from the other movie goers regarding that very predictability.

Perhaps it’s just me (and I trust you to tell me if I’ve gone awry) but when did predictable become a negative thing?

When I go to a movie with my child, I want some predictability. I want to know that we won’t have a repeat of the Happy Feet experience. We are going for a certain type of fun and it’s satisfying when you get what you pay for.

This is a customer experience, right? I think that many customer experiences are based in a need for predictability. You have expectations and you want those expectations delivered upon. Do you know what qualities your customer’s expect to have every time they use your product? Do you know how important that predictability is to them? Do have measures in place to ensure you don’t break those most predictable moments?

Maybe, just maybe, predictability is a lot better than we think.

Mapping your customer experience

Tabitha — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:58:25 +0000

In discussing a customer touchpoint mapping project recently, I was asked this question, “Have you formulated your ROI for this project yet?” Well, no… at the beginning stages of this type of project (touchpoint mapping, customer expectations capture, gap analysis) you simply don’t know what your ROI is going to be, mostly because you have no idea what problems you’ll identify. All of the ROI glory goes to the projects that come out of a customer touchpoint mapping project.

I think this is the reason why so many companies don’t make the effort to do it. Because it’s hard to quantify up front. Because some people have that little voice sing-songing “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, never realizing that we might not think it is broken, but our customers might.

Having done these types of projects before, I know they can have tremendous positive impact (increase revenue, improve cusotmer loyalty, even attract more customers). But the patience and willingness to invest (time, resources and money) for the currently unquantifiable gain, that’s hard to find. What do you think holds companies back from doing these types of projects?

Customer Experience Professional

Tabitha — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:36:18 +0000

Customer experience is a growing specialty field. It goes by many names and titles but the disciplines are quite similar. As a member of this growing group of practitioners, I’m fascinated with the backgrounds where my colleagues come from. Many are from market research backgrounds (since getting the customer feedback is where you start a program) but mine is a different path. I come from an improvement background (project management, Lean Six sigma, program development, etc). I believe the heart of a customer experience program is identifying and driving customer fed improvements.

Measure – analyze – act – measure.

I’ve had the pleasure to work in this specialty for ten years now. I continue to be fascinated and challenged. I wonder where this career path will go. I’ve heard some say that it doesn’t have “legs to grow with” as a career path or that it is limited in executive potential but I don’t agree. I believe that the growth of social media highlights the potential need for even more people to participate in this discipline and more companies to adopt it. Customers are demanding to be heard. Customer experience professionals are here to listen and learn, using that customer voice to help companies grow and make customers happier at the same time. What do you think? Where is this field going?

2009 – Kicking off the new year

Tabitha — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:33:34 +0000

The holidays are over and I am back to work after my longest vacation off in my working history. It was lovely but it will come as no surprise to those close to me when I mention that I managed to snag an awful virus and was sick for the whole two weeks. I am still dragging through the dregs of it… All of that aside, it was a lovely and quiet holiday, filled with family time and I treasure the opportunity I had.

And now, it is time to work with my team to put definition to the strategy elements for 2009. This is always such a great time of year for work, in my opinion. I love looking at the long term plan, figuring out what needs to be done this year to get to fulfill that vision and breaking it down to quarterly chunks. This is the year for retention and customer focus, no doubt about that. Any company not thinking in those terms are going to have an even tougher year.

Step one – find our retention version of the angled measuring cup. If you haven’t heard the President of Oxo International talk about this invention and how it fulfills their principles, you missed out (http://gelconference.com/videos/). In short, it’s time to find a clearer way of looking at the information to better understand what our challenges are.

Step two – use that information to make the customer experience even better, so we are able to deliver more value to our customers and they want to stay with us longer.

Which brings me back to the beginning – it’s time to plan! Is that what you are doing this month?

One more day…

Tabitha — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:35:01 +0000

I have a lovely, long holiday planned with my husband and daughter. Sixteen days off. A rare thing in my life. Normally, I only have a week off at a time (total of nine days), so this rarity will be something to treasure. I’ve spent a fair amount of time the past few weeks encouraging my team to do the same. For a Customer Insights organization, the end of the year is not a crazy one like some parts of the org, more a time to wrap up projects.

I believe in setting a goal to try to get to zero by the end of the year when it comes to vacation time. There is a reason we get that time off – it’s for balance, for health – both physcial and mental. And it’s important to take time off. This year, I won’t quite make zero – I’ll be short by a day and a half but that’s pretty darn close. And it’s important to remember that there’s no award or recognition for not taking time off. So if you are one of those types – you know the ones, the hoarders of time (I am a reformed hoarder, so I know what it’s like) – then try it for just one year. Make it your goal in 2009 to get to zero vacation days by the end of the year. You never know, if you try it once, you might find you’ll never go back to hoarding again.