As the concept of customer experience becomes more prevalent across all industries, companies are working to keep up with how to translate the idea into tangible business benefits. Dana Hyatt, VP of Customer Experience within the Thomson Reuters Tax & Accounting division, recently spoke at the 2015 Engagement and Experience Expo during a session titled, “Creating Effective CX can be ‘Taxing’ yet Financially Valuable within the ‘Walls of Marketing.’”
The creation of Hyatt’s position, she explained, was the result of Thomson Reuters finding itself data-heavy, but action-light. The company had an immense amount of data, but failed to use the information to connect with customers on a deeper level.
Hyatt’s title places her within the marketing division of the company, but she’s made an effort to put her customer experience fingerprints on every part of Thomson Reuter’s Tax & Accounting division.
“I don’t wait to be invited to meetings [in other departments],” said Hyatt. “I wait to be asked to leave.”
Customer surveys are a tried and true method of gathering valuable insight, but consumers today are becoming less engaged with survey participation. Thomson Reuters faced this problem, and couldn’t reliably draw actionable insights from the channel. Rather than abandoning the process due to declining response rates, Hyatt elected to approach survey communication from a marketing standpoint.
“I told my colleagues in marketing that this should be run like a campaign.” Hyatt continued, “I’ll give you the nuts and bolts, but I need you to write the text and make it more personable. We need to tell them what we’re going to do with the feedback, and give them a summary of what they told us. Just by incorporating these best practices, we saw a huge increase in response rate.”
To extend the customer experience culture to employees, the company created “CX Moves.”
This is a quarterly video that features CX employees and teams that have done something great in the field of customer experience. Beyond the video, employees are encouraged to share their own stories through the redesigned Thomson Reuters customer experience web page. The page has proved successful in engaging employees and making CX a truly companywide effort from top to bottom.
In an unconventional technique, Thomson Reuters executives often meet with customers in a non-sales setting. These informal meetings, according to Hyatt, are used to determine why the customer chose Thomson Reuters and how their specific experience has been thus far. The trust from customers has notably increased because of these meetings, and customers appreciate being engaged on a personal level.
Looking forward, Thomson Reuters is working harder to engage customers on a more human level.
“In addition to getting all of our mechanics right, we need to understand how it feels to do business with us,” said Hyatt. “It’s been challenging to get to the bottom of the question, ‘How does it feel to conduct your business with our products?’”