During her session, “Driving Client Experience Improvements through Culture Change,” at Forrester’s Forum for Customer Experience Professionals East last month in New York City, Jessica Saperstein, Division Vice President, Strategy & Business Development, Automatic Data Processing (ADP), she told attendees what will make the biggest impact on customers now and in the future.
Saperstein said ADP, a B2B payroll and human resources services industry, focuses on answering the question: How is Voice of the Customer driving your strategy?
“We provide end-to-end services and work with clients of all sizes (very small to large global multinational enterprises),” she explained. “We partner with 6,000 clients in 125 countries. We pay one out of every six workers in the U.S. Service is at the heart of everything we do.”
Client experience and innovation is at the core of the ADP value proposition. Delivering a great client experience is complex, involving multiple interactions that ADP clients care about across a range of channels, Saperstein said.
What’s more, not all of those interactions are equally important, and the most critical moments may be managed by multiple stakeholders. The resulting challenge: Train frontline employees across functional areas to understand which interactions matter most and what to do in those moments.
The potential reward? Enhanced client retention, a growing share of wallet, and a growing number of client advocates to drive company growth.
In mid-2011, Saperstein said, ADP was in a “pretty good place” regarding traditional metrics and customer retention had reached an all-time high.
“We had well established ways of measuring customer satisfaction for 20 years,” she explained,” and the quality of scores and service quality was trending upward and looking quite positive. We should’ve been feeling good. But good wasn’t good enough. There were still areas in the customer experience where we were falling short and not delivering that stellar customer experience.”
Saperstein said ADP, in the minds of company officials, was the market leader.
“We needed standout scores, above the rest,” she said. “In our industry, all competitor scores clustered together. We weren’t necessarily differentiated enough. We needed to reinvent our approach to client experience to differentiate from the pack.”
As a result, ADP, adopted a very different approach.
“We recognized we needed to standardize,” Saperstein said. “We benchmarked the market place. We needed to change how we were measuring client satisfaction. We adopted the Net Promoter Score system, which shed some light on some issues.”
Saperstein said ADP transitioned from 93 different surveys to a single relationship survey, one that included several open-ended questions where “we could really dive deep and understand what was driving customer feedback. Were the real issues delighting or frustrating them?”
ADP also implemented text analytics to assist in data analysis that could be shared across the company.
“We share best practices that embed this capability into every one of our businesses,” Saperstein explained. “We had accountability for the customer experience, which made a big difference. Today, we’ve been able to drive communications and engagement around it.”
ADP has 3,500 associates actively involved in the NPS closed loop process with clients, and 30,000 associates globally are leveraging Voice of the Client information and data “for everything we do. We’re quite proud and pleased in embedding this new focus in our culture.”
What did ADP learn?
“We’re still early on in our journey,” Saperstein said. “This tool is very critical for us to really understand the emotions associated with our clients and the practitioners using our solutions and interacting with us on an ongoing basis. It brought context to other data and analytics.”
Journey-mapping the onboarding experience was one of the most significant experiences for ADP, Saperstein said, “regarding whether they became actively involved with us. We were able to dive deeper into onboarding and map that emotion across different steps of the onboarding process.”
Previously, clients were interacting with too many touch points across ADP, Saperstein said.
“From this insight, we focused on redesigning that onboarding implementation process,” she explained. “Through redesign, we cut about 40% of time out of the onboarding process, which was a dramatic improvement.”
Where does ADP go from here?
Building client-centricity into the product itself as well as the client experience, Saperstein said.
“Advocacy and loyalty are very critical,” she said. “We’re proactively communicating in client communities, and mining our text analytics. There is tremendous potential in using analytics to predict the future.”
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty 360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.