Simplifying Your Customer Experience Program

Keeping things simple is a goal of every brand. Simplifying a Customer Experience program can be truly beneficial for any brand and its bid to retain and attract customers.

On Tuesday, March 29, 2016, Loyalty360 will host a webinar titled, “Insider’s Guide to Customer Experience: How to Simplify Your Customer Experience Complexity,” at 1 p.m. EDT, which will be presented by Verint.
Loyalty360 caught up with Brian Koma, VP & Customer Experience Practice Leader, Verint, to learn more about this intriguing webinar theme.

What are three things marketers can do to simplify their respective CX programs?

Pick a place to start the process. Remember there is no wrong answer. Too many organizations get overwhelmed by the perceived complexity of the entire CX measurement, analysis, and execution process and end up taking too long to get any type of results. Pick a place to start, agree with internal stakeholders on the metrics, and find some quick wins. 

Once you’ve identified some quick wins, engage your stakeholders in communicating these wins to the organization. By having others speak for you, it can amplify the message exponentially and enable these individuals to influence their peers about the value of CX.

Communicate across organizational silos. If simplicity is a key objective, communicate early and often,  Making regular, concise, organization-wide communications of the findings and events in your Customer Experience (CX) program part of your strategy will help “win hearts and minds” and allow you to identify duplicative efforts and projects.

What are loyalty marketers doing well in this area and where do the challenges lie?

Loyalty marketers are playing a key role in driving the CX efforts in their organizations. Many loyalty professionals are driving analytics efforts, and very importantly, the closed-loop processes that ensure that data is not just analyzed, but also acted upon. While they are playing a key role in the process, one of the principal challenges lies in working with operational groups to obtain the data necessary to connect CX programs with the hard data necessary to quantify the ROI of the overall program. Too often, this data exists in silos throughout the organization and it can be difficult to break down these barriers.

What are the common mistakes marketers make when planning/implementing a CX program?

Often, it’s focusing exclusively on the squeaky wheels, or what we call “break/fix” yielded from transactional and customer-service surveys. They are important, and some would argue the most important, source of customer insights. But to ignore the other sources of feedback, the relationship research performed by the CX team, the changes in purchasing patterns across key customer segments, the insights that should be gleaned from social media outlets: these are how both strategic and tactical direction can be fully informed.

How can marketers overcome organizational inertia and create champions?

Just like we are asked to “Think Global, Act Local” as environmental stewards, the same applies when striving to change the culture. Start with a small team or use case, and leverage transaction customer feedback next, and develop and monitor the changes indicated from the data. As this process gets underway, you now have both internal stakeholders and internal champions. Schedule and deliver the results and commentary from the frontline and from the customers, and the ripple effect will start to grow before you know it.

CX is seen as a key differentiator today. How should marketers view CX?

CX is the source for leading indicators for the marketing team. This is especially the case when the unstructured data coming in from surveys, social media, and emails is mined. When these analyses are put into the context of the structured data (demographic, firmographic and attitudinal survey data alike), the real opportunities within the customer base, and their challenges, become easy to identify, quantify, and act upon. Marketers must also work hard to obtain the operational data that can be used to quantify the effects of CX efforts. This is critical to being able to define the ROI of the program and justify further investments. 

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