Measure Customer Experience ON THE GO - Concept, Model and Example

 

Every organization is trying to capture the frontier of customer experience and making strides in various directions. New technology, tools and their applications are being summoned in unique manner for it. Secret algorithms are being built to decipher the data available in the universe intelligently and use it proactively to create the differentiated experience for the customer. Everything with a hope that customer will get hooked to this good experience and demand it again and again.  

In this endeavor, the most critical part is to measure where does a company stand with respect to customer experience provided to a specific customer or a group of customers and if this experience is changing in positively or otherwise. Multiple ways are being used by companies to tackle this puzzle and we have seen some of the approaches in my earlier blogs

https://personalandprofessionalexcellence.blogspot.com/2019/11/customer-experience-measurement-stand.html,

https://personalandprofessionalexcellence.blogspot.com/2019/11/customer-experience-measurement-direct.html

https://personalandprofessionalexcellence.blogspot.com/2019/12/customer-experience-measurement-past.html

Today, I am going to present a model, which when implemented by an organization allows it to measure the Customer Experience and its movements on a continuous basis. We can call it CX ON THE GO. I am sharing the Concept, Model, and an Example here for easy understanding.

Concept:

Whenever we interact with a customer, it could be IT department with Business Users or it could be Sales Person with Customer (B2B or B2C scenario) or it could be HR department with Employees; every interaction provides some kind of experience to customer. This gets refined through subsequent interactions in +ve or -ve direction with every interaction. If the individual customers from the customer organization interact with each other e.g. sourcing manager, technical manager, finance manager in an organization, the experience gets a further tweak. This is a continuous process. At the time of decision regarding award of a contract or purchase of a product, the customer experience level at that time plays a significant role.

If we build a mechanism to create a base line for customer experience and then measure its movement based on every interaction, we would be in a position to create mitigation measures in case of adverse trend and can avoid surprises at the end.

For successful results, the mechanism should be easy to use as well as applicable to multiple industries and situations. It should not create any burden on customer as well as provider e.g. surveys, where participation is low, participation may not represent the population, is influenced by the recent developments, and require significant follow up. Finally, it should not be expensive to implement. The model presented in the next section has all these characteristics and can provide a great insight in the Customer experience and its movements on the go.

The Model

In my model, I have used “Customer Meetings” as a focal point. Customer meetings are the key drivers for creating experience. They act as a mirror to observe what experience has been provided during this meeting as well as how it is trending from past interactions. In most of B2B scenarios, interactions happen with customer at multiple levels.  Each meeting has a stated objective like periodic status review, new idea/product discussions, business review, etc. The product / service providers always look to improve the experience they provide to customer so that they get a chance to sell extended range of products or services. The Service provider uses multiple tricks to assess if customer wants to engage in areas beyond and understand the pulse from reactions customer provides during the meetings. If we capture this interaction and aggregate across multiple meetings, we will be able to see the movement of customer experience after every meeting. This data can be analyzed at multiple levels in customer hierarchy or Product /service category or time line to understand the composition of customer experience we are providing to our customer.  

The model works with a points system for recording various observations in the meeting. If we achieve the stated objective of the meeting well, then we give Zero points. This is the base line for customer experience which denotes that we are doing stated work as required. Then we identify other things that can happen during the meeting e.g. Customer was unhappy for something, then we give a -1 point indicating experience has deteriorated to some extent. If customer is very happy about something and hints that he is open to give more work or buy more products, this indicates an improvement of experience customer is getting from us and thus we give +1 points. With this concept in mind, we create a complete table of possibilities and their impacts and use it for assessing all the meetings. Some of the impacts could be higher e.g. Customer awards new work or places an order then the impact could be rated at +2 or customer takes away some work from us or returns some products then the impact could be -3. We observe the meeting and fill in the list with observation and net score is calculated. If the score is +ve, we have improved from the base expectation and vice versa if it is -ve.

We then look at what was our score at previous meeting and can compare if we are doing better or worse. We can plot a trend after every meeting to give us an idea of direction which we are taking and possible direction and implications in the future.

We can also take an average of multiple meetings with multiple stakeholders of customer and look at overall picture or compare the results at a certain group level to give us understanding of experience level within different organization units of customer or different levels within customer organization.

Every organization has to prepare this template of possible situations in the meeting and then the teams have to just populate it after every meeting and get the customer experience level on the go. No additional survey, no additional work, no follow up and process can be automated to get the analysis at various levels as soon as an entry is made after every meeting (This could be part of debriefing session, which is part of regular process at most of the organizations).

The example in the next section provides clear idea on how to create the template for each organization and use it.    

Example:

Let us consider an IT Service provider providing services to a Customer. (we can replace IT service provider by IT department of an organization and Customer by Business users). Let us assume that IT service provider is supporting customer in supply chain area for a long time through ERP and digital initiatives. Customer is very happy and willing to give more work. IT service provider also has started a project in Finance area which they got through recommendation from Supply chain leadership. This is not going as well as the other project and IT service provider struggled in the beginning. IT service provider is also trying to get into Infrastructure/cloud area through an RFP and wanted to understand what the temperature at customer end is and how it is going to influence result of the RFP.

As a mature organization, they have a good cadence of formal and informal meetings like weekly meetings at various project level, monthly meetings as well as quarterly reviews. Typically, Delivery teams attend weekly meetings and Sales team joins them for monthly and quarterly meetings. Various leaders join from both organizations as appropriate. Sales team and Client Executive have several other meetings related to new opportunities and offerings etc. IT service provider is completely focused on growing this account multifold and are looking for all the help they may get.

The IT service provider decided to use the model described in the earlier section to see how they are doing with respect to Customer experience on an ongoing basis.

First and foremost thing of the model is to create a points template which could be used to record the meeting proceedings. They identified various situations / conversations that can occur during the meeting and what it meant in the context of customer experience. They also identified the degree of impact that each one would have. Then allocated points for each situation. The table shows the template which was created. E.g. There might be an escalation in the project and discussion around the same in the meeting. There is a possibility that escalation would be discussed along with other things or there could be discussion only on escalation. This depicts gravity of escalation, greater time devoted means higher impact on the customer experience. Keeping this in mind, the points are assigned. This template was prepared and filled in by the company after every meeting to see what the score is.

The table below provides an illustration of how this template was used for Project 1, in Supply Chain area. 

One column was filled in after every meeting. Similarly, the template was completed for the second project. These when plotted on the graph provide us clear indication of the trend for customer experience.

The blue line in the graph indicates the movement for Project 1. The graph is above the base line which means we are providing better customer experience and it is improving. Whereas the second project which started on rough patch created heart burn with customer and it reflected in the graph which started in the -ve zone (Red Line). The team has worked well and over a period of 4-5 weeks the situation seemed to have improved. The Gray line represents overall picture combining the experiences provided by both the projects. This overall picture is critical to understand where the wind is blowing.

The second Graph provides us trend based on monthly meetings. Monthly meetings are attended by wider and senior audience.

It can provide a lot of insight into the perception at leadership level. Many a times a single challenging project does not really have impact on overall CX, which seems to be a case here. But sometimes a challenge in critical project can create significant dip. This reflects clearly in the monthly meetings. When we compare weekly and monthly trends, we can make out what is in the mind of customer.

The example given is a simple example with two projects. Many a times, there are large number of projects and each one will have its own impact on overall customer experience that customer carries for services provided to them. This tool helps in understanding these impacts as and when they happen. Automation of analysis can provide the dashboard to leadership in terms of how the customer experience is trending in real time

This process could be further enriched by including meetings other than project meetings like sales meetings, idea presentation meetings to get a broader perspective of the CX that customer is having from services provided.

Summary

The model presented here uses customer meetings as a central point to understand customer experience level. The points template is a powerful tool to gather the information. It looks and is very simple to understand and implement. Once the information is gathered from every customer meeting, various techniques could be used to assess Customer experience and its trends from multiple view points as well as build intelligence in to it.

Customer Experience Life cycle – Is it still valid in Covid-19 era and beyond?

We have seen in earlier blogs that Customer Experience depicts characteristics of a new product and has a lifecycle similar to a product lifecycle.

Just to recap quickly; It has four stages,

·       Introduction,

·       Growth,

·       Maturity and

·       Decline.

During Introduction phase, a new CX initiative is implemented by an organization which starts getting noticed by customers through the experience they get during various transactions with the company. During this stage, the pace of receiving new customer experience is slow and sporadic. People start talking about this new experience in person as well as on social media and the rate at which customer throng to get this experience increases significantly. Advertisement by the company about the change also helps picking up the rate. This is the growth phase. This hype creates a pull for new customers to try out new experience and presents significant potential for the company to acquire these customers and retain them for long term. More customers connect with company, do more and more transactions and provide a positive impact on the overall revenue as well as revenue per customer. When the initial euphoria of new experience is over, the customers start expecting this experience to be available every time. This results in slowing down speed of adding new customers and transaction volume remaining steady. We are now in Maturity phase. This phase also keeps customer experience more or less at same level. This phase also faces a challenge in terms of competition trying to start initiatives to give same or better experience. The customers are in two minds but most of them continue. However, some of the customers start building a customer experience fatigue i.e., the experience, which thrilled them some time ago does not excite them anymore and they start looking for something better, something different. They then start losing interest and try out a different experience offered by competitors and company start losing customers along with the revenue. The decline begins. If company does not take any action, the decline continues, resulting in loosing customers and revenue.

In this blog we are going to examine if this cycle works in abnormal situations like COVID-19. We will also extrapolate if it will work, and if it works how it will manifest, in post COVID-19 scenario as well.

Let us take example of grocery shopping and its evolution from perspective of consumer and seller. When COVID-19 started spreading like wildfire and fatalities started mounting, entire population was gripped with panic without knowing what to do. Everyone wanted to be safe from getting infected. So experience of “Safety” was paramount in the minds of customer which moved them in hordes to sellers who were providing them this experience i.e. “Home Delivery”. The customers were ready to pay additional money to get the experience they desired. They let go their brand choices, which they were particular about in the pre-COVID-19 scenario, for the sake of safety. Looking at the significant shift (growth in volumes) due to Home Delivery, most of the companies launched Home Delivery option and provided “safety” option to customer. Customer now had choice of sellers who can provide him his needs and in safe manner. Now the brand choices started coming back and customer started splitting the orders so that they get the products of their choice. This resulted in reducing in volume for some. To enhance this experience, few more variants came in to play like Free Delivery, Same-day delivery. This intervention compelled a few more customers who were apprehensive of Delivery charges as well as who wanted specific item urgently; and volumes started increasing for a few sellers. Some other sellers started giving another experience of “Curb Side Pickup” which is safe and from your neighborhood stores, your loyalty points counted, you get the products you are used to and care you were used to. This initiative also shifted the loyal customer base back to the stores and with development of “Same-day pick up” or “2-Hour pick up” it was almost like old times. Now the situation is most of the grocery sellers have all the services like Free home delivery, Curbside pick up etc. and every one can provide the same experience to customer. These things have become a norm and customer expects the same with every seller. There was one thing to which customer had turned a little blind eye in the quest for their need of “Safety” which was price, they were paying some additional money for every product, although it was few cents per product, but total bill was higher; there was almost no SALE or MARKDOWN on prices anymore. Customers were OK with this with an expectation that COVID-19 is an aberration for a few months and things will be back, which unfortunately has not come true. We have completed almost a year in this situation and with no clear end in sight. We have also observed that consumption of store brands increased as compared to national brands due to availability and cost considerations. Now all the sellers are almost on equal footing as they were prior to pandemic (with some exceptions), the original differentiation has started playing again and some of the Grocery chains have started price reductions to attract the customers and other old tricks.

If we observe all these happenings in last one year, we can see the Customer Experience life cycle in full play. As a seller creates intervention for satisfying the customer need of “Safety” and give a great experience to him, the seller saw a jump in customer base and volumes (Introduction).

Social media played a significant role in terms of spreading the word about the facilities provided by a seller to bring in more and more customers to its fold (Growth). Observing this trend, the competitors jump on the bandwagon and create similar initiatives, customers have a choice, and they start experimenting (Mature). Some customers get used to the earlier experiences and like newer experience provided by competition or want to go back to their favorite seller and start moving away. To address this CX fatigue, the seller launches another initiative (Same Day Curb Side pickup) to take experience to another level. The cycle continues.   

This manifestation of gives us a glimpse of what to come in future after the population at large gets grasp on the COVID-19. We can easily extrapolate how the CX cycle will play out. During the COVID-19 pandemic grocery chains rolled out a slew of initiatives in the areas of Home delivery, Curb Side pick-up, Safer stores etc. in their unique way. By the time we get an upper hand over COVID-19, these initiatives would become part of basic services any grocery chain should provide. The grocery chains will have to look at multiple different initiatives beyond “Safety” aspect and differentiate their products/services so that they can attract more and more customers and revenue. To name a few, it could be “Great in-store experience”, “Personalized home or anywhere delivery”, “Restaurant style pick up of gourmet food to your order while you shop”. We will continue to see the CX cycle playing out, extensions created.  

If we look at another critical intervention that happened on the work front is “Work from Home”, “Safety” at core. The companies who were able to address this need successfully and created investments have been able to survive/thrive in the pandemic. This has resulted in significant flexibility in customer service without actually meeting customer in person. Today this model is forced on everyone, but will definitely be part of offerings of many companies going forward. Customers will be expecting providers to use this model and create a great value for customer beyond just “lights-ON” or “cost benefit”. We have already seen certain offerings (CX interventions) from a few organizations addressing this challenge and will see many more as go forward

 

In conclusion:     

Customer Experience Life Cycle is clearly seen operational in preCOVID-19 era as well as during COVID-19. It is expected that it will play out in post COVID-19 era also. So organizations can really look at what interventions they are planning and their timing to ride the CX fatigue as well as address the challenges thrown by competitors. Differentiated Needs Pyramid could be used understand the unique / differentiated customer needs and create targeted interventions     

 

Reference:

CX Life Cycle management for continuous improvement in Customer Experience and Revenue/customer

https://personalandprofessionalexcellence.blogspot.com/2019/07/cx-life-cycle-management-for-continuous.html

Customer Experience Improvement using Differentiated Needs Pyramid (Maslow’s theory)

https://personalandprofessionalexcellence.blogspot.com/2018/03/customer-experience-improvement-using.html

Predictability in Customer Experience Improvement – A Perspective for Grocery Retail Industry

https://personalandprofessionalexcellence.blogspot.com/2019/07/predictability-in-customer-experience.html?_sm_au_=iVV4Rtj4p0NLfDVr

 

 

PreCOVID-19 to COVID-19 to PostCOVID-19 dilemma for CIOs and Wayout

From last 4 months we have seen that COVID-19 has turned the wheels of industry in the direction which was not anticipated by many. Many corporations have changed or have been forced to change the way they are looking at business or the way they are executing business. Since there is no vaccine or cure available as of today, the actions taken by individuals, corporations as well as governments are towards prevention which has impacted the whole fabric of personal and professional life. It has changed the manner in which basic things are done e.g. we no more shake hands when we meet or we do not come within perimeter of 6 ft from other person, we cannot go out and eat, we prefer ordering even groceries and veggies online rather than going out and choosing ourselves, guests are not welcome, we are afraid of travel, large RFPs are submitted, presented, awarded without an in person meeting, I can go on and on. Smart businesses have created mechanisms to handle this anxiety in the minds of customer and developed incentives like free and safe home delivery to promote the same and offset the downside created by odd customer behavior. Most of the businesses are suffering due to lack of customers coupled with lack of intent of buying not-so-essential things from customer. Customer also has learnt to live with different kind of processes where everything happens from home, most of the stuff is bought online, people have started planning for groceries and essentials which might not be available easily, it has gone to a level where in disturbance from kid in a professional meeting is accepted. Scientists are working hard, and they will definitely find some vaccine and / or cure for this virus. Just that we do not know when. When they find the cure will everything return back to the old glory or there will be a new way. Everyone kind of believes that it will not be the old way but there will be a new normal that we will need to deal with.

• Do we know what is this new normal? – No
• Do we know if this new normal will be same for all? – We know that it will not be same for all, but we do not know how it will differ

If we look at situation in which most of the CIOs are today, no one envies it.

•  They have to ensure that the business runs with whatever constraints have been enforced,
•  They have to ensure that the business runs even with the new way of business transactions (which is evolving as the COVID -19 situation is unfolding) by building new applications or modifying existing applications,
•   They have to ensure that IT environment secure from all the predators
•   They have to conserve the cash, forcing them to make difficult decisions like closing/postponing noncritical running projects, reducing IT team with no fault of theirs (with a knowledge that they will need them back soon enough and may not get them back) etc.

This is not all, the CIOs have to be ready to zoom in to high gear as soon as a solution for COVID-19 situation is found. Business teams will assess the situation and determine strategy adjusting to new normal and recovering all the losses that it encountered during the crisis. They would expect every department in the organization to step up and do their best. CIO will be expected to work in tandem and get the IT systems ready for the new normal almost in parallel to the realization of new normal. This is tough as new normal will comprise significant online/automation component and IT has to play a major role in it. With all these uncertainties and moving parts, CIOs are in dilemma as to what to do, when to do and how to do? There is no case study nor there is any template and they have to find their unique way out.

I think, Differentiated Needs Pyramid, if applied to the three situations i.e. PreCOVID-19, During COVID-19 and PostCOVID-19, CIOs can find a way out to bring in some proactive measures and partner with business to get it back on track as fast as possible. 

In my earlier blog, Predictable Customer (Internal) Experience Improvement- CIO Perspective  

 https://personalandprofessionalexcellence.blogspot.com/2019/09/predictable-customer-internal.html,  We have seen that a CIO can be successful in improving the experience that they are providing to their customers i.e. Business Leaders by understanding their needs better. Following picture depicts the differentiated needs of the Business Leaders in the business as usual (PreCOVID-19) situation.

This is a five level Differentiated Needs Pyramid and once CIO is able to identify specific needs for the each level for Business Leaders corresponding to their business, then they can take up the right initiatives and go beyond the expectations from business and be a partner to business in its growth. 

If we extend the same philosophy a bit further and analyze this pyramid for three situations i.e. PreCOVID-19, During COVID-19 and PostCOVID-19, we can see how the needs of Business Leaders are going to change at each level in each phase. Using this, CIOs can predict what is going to come their way and they can start addressing the same. Following diagram provide the glimpse of how the needs are likely to be in these three situations Each CIO can plot the 5 levels of specific needs for their business leaders using needs of their specific business.

Each business is unique and their strategy to woo their customers is unique. This needs to be considered while detailing out the actions under each level that might be required to be taken by CIOs in order to satisfy or exceed the needs of their customers i.e. Business Leaders. If a similar exercise is undertaken by Business leaders for their end customers, they will know how the needs of their end customers are changing, thus what strategies need to be adopted by business to satisfy their needs. 

In my earlier blog Predictability in Customer Experience Improvement – A Perspective for Grocery Retail Industry,

 https://personalandprofessionalexcellence.blogspot.com/2019/07/predictability-in-customer-experience.html?_sm_au_=iVV4Rtj4p0NLfDVr  I had taken an example of Grocery Retail scenario for two segments of customer i.e. Customers with age greater than 50 & customers with age below 30. It was clear that the needs vary at each level and the business leaders assess them for specific customer base to determine specific initiatives for creating stickiness. I have extended the same example for customers with age greater than 50 and created a scenario of three stages PreCOVID-19, DuringCOVID-19 and PostCOVID-19. We see a significant swing in the needs as we transition. Some changes made during COVID-19 phase do stick around or get a little modified and get added to the PreCOVID-19 scenario to give a unique set of needs at different levels to the customer base. The diagram below provides a glimpse at this. Certain things like Online Ordering, Free Home delivery, Easy Curbside delivery, Security, pop up at multiple places, which means business will need to extend and enhance the model they have created during COVID-19 and make  

available to customer. The only change would be it will not be a compulsion on consumer to use this facility, but it will be an additional perk that consumer can avail. Better cost-effective way to create this facility through an IT project would definitely be on card for such an organization. Another situation could be around delivery; free home delivery or same day delivery or same day curbside pick up would be expected and if CIO can create an application which will help Supply chain team to make it happen, the business leaders would love it. During COVID-19 consumers were ready to bear some hardship due to fear and desperation, however in PostCOVID-19 scenario, they would not be ready for hardship and will expect the same facilities without hardship and additional cost. The race would be to satisfy these new needs (New Normal) and win over more customers and higher business.

In Summary, the transition from PreCOVID-19 to COVID-19 to PostCOVID-19 is dramatic. Consumer behavior will change almost 180^o each phase. A new normal will be attained in a short period after the solution to COVID-19 problem is found. There will be race to understand this new normal and satisfy the needs of customers in this new normal so that business can get itself back on track. The level of uncertainty is preventing business and their IT teams from launching new initiatives. In this situation Differentiated Needs Pyramid can help Business and IT to proactively look at what could be possible areas that they should work on and be ahead in the game.

Customer Experience – Perception or Reality

Customer experience is the frontier where the battle for customer loyalty (and associated revenue) is being fought. Every industry and companies therein have started focusing on it. New ways and methods are being experimented regularly. Companies are trying to give a better customer experience than what they are offering today or what their competitors are offering. This is to create a unique differentiation and create a challenge to its competitors.  The game is to give customers something beyond their expectation in every transaction that happens between company and customer. Key is to understand the expectations, which do change based on the situation, and provide a right response at right time. 

Gartner has defined Customer Experience as the customer's perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier's employees, systems, channels or products.  As per Forrester, Customer Experience is, how customers perceive their interactions with your company.

Note the word perception used in both the definitions. Perception, according to Cambridge dictionary, is a thought, belief, or opinion, often held by many people and based on appearances. Which means customer experience is totally dependent on how a specific customer feels specifically about a specific thing during the interaction. It may not be reality and different customers will have different experiences for the same interaction and totally governed by the psyche of the customer at that moment. Theoretically the same customer can experience different experience for the exact same interactions at two different times. If Customer Experience is a perception, a few questions arise

·       Is there any Base line or Absolute reality or Empirical Gold standard for Customer Experience which can be used by companies?

·       Is there any way to measure perceptions?

·       Perceptions can change based on various extraneous factors on which company has no control: in that case, is this a valid measure or we need to find a better way to understand the perceptions quantitatively?

Customer experience is subjective and hence measured in generic terms like Bad-Good-Superlative or on the scale of 1-5, etc. i.e Customer experience is a result of interaction between the response a customer gets throughout the transaction to procure any product/service vis-à-vis the expectations he/she has, before starting the transaction. If the response matches the expectations, customer typically brands it as a “GOOD Experience”, if expectations are not met, the experience varies on the negative side and if customer gets something beyond what is expected, the experience gets labeled as SUPERLATIVE. This brings out another variable which impacts Customer Experience i.e. “expectation of the customer from the transaction”. This impacts the score given by customer. In the normal circumstances, current experience becomes baseline expectation for the next transaction and so on. The same level of interaction creates -ve impact on Customer Experience levels as the +ve gap between current experience and expectation is reduced and over a period of time, it becomes zero or -ve, turning the direction of Customer Experience in opposite direction.

Although Customer Experience is a perception of customer and it can be different for different customers, customers take their actions like buying more or shifting to competitor based on these perceptions. So, these perceptions become reality for the company, and they need to act as if they are absolute reality. Hence Customer experience could be defined as REALITY OF PERCEPTION

This subjectivity and variability create a significant challenge for companies. It is difficult to quantify the Customer Experience level for any specific transaction with customers thus posing further challenges in identifying the remedial measures as well as implementing them to improve the CX. This is one of the key reasons why companies are hesitant to implement new measures and unsure of their results. If we are able to remove the subjectivity from the Customer Experience measurement, the companies can heave a sigh of relief. I have an idea to achieve this and converting Customer Experience from Perception to Reality which can be quantified. The key is to use the available data in the system rather than asking feedback through a survey (which adds subjectivity). We can define success criteria for any transaction e.g. If we are organizing an event in the store, success criteria of the event could be increase in footfalls into specific zone in the store. If we are able to count footfalls at the event, footfalls at the target zone when the event is on and compare the same to the footfalls before the event was launched we can find if the event was effective and customers liked it or not without asking the customers. If the footfalls are more than the normal footfalls, the event is effective; if they are same then event has no impact and if they are reduced, then event has -ve impact. These measurements can be taken on continuous basis and company can tweak the event on continuous basis till they get the right result. The example given above is a simplistic example to get an understanding of concept of quantification of Customer Experience without asking customer. With new developments in AI/ML, several algorithms could be written to understand complex situation.

Once we are able to quantify the Customer Experience using available data (not using survey), it could be rationalized across multiple segments, zones, geographies, etc. and company can take appropriate actions. It is now no more Reality of Perception but Reality of Reality.  

Customer Experience Measurement – Past data or Future (Predicted) data

In the last couple of blogs, we discussed about the three key questions an organization needs to answer to bring in clarity in its CX improvement program as well as assessing and enhancing benefits from the same. These are, 

1. Should Customer experience be measured as stand-alone value or it should be measured in terms of  rate of change in the CX measure? 
2. Should we measure using Direct Customer Feedback or through Indirect (derived) feedback? 
3. Should we use past data or future (Predicted) data?

We deliberated first two questions in the earlier blogs and will discuss the third one in this blog. Refer following links to read through-          https://personalandprofessionalexcellence.blogspot.com/2019/11/customer-experience-measurement-stand.html,

https://personalandprofessionalexcellence.blogspot.com/2019/11/customer-experience-measurement-direct.html

This blog talks about the third question regarding usage of “past” or “future data (predictions)” in order to bring about business improvement using CX. Before we get into the discussion around data and its state, let us look at the typical process of CX measurement and how it helps in business improvements.

Following diagram depicts the process in simple terms.

Organization assesses customer journey for a specific aspect of business and identifies areas where an intervention for improving CX is necessary. It then designs and implements the intervention based on the findings from journey assessment as well as its understanding of customer preferences & behavior. Feedback from the customer is collected through survey / interviews using online / in-person mechanism. If the feedback is positive i.e. CX is good, then organization continues the journey to reap benefits of the intervention. However, if the feedback is mixed or not encouraging or there is no impact at all; organization identifies shortcomings/misses during design / implementation of the intervention and subsequently defines a tweak that would be necessary to address the same. This tweaked intervention is again implemented, and the same cycle follows. If the mistake is such that it cannot be corrected by smaller tweaks in the intervention, then organization abandons the initiative as early as possible to contain the damage it might be creating. The cycle from assessing the feedback till implementation of tweaked intervention easily takes 2-4 months. If the right fix requires more than one tweak, the delay in getting the desired results increases proportionately.  

As we know, CX (as well as related revenue impact) follows a lifecycle similar to product lifecycle as shown in the following diagram. Refer following link to understand detailed discussion around CX lifecycle.   https://personalandprofessionalexcellence.blogspot.com/2019/07/cx-life-cycle-management-for-continuous.html  Once the CX intervention is correctly designed and implemented, it starts showing positive results on experience as well as revenue as shown in the diagram. However, if the intervention is not appropriately designed and customers do not embrace it as expected, the tweak cycle kicks in. After one or two tweaks the CX journey settles in. In such cases the graph for CX shifts to the right (Blue Line in the diagram below) creating a period of uncertainty from the start of first intervention to the implementation of intervention after tweak/s. 

During this period, CX may go down or waiver or may not change at all. The company is busy in finding the right tweak and can be vulnerable for attacks from competition. There are chances that it may lose revenue as well as goodwill with customer base.

There are two challenges faced by company in this endeavor. First one is feedback cycle takes significant time delaying the tweak that might be required to be implemented.  Process of getting feedback from customer has inherent limitations in terms of how frequently you can go to customer and ask their feedback coupled with no guarantee that customer will provide feedback when reached through modes like e-mail or online survey. Organization is pushed into uncertainty zone and there is no easy way to reduce this time. This limitation could be eliminated to some extent by creating multiple sets of customer segment with similar characteristics and reaching out to them at higher frequency; however, the process becomes complicated and does not help reducing uncertainty period by significant proportion.

Second challenge is that we really do not know when the CX lifecycle attains maturity. The trajectory is known but the time period for each zone like growth or maturity is not known and it changes with the specific intervention and its impact. It could be a steep curve up and steep down or it could be slow up and steep downward or it could be steep up and slow down. It is critical for a company to understand the stage of lifecycle CX is passing through. If the CX is in upward climb, organization continues to reap in benefits from the intervention whereas if it is on the downward slope, the organization starts reducing the benefits that it receives through this intervention and may start losing revenue. Organizations wish to elongate the growth stage as long as possible and would like to be in maturity stage forever. However, in reality this does not happen, the impact of the CX intervention weans away at some point of time and CX graph enters in to decline phase. It is critical for organization to plan another tweak or new intervention right in time so that its impact starts showing up by the time the impact from earlier intervention gets in to decline mode. The organization struggles to find this point, it cannot estimate the time it is going to take for any intervention to reach this maturity/decline inflection point (CX fatigue). It is also difficult to measure the CX level continuously to track its progress and estimate the next intervention point leaving organization vulnerable.  

Can we overcome these challenges? – YES we can !!!

The problem could be solved if the organization uses future (predicted) data. Organization can construct a model using indirect feedback mechanism as described in the earlier blog. This model will enable organization to obtain the exact stage of CX at desired frequency like daily. It can also go to a hourly frequency if we have the right model with right parameters and technological capability to manipulate the data collected through these points.

If organization creates a model using various data points from different interventions which depict the life cycle pattern for an initiative and build a capability to self-learn; this could create a tremendous intelligence for the organization to predict what is going to happen in near as well as distant future and when it should be ready for next intervention. The customer behavior is unpredictable and CX movement may not be same as what is predicted or there could be a significant campaign run by competition which is impacting the CX behavior; the organization can get a sense of these movements from the capture of indirect feedback without really waiting for physical feedback and can adjust the projections accordingly. This generates new predictions for organization to re-calibrate their actions on real time basis. The predictions are dependent on the AI/ML based self-learning model. The closer it reflects the reality as well as its ability of mid course correction determines the effectiveness.

In summary

• Mapping the CX value v/s Rate of change of CX can provide the status of CX initiative and direction that an organization should take going forward
• The indirect method to capture CX using parameters available in the organizations business systems wins over the direct data collection mechanisms
• Predicted data can provide organization with inputs which are early and granular than the past data collected from the customers
• The success of the CX backed business improvement depends largely on ability to create the algorithm which could represent the customer behavior using the parameters available for us in the system as well as one for predicting the CX lifecycle. AI/ML can enable organizations to achieve this and can help move ahead of curve in continuously improving CX as well as improving the growth rate for the business.