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
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.
