Since 1981 when JD Power issued the first U.S. Automotive Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) Study people have been called at home (during dinner!), asked for their opinion in malls and shopping centers and by people knocking on doors and since the first ‘You Got Mail’ was uttered after ‘Quantum’ renamed itself AOL in 1993 we have been getting requests for our opinion by email.
By 1998 we we saw the first moves from Customer Satisfaction Ratings to Net Promoter Score (NPS), then Customer Effort Score (CES) and now more robust Customer Experience Indices (CXI) from Forrester and Temkin and others.
In parallel we saw Customer Channels evolve.
- From in store and in person in the 50’s and 60’s we saw contact centers evolve in the 80’s supported by the newly minted Automated Call Distributor (ACD) the launch of the wonderful Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system in the 80’s and 90’s and global telecommunications bring us true globalization of call centers in the 1990’s
- If that wasn’t enough the mid 1990’s saw commercial web launch and Amazon style personalization expectations, consumer email, the earliest mobiles and interactive text (Blackberry and Palm anyone)
- The 2000’s brought social media, iChat, SMS and of course the iPhone in 2010 ‘ changed everything’
And sometime in the 2008-2010 recession consumers adopted them all and demanded that companies service them with true multichannel capabilities.
Today’s leaders understand that they have to be tightly bound with their customers. Constantly monitoring and sensing what customers want but how they are doing against those expectations. And not just how easy and Effective the experiences are but how Emotionally Empathetic or resonant they are.
The business consulting leaders (Forrester, Gartner, Bain, McKinsey etc) have proven the direct link between great CX and business success including enhanced revenue and profits by retaining and reselling customers, reducing cost of service, gaining new customers by referrals and less business failures because of greater customer insight and understanding.
So why are we still relying on annual, or bi-annual, or quarterly relationship surveys. To be successful you need to get insight from wherever. Yes relationship surveys, but also transactional surveys at particular journey stages and events, digital analytics, call center analytics, semantic analysis of emails and social media conversations and even environmental data from IOT devices and tracking customer behavior against content funnels and multichannel journey compliance.
Luckily the tools to do this are ever richer in function and ever more cost effective to purchase.
Whether you are seeking general CC insight, product improvement information, goto market strategy insights, operational efficiencies through problem avoidance you need to be engaged with your customers . .how and where they want. You need to pick the right multiple CX metrics to understand them, NPS, CSAT, Effectiveness, Ease, Competitive positioning. And then you need to know how those metrics relate to your Business Operating Metrics.
So if you have a VoC survey program .. figure out how to elevate it to a true Multichannel CX Metrics system .. if you don’t have a VoC survey capability yet .. first ‘where have you been and what are you thinking ?’ .. second get one and get one fast but get a modern CX Metrics System .. you don’t want to be deploying 10 year old strategies today.
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