Companies have come to realize that improving customer experience leads to good business. If you (also) want to improve your customer experience, start synchronizing customer insight across the local departments in the organization.
This article covers:
- How is synchronized insight the key to improving customer experience?
- How does it impact the customer experience?
- What characterizes synchronized customer insight?
- How do you synchronize your customer insight?
- Obtain deeper and broader customer insight
- What are the benefits of synchronized customer insight?
- How good are you at creating a positive customer experience?
How is synchronized insight the key to improving customer experience?
If you want to improve customer experiences, the first thing to do is to make sure you have a shared perception of customer experience throughout the organization. Many organizations end up with numerous surveys that produce a great deal of customer insight that creates different perceptions of the customer experience.
The challenge with these many isolated surveys in the local departments of your organization and the incoherent insight is that you:
- Structure, categorize, and report data differently,
- Use different evaluation methods and KPIs,
- Only optimize the small part of the customer experience that you work with,
- Have different outlooks on customer experience.
- Submit different and sometimes contradictory reviews of customer experience to top management.
An Ennova Survey from 2017 showed that this problem is widespread.
Here, only one quarter of the largest Nordic companies believe that they have a high degree of coherent customer insight.
How does it impact your customer experience?
From the customer’s perspective, it is also a problem if you don’t have a high degree of synchronized customer insight. Because you cannot keep avoiding it and, eventually, your customers will experience the lack of coherence that follows.
Customers are bombarded with questions concerning their experience with you. They have to determine if they would recommend the company to others or not. They are called by a customer service representative or perhaps even by an automated calling system.
Customers like to be heard, but there are limits to how often they want to answer the same questions from the same company.
There is also the risk that the customer’s experience with your brand is inconsistent and incoherent. In one situation, you win the customer over with a fantastic customer experience. In the next, everything comes crashing down because a different department has other goals.
Let’s look at an example of this:
The salespersons promise customers 14-day delivery, to which the customers react positively.
However, the goods are only delivered a month later. This disappoints the customers, and they now rate their experience much lower.
The delivery went perfectly when measured according to the parameters of the logistics department, which focuses on providing good updates along the way.
However, the customer is left with a bad experience because of the unfulfilled expectation created by the salesperson.
Your customers experience involves the whole organization, so you have to consider the combined customer initiatives in the company.
What characterizes synchronized customer insight?
Do you know if your insights are coherent and consistent? Synchronized customer insight is characterized by:
- Using the same evaluation methods for KPIs.
- Grouping insights across data sources into the same main themes.
- Reporting with a uniform structure and always based on the customer experience.
How do you synchronize your customer insights?
To synchronize your customer insights, you need to establish a central customer insight unit. Unfortunately, this is not always that easy.
After all, different departments have their own idea of what is most important to the customer. If they were responsible for the general decisions, their focus would be unbalanced.
To overcome this, you need a central unit in the organization.
In smaller organizations, this unit could, in principle, consist of one person. The important thing here is for customer insights to be drawn across organizational functions.
Obtain deeper and broader customer insight
The primary role of the customer insight unit is to synchronize all customer insight across the organization. However, it will also be able to provide relevant insight to the organization. Therefore, the local departments do not lose insight; instead, they gain a deeper and broader understanding of the customer, as the unit can draw from several sources.
It is easier to personalize the customer experience for the organization. It increases the likelihood that the company, as a whole, provides a consistent customer experience.
Yet another advantage is that the budget for things like studies, surveys, analyses, systems and tools can be reduced. One centralized unit can exploit economies of scale. The organization may also find that it needs fewer external suppliers and partners.
What are the benefits of synchronized customer insight?
The biggest advantage of synchronizing customer insight is that you can provide a better and improved customer experience. The main benefits are:
- It is far easier to identify the reasons for a poor customer experience.
- It also increases the likelihood that the organization’s initiatives actually improve customer experience.
- The salespersons submit their insight to the central unit. The unit synchronizes with the other insights from the organization. They can now see that the customer’s top priority is quick delivery.
- The administrative resources used to provide ongoing updates to the customer are no longer necessary. The logistics department can then focus on shortening the delivery time.
How good are you at creating positive customer experiences?
In most organizations the customer insight area still has an enormous untapped potential. Therefore, we clearly recommend that you act proactively and take more responsibility for your customer insight area based on professional tools and approaches.
Take this quick test to get an indication of the extent to which the customer experience is on the agenda in your organization.
The test gives you an overall CX score which is an expression of the CX maturity of your workplace as experienced by you.
This article is an abbreviated and edited version of Chapter 3 in the Danish book entitled "Professionel Kundeindsigt - Forskellen mellem økonomisk succes og fiasko" by Søren Smit (Professional Customer Insight – the Difference between Financial Success and Failure).
What drives true ambassadors?
A common trait among many companies is that one of the most significant drivers of customer experience is the ability to make it easy for the customer and to provide a coherent customer journey. So if you are looking to strengthen your share of delighted customers, a piece of advice would be to (re)visit your customer journey(s) and assess their performance in terms of making them easy from a customer’s perspective. A friction-less journey, spiced up with 1-2 WOW moments, is the recipe for delighted customers.
