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Showing the value of CX

The best way of showing the power of Customer Experience is to demonstrate the value it can bring to your organisation. If your organisation does not have an active CX strategy or custodian, then presenting the benefits of reducing customer pain points can open the doors to gaining permission for a larger-scale transformation.

This edition of CX Tips is designed to provide a simple guide to enable anyone to improve the customer experience where they work, through identifying and resolving customer pain points and measuring the difference these changes make.

Measure your current CX performance

The first step is to understand how customers currently view their experience interacting with your organisation. A simple survey after customers engage with your organisations can reveal how they feel and provide a baseline to improve on.

Start with asking customers how satisfied they were with their experience and how likely they are to recommend your organisation can help establish CSAT and NPS scores to use as a baseline.

Furthermore, asking customers open questions about what they liked and disliked about their experience and the changes they would like to see can spark ideas for how to improve the customer experience.

Map your Customer Journey

Every organisation has multiple customer journeys, each serving different customer needs. These might include booking an appointment, making a purchase, using a service, having a consultation, making an enquiry or using after-sales support.

To make the process manageable, choose a single customer journey to focus on and map out the steps customers take along the journey.

Observe your customers

Now observe customers as they travel along the customer journey. Observations can take the form of watching customers using your service, speak with your staff, move around your shop/office/clinic and listening to call centre conversations.

Look for moments along the journey that impact the customer experience:

• Are there moments where the customer needs are not met?

• Are there bottlenecks in your service?

• Do customers side-step stages of your journey to get the result they want?

• Are there moments where customers are confused or frustrated?

These are all opportunities to address customer pain points and improve their customer experience. Choose a moment to improve, one that feels manageable and can yield a tangible result.

Talk to your customers

Now you have identified a customer pain point, talk to customers (in-person, on the phone, via email or through a survey) to gain a deeper understanding of the issue*.

Ask the customer to describe the problem they are experiencing, what were they trying to do but couldn’t. How could it be better?

Look for what the customer need is behind the problem and get into their mindset. These are the keys to getting to the crux of the issue and developing the brief for the solution.

*Make sure you have the necessary permissions to contact customers first before you undertake this step.

Generate ideas

Here is the fun part!

Now you have an overview of the customer journey, and the pain points within it, you can start developing solutions to resolve them and improve the customer experience.

At this stage, the more ideas, the better. Gather people together (ideally from different departments to get a more diverse range of ideas), and describe the customer, their journey and the pain point you are trying to resolve. Ask for their ideas of how the experience can be improved?

Assess your ideas

Gather the proposed ideas and start assessing them against the following criteria to identify the most appropriate solution:

• Desirable - Does it solve the customer problem and customers find it attractive?

• Viable - Can you deliver the solution now and sustain it into the future? Does it make sense from a financial stand-point?

• Feasible - Is it technically possible for your organisation to deliver?

• Ethical - Just because we can, should we implement it? Does the idea discriminate, can everyone use it, does it harm the environment or community?

By now you should have a shortlist of ideas to take into testing. If no ideas make the grade, repeat the idea generation phase.

Test your idea out

It’s unlikely your idea will be perfect first time around, so you will want to test your idea out and gather feedback to improve the solution.

Sketch the idea out and share it with customers. Or if you are delivering a service, try acting it out to demonstrate how it works. Do customers understand the solution? Do they like it? Do they have suggestions for improvements?

The aim is to quickly and cost-effectively understand what works and doesn’t work. When an idea fails it will either be the wrong solution, or the problem isn’t as you first understood it - Both are good learnings, so don’t be discouraged.

Use the feedback to further refine your ideas, repeating these steps several times until your idea is ready to launch.

Launch your CX improvements

Once you are ready and have the necessary approvals, it’s time to take your ideas to customers. Consider running an A/B test or trialling your solution for a specific period to see how it performs.

Regardless of which method you choose, it’s crucial to measure the impact on your customer satisfaction score and Net Promoter Score to show the difference you have made.

In addition to measuring the impact on customer experience with you improvements, quantifying the financial impact will go a long way to gaining support within your organisations leaders for further CX initiatives.

Ways to demonstrate the value of customer experience

With your customer experience enhancements in market, now is the time to share with your organisations the value these changes and customer experience can bring.

Depending on your organisation and the change you have implemented, pick the most appropriate financial measure to quantify the value of the change:

• Increase in customer lifetime value

• Costs saved through the reduction in customer complaints or queries

• Profitability or reduction in lost sales from serving customers more effectively

• The value of new customers gained through recommendations

Being able to demonstrate the customer pain points, how you have reduced or resolved them and the financial benefits brought to your organisation will help you justify the value customer experience to your leadership team and can open the doors to gaining permission for a bigger transformation.