The fifth best practice is often the hardest. Many times—after much time and money is spent on strategy development, launching services and technology—there are shortfalls...
Having worked in the CX space for years across a variety of multi-location brands, we have seen a common thread in customer experience programs that are successful in improving customer satisfaction and driving business results.
Not coincidentally, these programs follow recommended best practices:
- Strategy: The program is aligned to strategic objectives
- Multiple Lenses: Various performance measures (mystery shop, audits, customer surveys, employee surveys, etc.) are used to provide an understanding of location-level and brand performance
- Predicative Analytics: Data modeling is employed to identify what matters most to customers
- Technology Reporting: Tech stacks are simplified and amplified by integrating multiple performance measures and internal data into a single platform
- Accountability: Key stakeholders are responsible for both monitoring and taking action on program results
Many times—after much time and money is spent on strategy development, launching services and technology—there are shortfalls in setting accountability and taking action on results. The fifth best practice is often the hardest.
Assign ownership and accountability
An essential component of any measurement program is establishing who has responsibility for monitoring and taking action on results. Just having a metric in place won’t make your customers more satisfied, and it won’t make your business magically improve. As we have often seen, just knowing the score does not change the score. You have to be purposeful in assigning ownership and accountability for results.
In setting accountability, we have found that organizations that communicate the “Ws” (and one “H”) perform best in driving true business performance improvement:
- Establish and document who is accountable for monitoring the results
- Tell them the why behind your CX program, so they understand the mission and goals of the program and the organization
- Explain how satisfaction is factored into various corporate objectives as well as MBOs and WIGs
- Tell them what they should be doing with results,
- Teach them where results can be found,
- Define when they should be reviewing results and taking action
Monitor results
Whatever you chose as your satisfaction metric, you will have a score. Knowing your score is good, but the score isn’t actually the be-all end-all. You need to understand how your score changes over time. Is customer satisfaction improving or declining? Is a low score one month just a blip on the radar, or, is there a downward trend in customer satisfaction? In either case, what is driving that change in score? Does your program help you understand that?
Understand what impacts customer satisfaction
A key success factor to improving customer satisfaction is your ability to identify the things that are most important to your customer’s satisfaction. This may take a bit of work, and you may not have an in-house analyst who can model your data. Your CX partner should be able to provide these insights to you. It is well worth the investment to know which behaviors are most impactful to your customers’ satisfaction.
Take action
Once you know the behaviors that result in delighted customers, look back at your performance to understand how you are doing in those areas, and take action – train your employees, create incentive plans, hold store staff accountable, and change policies that don’t work for customers—to gain improvements.
The process doesn’t stop; keep monitoring results and taking action. Customer satisfaction isn’t a one and done proposition. You have to be dedicated to making it an integral part of your business. Lucky for you there are proven best practices for success.
If you would like to learn more about these best practices and how industry-leading organizations are leveraging them to drive improvements in their business, schedule a briefing with one of our CX experts today.
