It’s always exciting to start a fresh project here at CCC, and I am very happy to announce that we will be starting next week on new research regarding measuring the customer experience.
What about measuring the customer experience, you ask?
Well, we are planning to explore many different facets of this topic, so I think there will be something for everyone! And one of the best things about new research projects in my opinion is that there is always an opportunity for our member companies to help guide the direction of our insights. Sure, we have a general plan for what we would like to create and share with you, but so much of it depends on what we hear from you. Where do you struggle? What would be most valuable to your organization? Where have you tried and failed? Tried and succeeded?
I’m hoping that you’ll leave us a note in the comments section with some thoughts. To get your creative thinking going, here are a few early ideas on our minds:
- The proliferation of multichannel customer experiences is forever changing the way we should measure our service efforts. In other words, it’s no longer good enough to ask a customer about their experience with the rep they just spoke to…since it’s very likely that customer also has been to your web site and probably has some feedback to share about that as well. How can companies start examining the service experience more holistically?
- Customer surveys are not a game of twenty questions. I’m not just talking about keeping surveys short and sweet (which we should try to do, of course), but more importantly, the questions that make the cut need to be GOOD ones. Most surveys do not afford us the luxury of asking questions until we finally uncover a good nugget of feedback. Instead, the burden is on the company to ask the questions that will elicit the most actionable feedback possible. How should companies strategically select the best questions and build an effective survey out of them?
- When service goes multichannel, so too should surveys. So if the above items are about what you track and how you consider the overall customer experience, this point is about how to do it. Specifically, as customers are increasingly comfortable contacting us in new channels (e.g., SMS, Facebook, Twitter), then perhaps surveys should follow suit. Easier said than done, though?
CCC members, you can learn more about this upcoming research—including the plan for releasing the information—on our web site. Also, please take a moment to leave a comment below to tell us what would be interesting to you. Better yet, please feel free to contact us to schedule a conversation on this topic with the research team.
Related CCC Research
- Measuring the Customer Experience Topic Center
- Customer Effort Score
- Customer Experience Survey Design
Related posts:
on August 25, 2011
Respond
Hi Lauren
We struggle to align the way that we set up and design operations (for example; in the call centre) to be truly aligned to customer requirements and expectations.
We typically use the following six ‘pillars’ when designing operations http://www.oeeuk.com/what-designtransformation-operatingmodel.asp and so it would be great to understand ways in which we could ask customers questions that would inform these areas going forward.
Great customer experience, should, after all, start with the way you design your operations in the first place!
Thanks
on August 25, 2011
Respond
Very interesting subject Lauren.
We have tried to approach this in a holistic way, from the customer’s perspective. He/she is not so much interested in the individual interaction, be it by telephone, chat, email, web search, etc. Their interest in in having their question answered accurately, counteously and in a reasonable time frame. And each customer can interpret these 3 criteria very differently.
So our approach has been to focus on the customer’s question (in our terms, the case) using our database of closed cases, and survey their overall satisfaction, focusing on their satisfation with the expertise, manner and timeframe of the experience.
Looking forward to your research results!
on August 26, 2011
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We have used a number of measurments that have focused on accuracy and speed of service. There are two new areas we are exploring as we roll out technology to support the gathering of data. The first is an ‘ease of service’ survey that focuses on how easy it was to access our systems and how easy it was to get the desired information. The second area we will be exploring will be automated surveys generated at specific points in the claims process.
on September 3, 2011
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This topic is of great interest to me since my efforts to measure our clients’ experience in ways that really matter are a current focus of mine.
I hope that there is a significant effort to focus on this topic from a b2b perspective (mine) differentiated from a b2c perspective. As we all know, the expectations of clients, level of support and ongoing nature of the relationships are significantly different between the two. Also, in our environment, due to the complexity of products and the issues our clients face, first call resolution is no longer the indicatior of service it once was.
In a b2b environment it is difficult to get clients to differentiate between the service our products provide and the service that my client services team provides. This can make it difficult to interpret the data.
Response rates and the number of responses to surveys can be so low as to make the data difficult to use. I’d appreciate information on how to increase survey response rates.
Finally the things we really need to measure are difficult and time consuming to measure and the data is difficult to aggregate. For example, without a survey or a specific complaint indicating that my team gave a client an incorrect answer, I don’t have the ability to know when bad information is passed on. The ability of my managers to listen to calls and monitor case notes is limited. The best my managers can do is sample a very few of these items for each of their teams in a given month. It can be a bit of a lottery.
Measuring the way my team tailors their responses to the specific needs of a client in a specific interaction is again very time consuming and difficult to aggregate without specific complaints or a sufficiently high survey response rate to give me a significant sample of that person’s work.
All of that to say, I am looking forward to the results of your work and am hopeful that it will address some of these challenges.
on November 7, 2011
Respond
Lauren,
Great topic, have you published the results of your research? I would be certainly intetrested to learn about how companies effectivley measure the customer experience and aligning to VOC as well as business requirments.
Also it would be great to know about the best practices that exist in terms of Call Quality org. structure. Inside the business, outside the business work collaboratively with the business (bias) etc.
on November 11, 2011
Respond
Hi Eric,
thanks for your comment! We have not finished our research yet, but we have just released a new tool designed to help members assess the strength of their current post-contact surveys along several parameters. You can access the tool here. Enjoy!
on November 16, 2011
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[...] Email Print This Post TweetSeveral months ago, I used this blog to announce the launch of CCC’s new research initiative on the topic of measuring the modern customer experience. Since then, the team has blogged about [...]