Connecting Customer Experience With Value

Failed customer experience ventures are often the result of good intentions but poor deployment. It’s easy to see the end benefits of focusing on the consumer, from increased loyalty to a lower cost to serve, but the implementation leaves much to be desired. Specifically, companies fail to connect customer experience with value.

Fully understanding the value of superior customer experience and how it generates value is critical in combining these two into one value marketing super-tactic. With less than half of all customer experience leaders knowing what ten additional points on their net promoter score would mean for their business, it’s time to examine this much needed relationship.

The Disconnect

Efforts to create a better customer experience begin with broad aspirations, often leading to disruptive initiatives that entail bold moves and innovations. This is coupled with a failure to quantify economic outcomes relating to the differences in consumer experiences, which leads to clear costs with unclear near-term results.

Questions about business policies, investment in innovation, and cross-functional priorities arise. These are rarely answered, however, as executives stall before they get going without a solidified link to value. Early gains, momentum, and a position of strategy at the table cannot be obtained without that link.

A Better Path

Thanks to science, research, and methodology, there’s a better approach to connecting customer experience with value. It requires patience and discipline to build the analytical approach required to make this connection, but it’s well worth the time and effort spent.

Properly establishing this link gives you key insights into what customers care about most, where to focus your efforts, and how to maintain the consumer experience at the top of your priorities list. Do this correctly, and you’ll also be able to direct investments properly as you approach a self-funding program.

Building the Link

Your first step in creating this connection is to develop a hypothesis about customer outcomes. Start by identifying customer behaviors that reveal the value in your industry. Airlines, for instance, would identify what promotes more travel and travel revenue while specifying what creates a lower cost to serve.

Next, connect customer communication to their action. What are they saying in satisfaction surveys and how has their behavior change over time? Create a data set from the results of past surveys, identifying what drove satisfaction rates and recommendations to friends. Linking survey results to your databases will help create the backbone of customer experience data.

Use this data to create a model, in graded short list form, of subpar points and notes of high regard to customers. Then, figure out how you can eliminate the negatives while doubling down on the positives. Keep your focus on issues with the highest payouts.

Third, use that data to compile two years’ worth of satisfaction outcomes and look at the churn rate. Then, consider what measures could be taken to turn just 5% of your dissatisfied customers into neutral ones. The goal here is to use their feedback to determine how you can move them up the value chain, ending at a satisfied level.

Fourth, analyze trends in a way that looks to the future. Looking backward over too long of a period yields inflated economic results, leading to bias in investment decisions. Analyzing trends on a yearly basis changes the outcomes measures for your value chain, providing more precise and actionable data.

Finally, track your outcomes. Quantifying the value of customer experience requires you to track each segment that matters most. As you link satisfaction to business outcomes, you are better able to set appropriate priorities and quantify payouts.