CXOs

Theultimate Customer Experience guide for

Understanding what it takes to deliver a great customer experience

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TABLE OF CONTENTs

The current scenario with Customer Experience .......................................... 03

The biggest challenge in scaling up .................................................................. 06

Say hello to CloudCherry ..................................................................................... 08

Choosing your CEM platform wisely ................................................................ 10

The CloudCherry way to CEM ........................................................................... 13

Asking the right questions is a science ............................................................. 21

Closing the Loop – discovering insights on Customer Experience ........... 28

The CloudCherry takeaway ................................................................................. 31

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The currenT scenario with

Customer Experience

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The term Customer Experience Management has become synonymous with most modern brands. Every brand is definitely doing something related to it, and they also have some customer experience management process in place. As part of the process, brands are collecting customer feedback, be it on paper forms or notebooks, as an attempt to at least start listening to their customers.

This definitely relates to a wide-scale realization of the need for a great customer experience; every brand recognizes that the customer is the centre of their universe. But somewhere in their day to day activities, Customer Centricity tends to take a backseat. There arises the biggest question - does all the effort and resources spent towards improving the customer experience have the desired effect?

Unfortunately, that is not enough for the Customer Experience to start delivering Customer Delight. We have also seen brands encounter friction from their staff in embracing CEM Deployment. In many cases, Customer Experience Management Systems have been unable to deliver ROI and impact the overall Brand Experience.

In our experience with brands from multiple verticals, we have seen that large brands, or even the niche ones are very aware of the importance of Customer Experience at the top-level management, and have put something together including the right personnel equipped with enough resources.

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So how can CloudCherry solve those problems? Simply put, CloudCherry empowers and automates the complete Customer Experience Management Process for brands. In this eBook, we aim to guide top-level management on the best practices for implementing a Customer Experience Management Solution that results in maximum adoption and faster ROI.

We believe that the CEM system is not just about the customer but also about employees. More importantly, it is crucial to have a planned strategy and define a clear-cut process around it.

Even before we define a process, it is important to know why we need a Customer Experience Management Solution, how it impacts the overall brand, and why every single employee is a brand owner when it comes to delivering delight to customers.

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The Biggest Challenge in

Scaling Up

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“When a Brand starts focusing more on things like Profitability and Operations, the values which steered it from being a company to becoming a brand become diluted and

eventually obsolete. Rather, brands should retain their fundamental focus on the Customer.”

A brand is a promise. When you interact with a particular brand, they promise to deliver a certain level of service or a certain quality of products, among other things. When a brand delivers on that promise, they get happy customers. Fall short, and they have unhappy customers. And when they exceed this promise, they have Delighted customers. It is as simple as that!

Now, the promise is made up of a lot of aspects the brand has, over a period of time, done well on. So typically you see a company becoming a brand when they start doing a few things exceedingly well than others. The problem starts when a brand starts to scale. The people who created the brand face a new set of variables. As new people come in, there are different ways of growing – franchises, branches etc. And that's when the proverbial house of cards is in the danger of collapse.

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Say hello to Cloudcherry

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A brand that consciously realizes the danger of losing focus on its promise is the one to actually puts a Customer Experience process in place. CloudCherry makes it super-efficient and easy to measure key parameters that make up your brand promise and the key aspects of your business.

Cloudcherry helps you constantly measure your brand parameters to see how you stack up. There are also other areas that the brands need to do fairly well on if not exceptionally well.

CloudCherry helps brands identify and track certain areas that the brand may not have identified as important or may have thought did not matter to their target audience. Brands need to deliver more than just the ‘Brand Promise’ to Delight Customers.

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CHOOSE YOUR CEM PLATFORM

WISELY

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The Customer Experience Spectrum

How do you make sure that your brand is delivering on its promise and that your customers are happy? The obvious one is when sales actually start increasing, which is a more reactive measure. A better way is to be able to reach every single customer, listen to their feedback, monitor customer sentiment and introspect proactively.

Also, if you look at Customer Experience as a spectrum, on one end you have extremely unhappy customers and on the other end you have extremely delighted customers. These two sets of people some way or the other will reach out to you. But the majority - which is typically close to 80-85% of your customers - are not going to proactively communicate and tell you what’s going wrong.

They might be happy in an overall sense, but there's probably one aspect that stuck out like a sore thumb - and if it repeats over a period of time, they could quit your brand. These are whispers that are typically ignored - and if brands don’t catch these whispers it will eventually turn into noise. Many CEM Solutions are unable to capture the middle of the Customer Experience Spectrum.

“It is important to track

customer experience

throughout the customer’s

journey with the brand,

and collect feedback at all

important touchpoints.

This allows Brands to catch

whispers, and delight

unhappy customers.”

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“Effective Customer

Experience Management

cannot be run as campaigns

- weekly, monthly or

quarterly. CEM has to be

implemented across the

organization, through a

bottom-up approach and it

needs to have structured,

strategic owners.”

So, who runs the Customer Experience Management initiative?

Many brands feel that they need to hire someone dedicated to run this. However, it’s a part of what your employees are actually doing at the moment. For instance, if we want our staff to meet and greet customers in a certain way, all it takes is a little bit of training. It's hard to have someone in the corporate office constantly monitoring the implementation of this practice. The staff out there making your customers happy have to realize that this is one of the foundations on which the brand is actually created and have to make it part of the DNA.

Customer Experience has to be conceptualized and strategized from the top, but is always delivered bottom up. For the Customer Experience Management initiative to be effective, the sole owner of the Customer Experience has to be at the CXO level, but dedicated implementation has to be done across the entire organization, across all levels. The challenge always is how to make every employee an owner. And CloudCherry can help you with that. We will explore this in the later sections of this eBook.

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THE CLOUDCHERRY WAY to CEM

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Collecting data is the first step in conducting any big data analytics. The Data needs to be as broad as possible and not a sample. To find patterns later, you need to collect data today, with minimal effort & intrusion into your normal workflow. This includes data from not just from your customers but also from your own staff.

We need to let the customer choose the channel and time for giving feedback. CloudCherry allows you to collect feedback through various channels like E-mail surveys, Website surveys, Tablet or Smartphone feedback, QR Codes, IVR Feedback, SMS feedback and Microsurveys. All the data collected is stored in one dashboard in real-time.

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The whole point is to give a positive connotation to the CEM and remove the negative association that people have regarding CEM platforms. It is not all about negative feedback. It’s about the entire spectrum, the good, the bad and the mediocre. Customer Experience is not all about Customer alone, it is also about getting employees motivated as well.

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It always starts with the people

The first and foremost thing the organization needs to do before implementing a CEM is to take people into confidence. Employees feel apprehensive that there is a system that collects feedback from every customer - and there's a fear of negative feedback, especially about their performance. Employers at the CXO-level and the manager-level have to realize this, and think long term. People make mistakes. If you think long-term, you will make sure that proper training is imparted to your employees.

It should not happen that for every negative feedback, a mail goes out to the concerned employee, asking for an explanation, and a lot of noise is made out of a very small issue at hand. You need to realize that customers may not be always right, and demotivating an employee will serve nothing. We have to identify the weak areas that may need more training, or find better roles to make sure you have employees who become better because of the CEM program in place.

Very few enterprises have the foresight of creating alerts for exceptional scores, and congratulating the concerned employee, motivating them, making them an example for others to follow and eventually bringing a whole positive connotation to the CEM implementation. Employees want to be appreciated for what they do well.

Frontline employees and staff should want to implement a Customer Experience Management System and embrace it. The takeaway here is to remove fear and associate Customer Experience Management with positive improvement. When employees are appreciated, they start thinking how they can do their job better. And that's when the whole organization recognizes the positive impact CEM can have not just on the brand but on the employees as well.

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“Identification of feedback

channels is unique from

brand to brand and even

within a brand for different

customer segments, or

different products.”

Customer Experience broken down into parts

Anchor your Customer Feedback channel

The first part is the identification of feedback channels. What that means is that you have to be available to listen to your customers, wherever they are. This starts with your anchor channel.

An anchor channel could be a tablet at a retail store, whereas for an e-commerce brand it could be the order page or e-mail channels.

As a brand, you have to be available to your customers throughout the customer journey. So we have to first identify the anchor channel that will get the maximum number of responses and then identify what all add-on channels are applicable for the brand.

If a retail store only implements tablet or electronic feedback, the staff can get selective on whom they want to give the tablet to or the customer may be in too much of a rush to give feedback at the store. So, even though a tablet is the anchor channel, you'll have to follow up on that with add-on channels like SMS surveys, Email surveys , and so on. Channel identification needs to be thought through to strategically capture the customer journey, which is why we have conceptualized Cloudcherry as a truly Omni-channel solution.

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A giant product+service brand in the B2C segment deployed a CEM system using website as the anchor channel and the only channel to collect feedback. A nicely branded feedback form with a very user friendly interface for collecting customer feedback was embedded on the company’s website. This is a typical case of choosing the easiest channel where feedback collection can be implemented.

After few months the brand felt that the CEM system did not work for them as the data collected was inaccurate. The data said that 96% of their customers were unhappy with the brand. But the brand was sure that they had happy customers as well, so what went wrong?

The website channel was able to capture only one end of the Customer Experience Spectrum feedback from the extremely unhappy customers. This is why the brand failed in its implementation of CEM and did not get a well-rounded perspective of the customer experience.

How a bad choice of a feedback channel can lead to CEM failure

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1.

The main objective behind channel-wise CEM deployment

Make customers feel that if they are very happy they can tell the world, but if they are unhappy, they can tell the Brand

To be available wherever the customer is, and to collect feedback data across the Customer Experience Spectrum

2.

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Customers do not want to always complain. They do that when they feel no one is interested in listening to them and when they are not going to get a solution for their bad experience.

“Every employee in your

organization will

eventually start looking

at Customer Experience

as a metric.”

Customer Experience KRAs for Relevant OwnersEven at the bottom of the pyramid, everyone is responsible for some aspect of the Customer Experience - an employee at the billing counter is responsible for accuracy and speed of billing, the doorman is responsible for opening the door and smiling at the customer.

For effective deloyment of a CEM solution, you need to break down Customer Experience KRAs into as many little pieces as possible. At the end of deployment, every employee should know that Customer Experience impacts the brand, and every single employee is contributing to the brand experience. Every manager should be empowered with a metric that they can use to measure the performance of their team.

For example, if a team gets a 4.28 on a 5-scale today, and tomorrow if the same score goes down to 3.5, every team, like it or not, will be unhappy because the score has gone down. Teams will be self-motivated to beat their previous score and brands can even incentivize them. And this is how Customer Experience turns into a movement in your organization.

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ASKING THE RIGHT

QUESTION ISA SCIENCE

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As already established, the only route to success for a Customer Experience Management Solution is a bottom-up approach, where the front line employees are motivated enough to collect customer feedback. Once the importance of Customer Experience has been ingrained in the DNA of the company, they can start listening to the customers' experiences, sincerely.

Brands need to ask the right questions. Only then will the information collected from customers serve the purpose of closing the feedback loop by discovering actionable insights. Let's now breakdown the methodology behind creating an effective questionnaire in three simple steps.

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STEP 1Setting Objectives – What to assess?

Every Marketing Person knows the importance of objectives. The same is true for a field as dynamic as Customer Experience. Before creating a questionnaire we need to set clear objectives and identify touchpoints. A broad statement like “The objective of this questionnaire is to improve Customer Experience” is only going to get us as broadly vague a response as our objective. The Result? Unhelpful Insights that might suggest that the Customer Experience Initiative is a failure. Hence, we need to have more focussed objectives to match the brand promise.

For example, a retail brand can have objectives like

Billing should be completed within 120 seconds

Every customer will be greeted when they enter the store1.

2.

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These objectives become the first metrics of Assessment. And these objectives must translate to an action point. For instance, if objective two isn’t met, it has to be actioned by the Store Manager and the Retail Operations team, while the first objective can be actioned by implementing a better training program for the employees. Having objectives like ‘enhancing the customer experience’ has no clear action point associated with it and is destined to offer absolutely no value.

Next, it's key to identify customer touchpoints. For example, in a car dealership, test drives may not have a core objective metric to track, but it is a customer touch point. For a Supermarket, fast and accurate billing may be the core objective but there are other touchpoints like ease of parking, etc.

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So the first step to creating a SUPER Questionnaire is setting up focussed objectives, that give us rules which can be assessed, and identifying customer touchpoints which together give us a set of questions. These questions will help us evaluate the customer experience to discover valuable insights.

Creating a questionnaire with the right methodology can sometimes also lead to a change in objectives. Insights gained from the responses can help us realise that the objectives or rules that we have set are not actually creating the Customer Experiences we expected, and this calls for a strategic meeting between the various management teams to reassess the objectives.

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Setting benchmarks is important to know whether the rules are going right or wrong. Taking the same retail example- If ‘Welcome and Greeting’ is an important rule for assessment, what is the benchmark? Should we be asking the customer to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10? No, because what we need to know is whether each and every customer walking into our store was being greeted.

So the benchmark here should be a simple ‘Yes or No’. On the other hand, a question on the ‘Knowledge of the Staff’ cannot be assessed with a Yes or No question. We need to assess it on a spectrum – on a scale of 1-10 or ‘poor to great’, for instance. Thus, the response parameters for questionnaires are based on benchmarks like ratings, yes/no choices, etc.

STEP 2

Setting Benchmarks -What are the assessment parameters?

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Customer responses should be used to get insights on creating a better questionnaire that in turn, will result in better insights. The above methodology of evaluating the objectives that we want to assess and the benchmarks that will be the parameters to evaluate these objectives, forms the basis on which insights will be determined.

Translate ToReassess

RESPONSES RULES

QUESTIONS

Define

BENCHMARKS

RESPONSE PARAMETERS

Remember - Questionnaires are an iterative and adaptive process. Once the responses start coming in, the rules that we have set need to be assessed. We need to be very sure that the objectives are actually impacting Customer Experience.

RULES

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Closing the

Loop

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Actionable Insights are Direct Linear Links. For instance, if the CloudCherry Insights instruct you that more than 30% of the responses to the question “Were you greeted when you walked into the store” is a No, this is a direct action point telling you that the employee training has to be improved.

If a large percentage of your customers are rating "billing time" as slower than ideal, there's an action point for the Retail Operations team and Store Manager to identify if it is a staff issue or an infra issue.

But what about the hidden subtext that we are not aware of? Let’s say that both the above questions are as per our set benchmarks and are passing evaluation parameters. But still a question such as “How likely are you to visit our store again” is getting a ‘NO’ from more than 40% of your customers. What do you do?

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With Free Text comments and the Cloudcherry Wordcloud, customer suggestions help in quickly highlighting trends from customer responses. For example, if a large number of customers at a store have given a comment on ease of parking or location of the store, the words ‘location’ and ‘parking’ pop up in the word cloud and could give insights to stores on the fact that location of the store is impacting the Customer Experience.

This is where Customer Analytics comes into play. We take large data sets and look at patterns to get more Insights. This may require, for example, a study of similar people exhibiting similar patterns, study what’s wrong and map it with the consumer behaviour. Most of the consumer's behaviour is subconscious.

When large data sets are available and we start analysing patterns, hypothesis starts to pop up. For example, in one of the retail stores, welcome and greeting was not a core objective, but analysing customer trends gave insights that 40% of the customers who got a welcome and greeting had a higher basket value that those who were not greeted.

Another example could be a Car Dealership which has identified Test Drives as a touchpoint but not as a core objective. But analysis of customer responses leads to insights that indicate otherwise - customers actually want a great experience during test drives as well. Many a times we may not even have identified a touch point.

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The Cloudcherry

Takeaway

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Give attention to that one customer by addressing complaints or queries in Real-Time

Show the world that you care about your Customer’s Experience by being present where the customer is - through an Omni-Channel deployment of CEM

Put all of the above together, start looking for trends and patterns, areas of improvement and insights – and in the end, deliver a superlative experience to win the hearts of your customers

Create a truly motivated workforce that has fully embraced Customer Experience by deploying CEM alerts, notifications and metrics positively

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© 2016 CloudCherry. All Rights Reserved

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ABOUT CLOUDCHERRYCloudCherry is a Real-Time, Omni-channel Voice Of Customer platform that helps brands track, measure & improve Customer Experiences - thereby increasing profitability and customer loyalty. Leading global brands use CloudCherry today to capture feedback from 17+ channels, measure key metrics like their Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score and more, analyse the data to gather customer insights, and put them in action organization-wide.

CloudCherry is a product of Customer Analytics Technogies Inc. based in Salt Lake City, UT, and has a global presence with offices in Singapore, Bengaluru & Chennai. The company is backed by Vertex Ventures, CISCO Investments, IDG Ventures India, The Chennai Angels and Capillary Technologies.

www.getcloudcherry.com | info@getcloudcherry.com