Author: Stuart Richards

As businesses slowly reopen and some semblance of “normalcy” creeps back into customers’ lives, organizations are faced with an opportunity to define and find success in a post-COVID world. Customer experience (CX) programs are the best means of acquiring new customers, retaining previous ones, cross-selling within existing customer bases, and lowering cost to serve, among other benefits that brands will sorely need as they reestablish business as usual.

Whether companies are new to the CX world or looking to brush up their brand, it never hurts to (re)visit the building blocks of effective CX governance. A well-governed CX program can help brands achieve transformational success, a better bottom line, and an improved experience for their customers.

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at five key elements crucial to effective CX governance:

• Focus
• Alignment
• Visibility
• Accountability
• Management

Key #1: Focus

Seeking to deliver a better experience for customers and achieve meaningful transformation is all well and good, but what does that goal look like for your brand specifically? Brands may be united in their aspiration to deliver those goals, but getting there looks completely different in every industry from construction to coffee.

That’s why it’s important for brands to sit down and define specific, concrete goals that they want to achieve through the power of customer experience. Think about what you want your organization to accomplish—could the company stand to improve its customer retention? What about lowering cost to serve or getting better at closing the loop with customers?

Creating a focus like this enables organizations to build better CX programs and keep their eye on the ball as it grows and delivers results. It also allows brands to track their progress and introduce or subtract program elements as needed.

Key #2: Alignment

The next step companies need to take after defining goals for their CX program is to align the proper stakeholders and resources. For some brands, this might mean creating a CXO position or aligning customer service, operations and financial departments. For others, it could result in creating an entire CX team and enmeshing it alongside customer-facing departments. Either way, it’s important to get all the right players in the same room.

Aligning the right stakeholders also enables organizations to close the outer loop, i.e. adopt a company-wide culture dedicated to customer success and continuous improvement. Metrics like the Net Promoter Score and its underlying philosophy, the Net Promoter System, are also helpful here. 

Stakeholder alignment ultimately prevents customer experience from being relegated to one departmental silo and instills it as a fundamental value of doing business. This can help gear an entire organization toward continuous improvement and, ultimately, success.

Key #3: Visibility

There’s another reason why it pays to make CX an organization-wide effort: visibility. Visibility goes a long way toward inspiring employees and departments to work in concert toward an improved experience.

As we just discussed, keeping CX initiatives cooped up within a single team or department actually makes executing those initiatives harder. Sure, organizations might attain some results, but making initiatives visible across departments enables those other groups to help work toward more ambitious goals and, again, inspires all employees (customer-facing and otherwise) to work toward a better experience and transformative achievement.

Key #4: Accountability

Focus and alignment can help a CX program proliferate—accountability helps ensure that the work actually gets done. This point begs little elaboration, but once brands focus and establish both goals and KPIs for their CX program, the stakeholders involved need to hold each other accountable if they hope to hit those goals.

More specifically, CX teams should establish a regular cadence for meeting, reviewing metrics, and looking for ways to adapt today’s progress to tomorrow’s CX goals. It’s key that stakeholders review KPIs, customer data, and financial and operational metrics at these times.

Key #5: Management

Focus, alignment, visibility, and accountability all feed directly into this fifth and most important element. Effective CX governance means effective management, which means defining a specific focus for a CX program, aligning all of the key players and resources, allowing CX enthusiasm to flourish organization-wide, and keeping those aforementioned players accountable.

All of this is easier said than done, and there’s no silver bullet for the job, but great CX management comes from effectively governing its four preceding elements. Organizations that can pull that off will reap the success they’ll need to (re)establish a foothold in the post-COVID world and beyond.

We’ve spent quite a lot of time discussing how brands can survive during the COVID-19 pandemic, but as shops reopen and governments begin lifting quarantine measures, it’s time to start talking about how businesses can thrive after this crisis.

Sure, COVID-19’s impact will continue to be felt for quite some time, but as customers return to storefronts and some semblance of normalcy is restored, it’s essential that companies consider how to effectively listen to those individuals in a post-COVID world. What follows are a few ideas for achieving exactly that:

• Listening to Customers
• Listening to Employees
• Listening to Non-Customers
• Employing Digital Strategies

Listening to Customers

It’s imperative for businesses to keep their customer experience (CX) and listening programs on during this pandemic, and doubly so as this crisis subsides. The COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed customer preferences, and tuning in to what these new desires are will make or break a brand’s post-pandemic success.

For that reason, organizations should not deactivate their listening programs as they reopen for business, let alone rely on insights gathered before quarantine measures took effect. Rather, organizations should tune their programs toward figuring out what customers want in their experiences as they emerge from quarantine.

Though these desires may vary somewhat from customer to customer, our research has identified a few common trends. For example, many customers want brands to maintain the safety standards they adopted during the pandemic, such as wider aisles for greater personal space and rigorous cleaning of self-checkout stations. Brands that listen for these and other preferences, then adjust their experience strategy accordingly, will find the success they need in a post-COVID world.

Listening to Employees

Employees have faced just as much uncertainty as customers in the age of COVID-19, if not more so. Between the threats of being furloughed or becoming flat-out unemployed, employees have had a lot of stress on their plate during this uncertain time. Brands that have spent the past few months listening closely to employee concerns and making adjustments wherever possible will emerge from this crisis much stronger than brands that don’t.

It’s key that brands continue paying this close of attention to employees as they return to work. Like their customer counterparts, employees care deeply about cleanliness measures, and will work much harder for managers and teams that they feel understand and sympathize with those desires.

There’s another reason to listen carefully to employees as quarantines subside. Depending on how they’ve been treated during this pandemic, many employees will hopefully return to work as brand advocates. Some, however, may return as detractors. Thus, it’s crucial for organizations to listen in not just to gauge how employees feel about their treatment during this pandemic, but also to address any disparities or negative sentiments.

Listening to Non-Customers

Maintaining relationships with existing customers is obviously important, but brands that want to aggressively regain footing they’ve lost during this pandemic should pay close attention to what non-customers are saying. This means expanding listening programs to cover multiple points of the customer journey, as well as giving non-buyers a chance to express their sentiments about a brand with tools like multimedia feedback.

This strategy can give organizations a heightened awareness of what potential buyers are looking for, and provide actionable insights with which to tweak experiences (within reason, of course) to better attract those individuals. This work can help businesses acquire and retain new groups of customers, which, again, is a must for companies looking to regroup and recoup after COVID-19.

Employing Digital Strategies

Listening to customers, employees, non-buyers, and other groups of individuals is important for gaining a holistic understanding of a brand’s experience and marketplace position. Knowing these things will be more important perhaps now than ever before as brands attempt to resume business as usual.

For those reasons, brands, again, should not deactivate listening programs or step away from digital strategies. If anything, companies need to adhere to both of those things more closely now than ever to find success in a post-COVID world. Multimedia feedback options, multi-point feedback, optimized survey design, and scanning for unsolicited feedback are but a few such strategies that brands can use to their advantage in a world after the Coronavirus.

Though companies are increasingly investing in customer experience (CX), the gap is widening between a brand’s promise of great customer experience and the customers’ assessment of those experiences. In fact, Forrester’s CX Index shows that there are literally no companies perceived as excellent in basic customer experience journeys. Companies are clearly missing the mark despite their CX investment—but why?

Read the full article…

With the spread of the COVID-19 virus, healthcare is right at the center of nearly every conversation. Many consumers are asking questions about their own healthcare coverage. Who do I turn to with questions about the virus? What should I do if I start to be symptomatic? What does my health care plan cover? What happens if I lose my job and can’t pay my insurance? How do I take care of pre-existing conditions and overall health concerns? 

With this heightened anxiety, it is absolutely critical for healthcare and insurance organizations to put a member experience lens on the situation—but this is easier said than done. Right out of the gates, health insurance companies are at a disadvantage when they seek to measure the experience provided to members because a member’s purchase decision is often not their own, but one made on their behalf by their employer. So whether you are measuring the member experience in “normal” times, or in the midst of a pandemic, healthcare providers and insurance companies will need to adapt to a new norm.  

With a better understanding of some fundamental aspects of the member relationship, companies can be in a position to turn a member’s apprehensive purchase decision into an exciting, positive experience. Before companies can do this however, we need to acknowledge some fundamental challenges when it comes to delivering a better member experience in the health insurance industry. Here are a few questions you should ask yourself:

Question #1: Do You Understand the Member Journey?

It’s an unfortunate truth, but few health insurance companies we partner with truly understand their members’ journey. Sure, a company might have a decent understanding of the experience at the call center, but what about the myriad of other touchpoints? Also keep in mind that a portion of the journey is external and therefore not directly influenceable by the insurance company but by the healthcare provider themselves e.g., doctor’s office visit, ease of getting prescriptions, clinic locations, etc.  

Whether the interaction is directly with the health insurance company or someone tangential to it, members are likely to view it as one and the same. It is important then that insurance organizations consider the member experience from three perspectives:

1) the member’s direct journey with the health insurance company

2) the journey health insurance companies create for their employees

3) the member’s journey with the experiences external to the health insurance company.  

Once a health insurance company has this perspective, they will be in a better position to understand the impact of the internal and external forces, and leverage that understanding to drive experiential changes. For instance, think of how much the member experience would improve if a health insurance company shared insights with their physician network about member visit expectations so that physicians can modify their experiences accordingly?

Question #2: Do You Know Who Your Members Are and What They Want?

Understanding the journey is one piece of the experience puzzle, but some companies fall short in taking the next step to know what the member expectations are across all journey points. Companies like Apple, Zappos, and USAA all differ in what they provide, but all are recognized for their excellent service because they have taken the time to segment their customers, understand their expectations, and build processes around those expectations.

Now think about a fairly typical experience with a health insurance company: a member contacts the company with a question about their bill, help on losing weight, finding a doctor, or perhaps they were just told they have cancer and don’t know where to turn next. These are the situations where health insurance companies need to create empathetic member experiences that stand out and touch members emotionally.

United Healthcare is one such company who listened to their members’ calls for more preventative measures and launched a program called Real Appeal to help members lose weight and improve their overall health. It was an interactive online program, using personal coaches and well-known celebrities such as Dr. Oz.  Participants received exercise DVDs and resistance bands, food scales, and other weight loss support items. Since the program was launched in late 2015, more than 100,000 members have collectively lost over 1 million pounds or an average of 7% of their body weight, according to United Healthcare. The program has saved employers up to 16% in annual medical costs, when program participants are compared to nonparticipants.

How great is that! Not only did United Healthcare listen to and put a plan in place to respond to member needs and expectations, but there was a positive financial outcome for doing so.  

But getting to this point requires that companies go beyond just understanding the journey and instead seek to understand member expectations and needs so they can build systems and processes around those expectations. Because like it or not, the expectations members have for their health insurance companies are being shaped by best-in-class experiences from leaders like Zappos, Apple, etc. This is the bar companies should be shooting for—instead of simply trying to be better than other health insurance organizations.  

Question #3: Do You Know Who Owns the Member Experience?

In her book Chief Customer Officer, Jeanne Bliss talks about how cross-functional teams will often build “three-hump camels.” What she means by this is that while everyone may agree that member retention is important and a simple solution is readily available, once people start to put on their “silo hat,” the simple solution now needs to satisfy all the silo priorities sitting in the room—and the original problem at hand may no longer be effectively addressed.

We are not saying that cross-functional involvement should be avoided, in fact, quite the opposite. But what an organization needs is a clear owner that drives a consistent member experience strategy throughout the organization. An individual to ensure that all decisions are being made with a “member first” lens and thus can bring together the various silos of the experience to create memorable interactions with members.

On paper, this seems like a pretty simple recommendation i.e., put someone in charge. However, you’d be surprised at how often ownership is unclear. While there are several approaches a health insurance company could leverage to identify owners, we often recommend using the RACI framework (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed). This framework is simply a matrix of all the activities or decision-making authorities undertaken in an organization set against all the people or roles. Just be sure you only have one accountable person assigned to each task or deliverable to ensure there is no confusion about ownership!

Question #4: Are You Measuring the Right Key Metric(s)?

Many organizations today are focused on a customer’s likelihood to recommend by calculating a Net Promoter Score or NPS. For industries like consumer goods where customers have several options to consider, or those where consumers are heavily involved in the decision-making process, NPS is probably a good metric to track. However, for industries like health insurance where the company is often dictated (versus proactively chosen), NPS may not be the right metric.  

In fact, Fred Reichheld, the pioneer of NPS, said this as it relates to the applicability of NPS: “we found that ‘would recommend’ also didn’t predict relative growth in industries dominated by monopolies or near monopolies, where customers have little choice.”

Unfortunately, there is no magic metric for health insurance companies to use because the right metric should be driven by the organizations’ goals and the strategies to meet those goals. In our experience, an index or combination of metrics is often the best predictor of member behaviors.  For some this might be NPS (satisfaction with the call center experience, and satisfaction with coverage), but for others it might be level of effort, likelihood to renew, understandability of coverage, and overall satisfaction.

Arriving at your key metrics will take time though. Yes, it would be easier to focus on NPS since others do and it’s simple, but the key question you should be asking yourself is ‘how good is that (or any) metric at predicting/influencing your strategic objectives?’ Having the answer to this and tracking your performance against it will help you meet your goals.  

Can You Change Your Member Experience? Heck Yes!

There is no question that the current pandemic will have a lingering impact on all of us, but it also provides an opportunity to better understand what your members need and to find creative solutions to connect with them. It is about building for and delivering upon member expectations, because creating a better member experience is not just about surveying members, it’s about understanding them and acting on their changing needs.

Looking for more information about improving the patient experience? Check out this eBook, “3 Reasons Health Systems Should Invest in Improving Patient Experience!“

Developing and maintaining a customer experience (CX) program is challenging, which is why many brands turn to a partner to help see this massive endeavor through. If, like many business leaders, you’re wondering how best to go about this process, what follows is an effective methodology for finding the right CX partner for your business:

1. Assess Your Current Program
2. Establish Why a Change is Needed
3. Incorporate The Needs of Other Stakeholders
4. Outline Program Goals
5. Develop Short, Middle, and Long-Term Plans

Step #1: Assess Your Current Program

Before searching for a CX partner, it’s important for brands to assess where their program is at. Specifically, organizations should establish which feedback channels they rely on, which stakeholders are involved, and whether their current program is effectively helping them attain meaningful transformation or meet business goals.

Companies that establish the scope, strengths, and weaknesses of their CX program before they begin searching for a vendor can better identify which CX partner can best suit their individual needs. Having this knowledge handy can also hasten any implementation processes once brands select a vendor.

Step #2: Establish Why a Change is Needed

Once brands have had a chance to sit down and evaluate their current CX efforts, they also need to answer a very important question: why bring in a vendor? What program or business need would recruiting a CX partner help meet?

Just as taking stock of a CX program can better prepare companies to seek out a vendor, so too can answering this question. Companies should always try to distill their CX and business shortcomings down as specifically as possible to both help find the right vendor and to be prepared to hit the ground running on improvements.

Step #3: Incorporate The Needs of Other Stakeholders

Considering company stakeholders’ needs is another important part of nailing down an ideal CX vendor. Just as they should consider why a change might be needed on the CX front, businesses also need to carefully consider which stakeholders would stand to gain from a CX partner’s assistance and how.

For example, do frontline teams need help with effectively managing customer feedback? Would Human Resources benefit from a change in how they engage with and solicit feedback from employees? These and other questions are why it’s important to consider what various stakeholders need from a CX program and how finding the right vendor could help their respective efforts.

Step #4: Outline Program Goals

This step can only take place after companies have identified how their current CX efforts are faring, why a change might be needed in those efforts, and which stakeholders need to be involved and how they’d benefit. 

To be clear, outlining program goals means establishing specific, meaningful transformations that brands wish to see, not something generic like “general CX improvement.” Much like establishing why a change is needed, outlining specific goals can help a company find the right CX partner for them significantly faster.

Step #5: Establish Short, Middle, and Long-Term Plans

Companies can take outlining program goals a step further by examining what they’d like to see a CX program achieve in the short, middle, and long term. Brands should get as specific as possible with the high water marks they’d like to achieve through customer experience, including customer acquisition, customer retention, upselling to existing customers, and by how much they’d like to lower cost to serve. These are just a few elements companies can incorporate into these plans.

Brands that take the time to put all five of these pieces into place will be excellently positioned to find the right CX vendor for their respective business goals. No matter those goals, though, it’s important to seek out a partner that offers a balance of data-powered solutions and inveterate expertise. Together, brands and their vendors can then establish needed changes, bring benefits to stakeholders, meet business goals, and achieve short, middle, and long-term success.

Though every organization needs a customer experience (CX) solution tailored to its own industry, challenges, and strengths, there are several fundamental traits that all successful CX programs share. 

In our latest webinar, “Now is the Time to Assess and Reinvent Your CX Program” with Forrester Senior Analyst Faith Adams, Eric Smuda described five elements that together define world-class CX initiatives and can enable organizations to achieve transformational success:

• CX-Centric Data
• Economic Framework
• Aligned/Empowered Employees
• Data Accessibility
• Organized for Success

Key #1: CX-Centric Data

If an organization hopes to reap success and meaningful learnings from its CX program, it needs to ensure that every bit of data gathered through that program is relevant to the experience it seeks to provide.

Companies can help ensure CX centricity in their data in a number of ways. First, it always helps to design feedback channels in such a way that customers can share what they think is most important about an experience, not just what a brand considers most prudent. For example, open-ended survey questions and media upload opportunities are just a few ways to help make this happen.

Brands can also make their data more CX-centric by desiloing it. Departments should never work in a bubble when it comes to soliciting feedback—rather, they need to ensure that their feedback methods aren’t running over each other and are working in concert toward a holistic understanding of the customer experience. These methods are key to ensuring more CX-centric data.

Key#2: Economic Framework

The best CX programs both help brands identify opportunities for meaningful improvement and serve as cornerstones of a companies’ economic aspirations. Thus, it pays for organizations to be mindful not only of how to provide a better experience, but also how that improved experience can help brands climb to the top of their vertical and provide new opportunities for growth.

Organizations can help their CX programs stay rooted in an economic framework by anchoring it in four economic pillars. First, companies need to ask how CX programs can help them acquire new customers. They also need to consider how those same programs can improve customer retention, identify opportunities to cross-sell/upsell within existing pools of customers, and, finally, lower cost to serve. This paradigm can help keep customer experience within an economic framework and, ultimately, improve an organization’s standing in its marketplace and with customers.

Key #3: Aligned/Empowered Employees

Employees are an integral part of any successful CX effort. Thus, brands that want to be customer experience leaders need to empower their employees to take part in that endeavor. 

How exactly can companies accomplish this? For starters, it pays to recognize the employees who are part of the feedback process. This means incentivizing and rewarding customer-facing employees who go above and beyond to listen to customer concerns and reassure those individuals that their feedback is being heard.

Additionally, once companies implement meaningful improvement(s) based on customer feedback, they need to circle back to the employees who helped collect that info to let them know what took place as a result of their dedication. This can help employees find greater meaning in their work and become more impassioned about their brand. After all, employee passion is a key component of any world-class CX program.

Key #4: Data Accessibility

The more accessible a company’s CX data is, the easier it becomes for CX practitioners and stakeholders to understand where their company’s experience effort is and where it needs to go to achieve meaningful improvement.

Again, it’s also important for companies to desilo their data. When departments and stakeholders collect CX data by themselves, they risk creating skewed views of their company’s CX efforts and may even trample over each other’s attempts to gather meaningful information. The companies with the best CX programs recognize the importance of having departments and practitioners work together toward a single understanding of the experience they provide. They can then make that understanding available for all stakeholders.

Key #5: Organized for Success

When companies strive to ensure CX centricity in their data, work to keep that data rooted in a framework of economic success, empower employees to take part in and drive that success, and make CX information united and accessible to all relevant stakeholders, they’ll be ready to build a world-class CX program and, thus, be organized to attain transformational success.

Though none of these tasks is a small endeavor, companies that work toward achieving them will not only see an improved CX program, but also get the most out of that effort. Doing so can help any company reach the top of its vertical and continuously achieve meaningful improvement for itself and its customers.