The Coronavirus pandemic has left no aspect of customer experience (CX) programs unchanged, especially compensation practices tied to CX results. COVID-19 has brought about uncertainty, but it also presents a unique opportunity to reevaluate—and redesign—CX-based compensation practices that companies have long held sacred. Let’s discuss how these practices are doing in the current age and how they might fare better during and after this pandemic.

Should We Eliminate CX-Based Compensation?

Many practitioners struggle with how companies tie compensation to CX metrics across their organization. Does this mean I am advocating that CX-based compensation should be eliminated altogether?

The answer is absolutely not. Having CX front and center as a beacon metric is critical for any business that claims it cares about the customer experience. So, CX-based compensation can still be very useful. However, brands should double-check whether they’re compensating employees based on CX metrics that those individuals can actually affect.

For example, would it really be ideal if a B2B company compensated customer loyalty for its B2B partner when it’s really just an agent for a third party? What if this hypothetical brand instead compensated its frontline employees on a metric more within their control, such as level of effort? Those employees would be incentivized to create a great experience, then be rewarded for their specific contribution.

The point here is that brands should always reevaluate the metrics they compensate upon regardless of events like this pandemic. However, the current global situation is an additional reason to hit pause and conduct these evaluations in great detail. Companies and their CX leaders can both double check that their CX-based compensation is sound and make any adjustments not only  to suit this new, pandemic-driven reality, but also for when this crisis is in our rearview mirror.

Should Everyone Be Equally Compensated?

This is a question that comes up frequently within organizations that offer CX-based compensation. Additionally, this question has been magnified by the pandemic because the customer expectations and service delivery have both changed drastically these past months.

Many brands offer compensation based on one or two beacon CX metrics—CX measures that everyone within an organization can get behind and strive to impact no matter their job or department. However, while organizations should certainly have these beacon metrics in place, there’s once again something to be said for the idea of levelling compensation to suit different employees’ ability to impact a specific metric.

This idea is important because it enables organizations to create a CX-centric culture, one in which every employee has a chance to make a difference while also giving employees who are especially close to a given process the chance to truly step up. This way, the latter group of employees who can make a larger impact will also feel incentivized to actually do so. Equally important is the notion of aligning compensation to impact or creating an organizational hierarchy that employees feel is fair, not arbitrary.

Aspirational but Attainable Goals

Another element for businesses to consider as they evaluate their CX-based compensation and incentives is whether to make goals aspirational but potentially unreachable, or attainable but not a “slam dunk.”

At several points in my career as a CX practitioner, I was responsible for setting corporate CX goals on an annual basis. My job was to balance the executive demand to move ever upward with an operational desire to ensure that we weren’t setting ourselves up for failure. Adding CX-based compensation to this balancing act can make it a bit more precarious—whether I signed up for it or not, our goal-setting had  a direct impact on my coworkers’ paychecks!

The trick with this dynamic, as with almost everything customer experience, is to meet everyone in the middle. That means being unafraid to challenge operations leaders to aspire for more while also having the courage to present facts to the C-suite and help them understand this aspirational vs attainable dynamic.

CX practitioners who can pull this balancing act off will be able to create realistic CX-based compensation goals that drive everyone to strive for more, not just be satisfied with hitting a goal. Reaching a consensus between all stakeholders results in goals that employees across the business will chomp at the bit to attain, and there’s no better time to reassess that balance than right now. Finally, since having a compensation impact is a great motivator, everybody wins—especially our customers!

Want to learn more about how to create mindful, meaningful CX management in the age of COVID? Learn more about COVID’s impact on CX data.

The journey to effective customer experience (CX) includes many steps. We’ve already talked about three of those steps—listening to customers, understanding who they are and the context of their experiences, and taking action to improve those experiences—in great detail. This journey should be as rewarding for your company as it is for your customers when you successfully monetize improvements to create a positive impact on the bottom line. 

The Strongest Link

The best way for companies to effectively monetize the changes they make to customer experience(s) is to link both actions and outcomes to business metrics. CX practitioners can point to any changes that have occurred in those metrics since implementing any experience fixes and easily connect the two. Practitioners can also use these links to prove ROI to decision makers, which helps determine both which projects to prioritize and how to build a case for (more) funding.

To make the most of these initiatives and to measure just how effective brands’ experience improvement efforts truly are, companies should always view improvement monetization through the paradigm of four economic pillars: customer acquisition, customer retention, cross-sell/upsell opportunities, and lowering cost to serve.

Customer Acquisition

Experience improvement initiatives can enhance customer acquisition. Customer feedback is obviously important for fixing existing experiences, but the ideas captured by analyzing this information can also lead to new products and services, and thus to new customers.

Remember that customers are a company’s best source of marketing. Using a CX program to create promoters and then have them advocate for your brand will grow your customer base considerably.

CX practitioners can prove experience improvement’s impact on new customer acquisition by keeping a few key metrics in mind, including net new customers, new customers acquired over a certain time period, and growth of market share.

Customer Retention

Customer retention is typically one of CX programs’ primary purposes, driven mostly by closing the loop and resolving individual complaints from customers.Typically, it’s also one of the easier elements to measure from a financial standpoint.

There are several key ways to think about and measure customer retention. Brands can draw a link between experience improvement and customer retention by paying attention not only to traditional retention or churn metrics, but also increases in average customer tenure or lifetime value (LTV or CLV).

Upsell/Cross-Sell Opportunities

Voice of the Customer (VOC) and improvement programs are useful for uncovering customer acquisition opportunities, but they also reveal new opportunities to cross-sell or upsell customers. Experience improvement initiatives can help brands uncover new needs and thus market products or services of which existing customers were previously unaware.

Brands need to keep a few metrics in mind as they consider experience improvement’s impact on cross-selling to or upselling customers. Companies should pay attention to how many customers upgrade within a given time period, the amount of customers buying additional products and/or services, and any increases in average customer value. New product and service purchases will also lead to increases in customer lifetime value.

Lowering Cost to Serve

Lowering the cost to serve customers is another primary focus of CX efforts, whether it’s fixing broken processes or reducing service calls. Brands can wield experience improvement in a number of cost-lowering ways. For example, channel shift is a common means of both improving an experience and lowering cost to serve. This can be achieved by, say, moving customers to more digital or self-service options. These changes can fit well within the paradigm of experience improvement and can be measured (and proven) via lowered process costs, labor costs, and cost per call or transaction. 

Another way to think about lowering cost to serve is viewing it as lowering the cost to sell. Selling to a current customer, for instance, is much cheaper than trying to acquire a new customer. Activating promoters or brand advocates can also be used in lieu of marketing expenditures. So too is making certain sales processes automated or digitized. 

Continuous Improvement

This concludes our four-part conversation on how companies can listen, understand, improve, and monetize their way toward transformational success, a stronger bottom line, and a better experience for their customers. As we have hopefully demonstrated, the journey to effective customer experience and the corresponding benefits for a company’s success and growth is continuous one, requiring constant attention, care, adaptation, and innovation. However, if you deal effectively with the bumps and obstacles you encounter and even pave new paths when necessary, you and your customers will enjoy the journey. 

Want to learn more about creating an effective success framework for your CX program? Check out our article on the subject, written by  CX expert Eric Smuda, here.

Delivering an effective customer experience is a journey, not a destination. If brands want to achieve transformational success, positively affect the bottom line, and create a difference for their customers, they need to not only listen to those individuals, but also understand who they are, what they’re seeking, and the experiences they’re having.

Whereas the previous conversation in this series focused on how to effectively listen to customers, today’s discussion tackles the next step in the process—understanding them. So, let’s touch on the benefits of taking time to understand who your customers are, what they’re looking for, the operational and financial realities associated with their experiences, and how that intelligence can produce meaningful success.

Solving for X  

Listening to customers is obviously crucial to CX success, but the journey toward building a better experience doesn’t stop there. Once companies collect customer feedback via a variety of methods and sources, the next step in this process is to combine customer feedback with a database or CRM so that they can better understand who is providing feedback. Companies can also segment this feedback by loyalty or non-loyalty club members, tiers within a loyalty program,  or CLV tiers.

Put simply, the brands that take time to truly dive into understanding who their customers are and what they want makes it much easier to prioritize gathered intelligence. Understanding customers also simplifies identifying actionable intel, which in turn enables companies to give customers more personalized experiences.

Tools of The Trade  

Similarly to listening for customer stories, there are three key tools that companies should use concurrently in their journey toward better customer understanding. The first is key driver analysis.  Brands can better understand customer acquisition, retention, and churn by analyzing the key drivers affecting those movements.

Predictive analytics, meanwhile, are an effective means of discerning what customers are looking for. This tool can also be leveraged to identify what those same individuals may seek from a brand in the future or what actions they may take later on.

The final and most important tool of note here, though, is sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis can detect how strongly customers feel about an experience (be that positive or negative sentiment). This heightened awareness of customer sentiment is vital to actually understanding them.

The Final Blend 

Customer profile information, behavioral or purchase history, and sentiment are all valuable information for companies to have close at hand, but they don’t provide a full understanding of the customer experience on their own. For that, companies need to contextualize customer feedback with financial metrics, operational metrics, and employee perspectives.

Adding these metrics and insights to a blend of customer information is vital for getting the full context underlying those individuals’ journeys. Brands that can see who their customers are and how that likeness plays out against financial and operational information will attain a full understanding of the customers’ perceptions of their experiences and why they happened that way. Adding internal context and ideas from employees also helps brands know how an experience can be improved.

Once organizations have profiles of their customers’ desires, experiences, and future intentions, they can go about applying that information to the experiences that they provide and create transformative success for both themselves and the frontline employees who sustain the brand. This allows companies to both personalize the individual experience as much as possible and to design new experiences based on their customer knowledge and segmentation.

Be sure to check out the next installment in our series to learn more about experience improvement.

Want to learn more about creating an effective success framework for your CX program? Check out our article on the subject, written by InMoment CX expert Eric Smuda.

Customer needs, wants, and expectations are changing rapidly, and brands that want to keep up need to aggressively monitor customer commentary if they hope to continue providing the experiences that those individuals seek. Though listening to customers is merely the first step in a wider, effective framework for customer experience (CX) program success, doing so enables brands to better understand what customers are looking for and to deliver real business outcomes, not just keep track of metrics.

With those in mind, let’s take a closer look at how to effectively listen to customers and how doing so enables wider CX achievement.

I Hear You

The first step companies can take toward better customer listening is to carry that function out in as many forms as possible. Surveys, for example, remain a useful means of gathering customer feedback, particularly when questions are written in an open-ended manner and encourage customers to submit information about the topics they care about, not just what the brand dispersing those surveys might. 

Though surveys remain relevant in the modern experience landscape, there are other tools that brands should also use to gather the richest feedback they can. Multimedia feedback options are a must in this day and age, especially as many customers find image and video the most ideal forms of self-expression. Options like these can be included in both surveys and in-app digital intercepts.

It’s important for brands seeking richer customer stories to insert feedback opportunities into numerous touchpoints, which is one reason why website feedback options are also handy. Customers appreciate being able to submit feedback even as they’re taking a journey with a brand, and website feedback can be an invaluable means of enabling that.

Finally, companies need to pay close attention to what customers are saying on social media and other customer service channels. Though it should come as a surprise to no one, these forms of communication can provide invaluable feedback that brands can put toward a better experience.

The Point of Better Data

It’s not enough for organizations to pick one of those aforementioned listening methods and run with it—rather, as we mentioned at the beginning of this discussion, brands need to use as many feedback methods as possible concurrently. By listening for customer stories in as many places and with as many methods as possible, companies can drastically improve the odds they’ll receive quality, actionable feedback.

It’s also important for brands to gather information like this from an oft-overlooked data source: employees. Employees are integral to providing a quality experience and are brands’ customer-facing front line, so it’s safe to assume that they also have valuable intelligence for companies to reap and make use of. Thus, brands should pay close attention to soliciting feedback from both customers and employees.

Organizations that gather all of this feedback will be best positioned to understand who their customers are, what sorts of experiences they’re seeking, and how to meet customer needs and expectations even as they evolve in real-time. Now that we’ve discussed how to better listen to customers, be sure to check out the next chat in our series, understanding the customer, to learn more about building a better experience.

Want to learn more about creating an effective success framework for your CX program? Check out our POV on the subject, written by inveterate CX expert Eric Smuda, here.

Anyone who works in customer experience (CX) has heard about the importance of desiloing data (if they’re not already leading efforts to do so). That process has become one of the most popular elements of the CX world as companies strive to integrate data sets, processes, and departments to serve a more unified experience vision.

Desiloing data is generally accepted as a great goal, but executing that goal is no small task. It’s natural for CX practitioners to wonder where to start. Which data sources should they integrate? How exactly is data desiloed? Finally, how can organizations begin using integrated data to achieve CX goals?

Taking Stock

Which data sources should organizations desilo to gain a better view of their CX efforts? The first and most obvious here is direct feedback from customers. Once brands have accrued that set of information, they can look to indirect feedback from customers and other groups. Finally, brands need to unite these sets of data with inferred feedback, descriptive data that can help organizations achieve a united, holistic picture of the customer experience.

Next, practitioners need to understand that their richest source of information about the customer experience lies in the minds of their frontline employees.  This is an often overlooked aspect of CX data and should be a priority.  Employees’ feelings about a brand are just as crucial a component of any company’s experience efforts as customers’, so it pays to include those insights in a desiloed system as well. CRM data is extremely helpful, too—organizations should desilo as much of their customer strategies, technology, and interaction analyses as possible.

There are two more sets of data here that are essential to include in a centralized data system: financial data and operational information. It’s common for organizations to assume that the only data needed for a decentralized CX system is info from customer-facing teams, but operational data is key to understanding a brand’s wider picture. Combine this info with the aforementioned customer data, and the result is a truly versatile and powerful source of knowledge.

Opening The Floodgates

Once a brand has located these data sources, it’s time to begin the process of actually desiloing them. It’s essential for CX practitioners to bear two key principles in mind as they go about this project: efficiency and accessibility.

Efficient data desiloing isn’t as simple as just dumping a bunch of files into a single folder. Organizations that desilo information can attain a cross-functional communication strategy that enables all its departments to take advantage of that data in meaningful ways. CX practitioners should thus strive to be the champions of this data and use it to demonstrate how other departments can benefit from it, not just CX and customer-facing teams.

Fortunately, brands that put their data in one place have largely achieved that cross-functionality with just that action. However, organization goes a long way toward accessibility, too. Keeping a data system in good order means making everything from data source names to file organization intuitive. Organizations that pull this off can better leverage their data to accomplish CX goals.

Executing On Desiloed Data

There are many benefits to desiloing data. Brands that unite disparate sources of information can help ensure that CX data is used throughout an entire organization. This can help brands create a culture of CX centricity (sometimes referred to as closing the outer loop) that makes the company geared toward finding feedback, resolving issues, and implementing actionable insights.

This increased unity in purpose ultimately leads to an improved customer experience. When departments share information and can draw data from one place, it’s easier to accomplish CX goals and to fix problem areas. Thus, desiloing data is a boon not just for brands and organizations, but also the customers for whom those companies seek to create memorable, compelling experiences.

Interested in learning more about making the most of your data and the tools with which you gather it? Check out our article on how to achieve meaningful customer listening here!