Have you noticed how brands are obsessed with asking us about us, “How did we do?” Despite this apparent interest in Customer Experience (CX), most brands fail to capitalize on our responses with anything more than a paltry thank-you at the end of the survey.
Case in point: I recently received six text messages requesting my feedback on how a DIRECTV (AT&T) Service Technician did in his effort to get my many TVs working correctly again. But after responding to a couple of the texts I hear crickets…nothing. Between the excessive messaging and the lack of follow up, DIRECTV has sent this Customer Experience backward.
Our latest research reveals the value of guaranteeing a good Customer Experience.
Direct Choice, Inc. and our partner, Phoenix Marketing International, recently completed the 2018 Customer Experience Research Study. Coming out of that study, Lane Mann of Phoenix has published some actionable insights.
In his last blog post, “How to Leverage Customer Experience Data to Increase Pricing & Margins”, Lane shared with us that the 2018 CX research findings showed that over 23% of US Consumers would be willing to pay more for products and services if guaranteed a good Customer Experience. Furthermore, nearly twice the volume of Millennials (28.5%) were willing to pay more compared to Baby Boomers (18.2%) and Seniors (15.9%).
Two glaring observations lead us to a hypothesis…
1) Research clearly shows that different consumer groups are willing to pay more if assured of good customer experiences.
2) Many times, CX practices attempt to learn “how did we do”… but then the brand does nothing with that information to guide future interactions with responding customers.
Our hypothesis is; “We have a major opportunity to drive measurable increases in customer loyalty and customer lifetime value by working to combine the power (and data) of CX and CRM disciplines”. And by doing this, we can drive further competitive differentiation and the ability to charge premium prices by consistently outperforming the competition with great customer experiences.
The general strategy is to use both reactive and pro-active communications after each customer experience to strengthen the overall customer experience in its relationship entirety.
How do we link CX and CRM? Consider this scenario…
What if the feedback captured from every customer experience (retail shopping, retail purchase, online browsing, online purchase, customer service phone call, in-home service, etc.) led to more proactive communications? It seems logical yet it’s rarely practiced. Ideally, follow up communications should ensure that customers feel valued every time they engage with you brand and certainly EVERY TIME they provide feedback. In addition, this CX data should be leveraged to create highly customized communications that accelerate re-consideration and repurchase.
If your CX data is not feeding your CRM database and not driving highly customized communications, this appears to be pretty low hanging fruit. Imagine how you could drive incremental sales in 2018 while improving CX to point where you are able to charge premium pricing.
For example, think about what happened vs. what should have happened with DIRECTV/AT&T…
- Customer forced to sign off that service was completed (there SHOULD have been another option that allowed the technician or customer to identify an exception)
- Technician identified there was a DIRECTV system problem keeping him from reprogramming the remotes. He didn’t know when the software engineers would fix that problem so he told the customer to call him in a week or so (this SHOULD have fed into their CRM system and when the problem was fixed, they should have contacted the customer to finish the service problem).
- Once the problem was fully resolved, the customer SHOULD have gotten a surprise and delight communication thanking them for their CX feedback and offering a very simple redeemable offer (i.e., relevant content for that consumer).
- All of the CRM data (including that this customer provided specific CX feedback) SHOULD be leveraged to create highly customized communications through all desired touchpoints including the billing statement (“Onsite repair work – No charge”) to further extend the goodwill from the latest customer experiences
Taking action… if your organization has CX data capture set up, but you are not utilizing it to drive pro-active CRM communications, please contact Scott Morrison of Direct Choice, Inc. at (804) 380-1994.
