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Why do many customer experience programs fail?

Most customer experience measurement programs start with a well thought out strategy. Unfortunately, we see over time without regular review of outcomes combined with heavy concentration on just the metrics, programs can become disconnected from their original strategy. Losing sight of the of the big picture can cause your program to fail. Over the last 30 years, we've seen some common oversights that lead to customer experience measurement program failure.

  • Lack of Purpose

Like anything in life your Customer experience survey program needs a purpose. What is your organization trying to learn from the results of this survey? Is it merely a quality check of your existing processes, products and employees? Or are you ready to make changes to process and culture according to the feedback provided by your customers? The answer to these questions will drive not only the questions you ask in your survey but also how often you measure feedback. Without clear expectations, we've seen surveys go out too often, lack of flow to the survey, and sometimes collect feedback from the wrong customers. 

  • Trusting CX metrics to be a sole indicator of business health

Many times we see companies trust a metric like NPS to be the sole indicator of the health of their business. If the NPS is consistently increasing we want to assume that the overall revenue of the company is also increasing. Customer experience metrics should always be cross checked with customer life time value, customer churn, buying frequency to attach the CX metrics into business outcome. Don't use one data point to drive your business.

  • Lack of visibility to the Executives

A strong customer experience program should have buy-in and support throughout the entire company, including the executives. Without the support from your executives, chances are the investments required to maintain these measurements and make the corresponding changes your customers need with be harder to come by. Your CX initiative should be embedded in to your company culture and business values from top to bottom.

  • Over Surveying

As mentioned earlier, the frequency of your measurements can have an impact on response rates and future measurements. Many CX measurement programs lose sight of the time each response takes from your customer's day. Without managing a temporary skip list and regularly running programs your customers will quickly become fatigued. You may not need to ask about your customer's experience after every interaction. We always recommend establishing a statistically accurate sampling of responses so you can honestly learn from the feedback and work on implementing changes. 

  • Failure to close the loop

Collecting your customer experience feedback is just the start of the feedback loop. You should have an alert system in place to notify employees about critical issues and business opportunities. Additionally, you should make an effort to let your customers know what you learned from the aggregated feedback and what you plan to change as a result of that feedback. If you don’t include a close loop system to your CX measurement program, chances are your CX program will lack action and may see lower response rates over time.

Ultimately the success of your customer experience survey program comes down to the planning done ahead of time and your ability to review the program on a regular basis to ensure that it is meeting your business needs. It is easy to let the status quo take control of your survey program and without regular updates and changes to the question set, the feedback you collect may become stale.  We recommend addressing your survey at least twice a year to make sure that the metrics you are tracking are providing you insight needed to reach your goals.

 

Topics: CX Blog

Written by Iresha Herath

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