January 13, 2005
Understanding the Customer Experience
You get what you measure. Unfortunately, customer survey questions are typically at too high a level, include too many feel-good measures, are decoupled from internal operating measures, are too unfocused to guide action, and generally fail to get customer feedback in the customers’ own words. If you want measurement to have an impact, you have to measure at multiple levels, times, and places that customers experience and evaluate their relationship with your company.
The main point of generating data about customers is diagnostics: what is the state of health of our customer base, as measured by their own reports of their experiences, feelings, and judgments at “Moments of Truth” (MOTs). Moments of truth are the discrete types of direct customer interactions with your products, services, or servicing at the actual point of contact with the customer. What we have learned from customers over the years is that survey questions geared precisely to the customer’s actual moments of truth lead to sounder, more accurate, and more actionable the data.
The challenge for organizations is linking customer experience metrics at MOTs to internal metrics on operational processes. Organizations must know exactly what they provide at these encounter points and how the company’s policies, procedures, and personnel create value for customers at these points. Without this understanding it is difficult to design survey questions that enable customers to provide you with useful information (i.e., information you can take meaningful action with) about their experiences at MOT’s.
While many organizations have both an extensive customer experience measurement program and extensive process-level operational measures, the two are rarely explicitly linked in a way that managers can understand and use effectively. Precise customer data collected at the end point of a customer-touching process is often disconnected from the internal metrics by which process managers monitor organizational performance. The ability to link internal and external metrics is often complicated by failure to focus on the specific actions at the MOT and by fuzzy internal metrics.
As you design your customer measurement process, some key questions to ask are:
1. What are the actual company/customer touch points?
2. What internal process or processes support each one?
3. What do process managers need to learn from the survey in order improve the quality of the customer experience at each touch point?
4. What internal operational metrics need to be informed by customer data?
5. What additional internal metrics are required based on what customers can tell us about their specific service encounters?
In order to have an effective customer measurement system, organizations should refine their customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty measures to ensure that they have an effective “early warning system” to flag under performing areas of customer/company contact. Process effectiveness management should then be tightly linked to customer experience measurement. This is accomplished by real-time MOT-based measurement of customer experience using indicators that are (1) clear to the customer and (2) map back directly and specifically to customer-serving business processes, policies, procedures.
Posted by Greg Robinson at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)
