Customer experience (CX) thought leaders from around the country recently came together to share industry insights and best practices at the Customer Experience Ecosystem: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange, held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The event offered both strategic and tactical solutions to many of today’s most challenging customer experience issues.
Not surprisingly, optimally leveraging all the data and technology tools available to customer experience stakeholders was a key focus. Effectively communicating and measuring customer experience data within the enterprise was another area of study and interest. Participants explored these issues in three unique brainstorming sessions led by moderators from the San Jose Sharks organization, Mastercard and STANLEY Security. These CX experts crowdsourced solutions and noted “fixes” from the field as reported by event participants. Read on for a compilation of their insights and ideas; many can be implemented immediately, while others will be useful for strategy and planning:
The Fix on Optimizing Mobile and Web Analytics
Moderated by Stacy McGranor, Customer Experience Program Director, San Jose Sharks
Key Takeaways – Data Collection
- Determine the key data points and clearly define how they will be actioned once collected
- Once they’ve been established, ask two questions: 1. WHY are we collecting this information? 2. Will it give us everything we need to take action and create success for the customer and the business?
- Be aware of “data decay” to ensure that you are not using and/or referring to data that is out of date
- Always understand the timing of the data points coming in and organize data collection strategies to honor that, e.g., real-time feedback opportunities versus annual surveys – both are useful; however, they are useful in very different ways
- Be vigilant in understanding who owns which portions of what data and, under no circumstance, should the data be “hoarded”
- Be clear on the tech stacks and their integrations to ensure connected data sources. As an example, if you ask customers for their channel preferences, ensure you are honoring them and not just “noting” them
Key Takeaways – Information Sharing
- As CX practitioners, we must avoid dismissing data in the event that we can’t control the action – we need to guide the stakeholders as much as we guide the customers
- In as many scenarios as possible, be sure that the feedback loop is closed so that customers and stakeholders understand what actions were taken as a result of the data collected or why no action was taken
- Clarity and brevity in data-driven recommendations for actions to drive desired customer outcomes is crucial in helping business leaders/owners and stakeholders
The Fix on Establishing Cross Enterprise Metrics of CX ROI
Moderated by Marilyn McDonald, Senior Vice President, Customer Interoperability, Mastercard
- Start with the C-Suite
- Include a top line CX metric for the company
- Connect CX metrics with the financials
- Changes to funnel metrics
- Cost savings
- Growth
- Prove a move in the CX metrics results in business metrics
- Work bottoms-up to help people understand why they should care about these metrics
- Outline the cost of NOT doing something
- Volume and value cohort analysis
- Each department should understand their metrics and how they drive the CX metric
- Then review for conflicts or unintended consequences
- Visually create cascading goals
- Publish KPIs in real time for all employees
- Ability to drill down
- Include deliveries that have rolled out and call out impact in the metrics
- Set common goals
- Include customers on your “improvement teams”
- Host a simple, lean event with the “Big Why”
- One day
- Pre-work before, i.e. all journey maps
- Customer in the room
- Regular reports outs with customer feedback
- All efforts tied to metrics
- Report back at a quarterly meeting
- Use CX metrics in performance evaluation
The Fix on Your Tech Toolkit
Moderated by Waseem Kawaf, Global Vice President of Digital Experience, STANLEY Security
Issues to solve for:
- Lack of structured data, governance and documentation
- Implementation taking longer than what was presented in the sales process
- Implementation relies on one sole stakeholder/champion
- Grappling with grandfathered solutions not built for scale
- Training and adoption of platforms
- Stakeholder buy in and involvement across the implementation process
- Pushing tools past their intended sweet spot (using excel for project management for instance)
- Adoption issues
- Silos across teams
- Not harvesting value from technology after the initial purchase
- Total cost of ownership (hidden costs)
- Integration
- Global versus regional solutions
- Resistance to change
How to find success:
- Start with a very defined problem definition and key points you can put on the board
- Cover the whole journey map with your implementation
- Good training and commercialization
- Good UI/UX
- Promise of the tool lives up to the delivery
- Iteration over perfection (fail fast, fix)
- Build stakeholder value across the spectrum
- Allow flexibility in development
- Ensure tech aligns to vision and an active roadmap
- Strive to be predictive and proactive
- Leverage personalization
- Make sure there is a multi-feedback loop
- Prioritize use cases and buy in
- Set realistic timelines and expectations
- Establish a creator mindset and rewards for innovation
- Choose the right path to scale as opposed to the easy path
- Involve IT and legal and make sure they understand the business and the purpose
