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The top 5 pitfalls of customer experience management

Posted by Perceptive Insights Team - 04 December, 2014

The common pitfalls of customer experience managementA customer experience programme is a must-have tool for modern businesses. Without it, businesses lack up-to-date, reliable customer feedback and insights that play a pivotal role in their marketing and sales strategy.

However, there’s more to a customer experience programme than simply collecting data. You need to know how to collect the right information, analyse it, and most importantly, proactively use it to improve your business.

Unfortunately, taking customer data and turning it into valuable insights is where many businesses come unstuck. Perhaps there’s not enough time or resource to do it in-house, or you may not feel entirely comfortable doing it on your own. If you can relate to this scenario, here are a list of the most common customer experience management (CEM) pitfalls—and how to avoid them.

It doesn’t have to be hard. And if it still is—have someone to do it for you.

 

Short on time? Download this content as an eBook!

 


 

Pitfall 1: No time or resource

Do you find yourself short on time or resource to implement regular surveys, or to fully manage your customer experience?

When companies start implementing customer surveys, many do it sporadically, which affects their ability to reliably measure how their business or staff is improving over time.

Managing your customer experience on a continuous basis can be time-consuming if you choose to do it on your own. There’s a deceptive amount of work involved, and thinking that doing it in-house will save you money often backfires. A lack of expertise could also result in being unable to get the answers you need.

Also, consider data hygiene. Multiple spreadsheets managed by multiple people can make life confusing.

 

Solution: A fully managed customer experience

When there’s not enough time or skilled resource in-house, outsourcing your CEM is a good idea. To have the ability to access valuable, daily customer data—all in one place—is gold.

Employing a live, ongoing, fully managed service, enables you to get on with running your business while the service is working hard for you.

 

Automatically deployed surveys

Ideally, you’d automatically deploy customer surveys to a sample of your customer base throughout the year, instead of a single annual survey. The beauty of this is that you never miss a beat and will always have customer insights at hand.

No business is the same seven days a week, 365 days a year. Things change: from seasonal fluctuations to new and upgraded products, operational developments and even new staff.

Surveying smaller samples of your customers across the year, rather than the whole customer base once annually, means you can create ongoing measurements that capture these changes. Instead of having a one-time snapshot of your customer experience, you gain a constantly evolving picture that is a closer representation of your customer base throughout the year.

With automatically deployed surveys you can understand your levels of loyalty and word of mouth in the market on a regular basis. This also enables you to maintain your business as usual, as there won’t be any need for additional resource. Here at Perceptive, we do all of the above, so you never have to worry about keeping data clean as this is all done for you.

 


Pitfall 2: Not asking the right questions

Many businesses who launch surveys in-house are not necessarily asking the right questions to generate meaningful feedback from their customers.

Failing to ask the right questions means you won’t get the information you need. Also, asking too many questions often runs the risk of making your customer base less inclined to answer your survey.

 

Solution: Outsource the expertise

Having an expert in the field do this for you can save you tonnes of time and ensure you get what you need out of your programme, including:

  • Analysing your current customer experience programme.
  • Asking strategic questions to ensure you achieve your desired outcome.
  • Measuring the quality and accuracy of your data.
  • Monitoring for trends over time.
  • Turning data into valuable insights which you can leverage for your business.

Having an objective, third-party company ask the questions for you also means that your customers (or employees) are more inclined to give you the hard-hitting, honest answers you need.

Our CEM platform, Customer Monitor, uses the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which includes a number of relevant and well thought-out questions to facilitate a strategic survey. The service also leverages technology to do the heavy lifting; you can easily apply filters and specific themes in text analytics, which provide a wealth of information.

In short, having an expert by your side really can make all the difference.

 


Pitfall 3: Continuing to lose unhappy customers

Research has uncovered that 96 per cent of unhappy customers don’t complain directly to the company and 91 per cent of those will simply leave and never come back.

Customer experience programmes are regularly touted as one of the best ways to predict when a customer is about to leave. And they are—when they’re managed in the right way.

However, businesses who launch their own surveys often find that by the time they sift through the feedback, it is too late to save "at-risk" customers.

The cost of replacing your lost customers with new ones is alarmingly high—five times higher than retaining a customer—especially when advertising costs and time spent converting leads are taken into account.

 

Solution: Save "at-risk" customers in time

Being able to save “at-risk” customers in time is one of the most powerful benefits that an advanced CEM service can offer. Here at Perceptive, we combine daily data with heavily researched metrics, such as NPS, which allows us to identify your most “at-risk” customers. This means you can see who they are and what they have said about you. You also get the chance to contact these customers to resolve their issues and create a happy customer out of an unhappy one, before they potentially damage your reputation in the marketplace.

This information is invaluable for a business, as it can increase your customer retention rates. Keeping your existing customers loyal is more cost efficient than constantly trying to acquire new customers. The stats say it all: a 5 per cent lift in customer retention can increase profits in upwards of 30 per cent.

 

Read more: How to keep your customers satisfied

 


Pitfall 4: Analysing the data

Analysing customer data is a challenge for many companies. Often, what they end up with is some form of static report or spreadsheet. Not only is this a lot of work to manage, but it can also create difficulties when trying to understand patterns and trends over a period of time.

The good news: there’s a way to make it simpler.

 

Solution: A dynamic software platform

Having a software platform capable of analysing data is extremely useful, as it lets technology do the grunt work for you, giving you up-to-date, easy-to-understand insights ready for you to action.

At Perceptive, we provide dynamic, online reporting which pre-analyses the data and makes it simple to interpret results. Those results can range from high level right down to the granular—and over long periods of time and/or daily too.

Our data analysis automatically provides a tangible measurement which can be used to uncover themes unique to specific customer segments or across multiple segments.

If you’re measuring employee engagement you can easily set and measure staff KPIs using the Net Promoter Score (NPS). You’ll also be able to pinpoint trends to direct long-term strategic improvements.

 


 

Pitfall 5: Securing your ROI

Implementing voice-of-customer surveys and analysing the feedback is only half the picture.

One of the main reasons businesses choose to launch a customer experience programme is to uncover valuable insights that will help them make solid business decisions. However, businesses who launch and collect their own surveys and feedback, often find they don’t know where to go next—or how to justify the running of a customer or employee experience programme.

 

Solution: Strategic insights are your ROI

The return on investment comes from being able to draw valuable, highly strategic insights from the data. Capturing customer feedback means nothing if you can’t do anything with it.

Understanding where the business falls short, what you can do to improve and being able to save “at-risk” customers is what will turn your business around. And it means that your customer experience programme will pay for itself in the long run.

Customer feedback is crucial to understand how people perceive your business, your products and services, and to understand how your business is doing in a highly competitive market.

The above, in combination with high-level research expertise to secure the insights you need, can be the difference between working towards customer retention or customer churn. An advanced CEM service actually pays for itself when considering the lifetime value of saved customers.

 


 

Having the right CEM expertise helps you

Businesses around the world rely on CEM expertise to provide timely, relevant insights that help them make smart strategic decisions for their companies.

Having the right CEM expertise helps you:

  • Save time and resources.
  • Analyse and understand data correctly to get the strategic insights you need.
  • Get it right the first time.
  • Have ongoing measurement of customer feedback—always access to daily customer feedback when you need it.
  • Ensure return on investment for your customer experience programme—by understanding how to best apply the insights to your business.
  • Identify your most at-risk customers and how you can turn them into promoters of your brand.

 

Learn more about customer experience management strategies for businesses wanting to become customer-led and grow their revenue in our free ebook: The common pitfalls of customer experience management.

Common CX Pitfalls. Download Now

Topics: Customer Experience


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