Editor’s note: This is the second article in a three-part series that explores the primary pillars of new global CX standards that Bain & Company, the creator of the NPS score, released alongside Kantar and Qualtrics. You can read about the standards here and the first pillar here.
CX teams are called on to create great experiences at scale, and the sheer number of moving parts can pose a challenge. It’s a long journey from collecting voice of customer data to finalizing the experience strategies that will drive long-term growth.
Modern companies have access to an unprecedented amount of customer data, but they need the right infrastructure to comb through and find the insights that will enable great CX execution, according to Paul Smith, senior director, MyCX at Bain & Company.
The second mandate in Global Standards for Customer Experience, which Bain, Kantar and Qualtrics released in September, emphasizes “customer experience capability” — having the tools and strategies in place to analyze feedback without getting bogged down by the flood of information.
“Even if you have surveys, social media, scraping, all of the different techniques, you're never going to get 100% coverage,” Smith told CX Dive. “Augmenting that capability with the data capability and connecting it across the organization really starts to enable you to build a picture across your whole organization.”
CX data management at scale can be daunting. Not only do teams need to examine feedback from multiple angles, they have to get the right insights in front of the right people while ensuring their metrics connect to actionable business goals like customer acquisition.
The 17 standards under the capability mandate aim to help teams develop better data management strategies as part of the overall standards’ larger goal of creating a common language for CX leaders.
Tracking feedback on multiple levels
The mandate calls on CX teams to track customer feedback on four levels: competitive benchmarks, relationships, interactions and journeys. Together, these levels can help companies uncover a more comprehensive view of customers’ perceptions.
Competitive benchmarking focuses on how customers view the brand in comparison to others, according to Peter Aitken, senior director and head of customer strategy and insights at Kantar. This measurement looks at the touch points where people interact with the brand and how this experience is differentiated from rivals.
“We want to make sure that you understand how your brand is perceived in the competitive context because customers aren’t buying just from one company — they're buying from lots of companies,” Aitken told CX Dive.
The relationship level digs into how customers feel about the overall brand experience. Interactions examine how customers feel about the experience at individual touch points, while journeys look at an entire collection of brand interactions from start to finish.
For an airline, ordering tickets, communications leading up to the flight, and the check-in desk experience are each part of the interaction level, according to Aitken. The journey level would look at how all of these points flow into one another.
“There's a whole series of moments where you will interact with the brand, and all of those moments will have an impact on what you remember later,” Aitken said. “All those moments are points where there's a real opportunity to deliver on needs but also differentiate.”
As an example, Aitken highlighted a postal company that lets customers pick up orders from electronic mailboxes. It's a company that pays special attention to interaction and journey measurements.
The journey needs to flow naturally, starting from when the customer receives a notification that their package is on its way. Customers should feel that learning the parcel has arrived and opening the locker to collect their order should are part of the same seamless process.
The company gets the end-to-end experience right by looking at interactions, such as the app itself, as well as how the journey flows from start to end, according to Aitken. This is also an example of how the broader global CX standards feed into one another — in this case, the customer experience capability mandate and the call to build a customer-centric culture across the organization.
“It's a very complex journey to orchestrate from the back end, but from a customer's perspective, it needs to feel really seamless,” Aitken said. “There are lots of different teams who need to come together and not just be focused on their own part of the product.”
Tailor dashboards to the user
Feedback is only useful if teams have a way to track and measure their findings. The mandate calls on companies to have live dashboards for this purpose, but they should be created with intention.
Dashboards need to be designed for employees the same way products are designed for customers, according to Aitken. Each team should have a dashboard that is readable, offers information relevant to their needs and can be further customized as needed.
“We always recommend that a good dashboard is designed intentionally, with clarity for specific roles and what those people need to see, whether they're managing a contact center, whether they're managing a store, whether they're an individual in the contact center,” Aitken said.
Smith likened a CX data dashboard to the controls on an airplane. Anything there should be absolutely vital to the pilot in the cockpit trying to make a landing, as any metric added to a particular dashboard tends to become important for the user, regardless of whether it’s actually essential.
This can be detrimental if it leads to employees focusing on metrics over outcomes or getting bogged down with secondary measurements.
“It can be very distracting to have a flashing red light on the dashboard that actually tells you we've run out of soap in the bathroom,” Smith said. “That is not going to help you land the plane.”
Linking data with business goals
One of the overarching goals of the global CX standards is to help teams earn more recognition for their contributions to the bottom line. Part of this effort is reducing the pursuit of metrics for the sake of metrics in favor of creating a demonstrable impact on the bottom line.
“I think oftentimes customer experience has had the mandate of, let's make people happier,” Smith said. “We believe that customer experience transformation is about earning growth through doing great things for your customers is a way to drive top line and bottom line revenue for an organization.”
Data is at the heart of CX teams’ efforts, but they must pursue it carefully. Metrics like NPS and CSAT can serve as powerful tools for the profession, but some teams pursue North Star metrics as a goal unto themselves, rather than viewing it as one tool in a toolbox.
“They see themselves not as custodians of enriching the lives of customers or driving customer centricity in the organization,” Aitken said. “They see themselves as the guardians of CX metrics.”
The global standards call on teams to link their customer data insights with actionable goals, such as customer acquisition, growth or retention. This can help CX operations define the strategic direction of the business, according to Aitken.
One way Kantar ties experience to the bottom line is equating CX initiatives with brand value, according to Aitken. Companies can track the four levels of customer feedback — competitive benchmarks, relationships, interactions and journeys — combined with a primary CX metric like NPS, and see how they contribute to an overall brand power score, which measures long-term sales.
The goal is to combine multiple smaller CX investments and adjustments into a larger, more comprehensive score that looks at brand strength over time, according to Aitken. A banking app upgrade, for example, might only create tiny score improvements, but it could be part of a long-term CX strategy that is driving success.
The goal is to understand how improvements in the experience have led to an improvement to the brand value, Aitken said. “And we know that stronger brands are much more likely to grow over time.”
