Mastering These Gives You a Direct Line to Satisfaction
According to Gartner, 89% of brands expect to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience they provide. In today’s consumer environment, where people have immediate access to more information and more means to instant gratification than ever before, that’s a wise place to start. But paying lip service to “putting customers first” and actually having a clear, well-focused strategy for optimizing the customer experience are two very different things—and the difference between them may well come down to how an organization tackles these four obstacles:
- The Multichannel Customer – The average customer journey involves nearly SIX engagement channels, and customers expect a seamless experience at each touchpoint. Do your frontline agents have the tools they need to deliver that experience?
- Fragmented and Siloed Data – Customer data (profiles, history, preferences, etc.), interaction specifics, support personnel and relevant tools may be scattered across the enterprise, confined to various freestanding systems, poorly integrated or otherwise subject to limited visibility. Is your data sufficiently accessible and manageable?
- Unstructured Data – Roughly half of CX data is unstructured, in such forms as audio recordings, verbatim comments and social media posts. Ignore this data, and you’re missing out on valuable customer insights. Are you hearing everything your customers have to say, even if it’s not neatly confined to a survey asking the questions you thought to ask?
- Turning Insights into Action – Knowing what’s on your customers’ minds is fairly useless if you’re not willing and able to act upon those insights, and use them to generate opportunities for CX excellence on both the personal and macro levels. Furthermore, when you take action, you need to know if those actions are having the desired effect. Three out of four CX professionals today don’t have the most effective tools available for turning insights into actions.
Insuring Customers, Ensuring Satisfaction
Direct Line Group is a U.K.-based insurance provider, with more than 16 million in-force policies to both private individuals and small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); they are Britain’s leading provider of personal motor and home insurance policies. By addressing the four obstacles to customer experience excellence, and supplementing comprehensive CX strategy with an internal campaign to keep employees engaged and focused on achieving CX goals, Direct Line Group was able to deliver a Net Promoter Score (NPS®) improvement of 13-18 points for customers seeking to purchase, amend or cancel their policies. Since initiating their “MyCustomer” project for gathering customer feedback—and leveraging that feedback to achieve meaningful cultural and process changes—the organization has received six awards from the Institute of Customer Service and U.K. Financial Services Experience Awards.
On September 29, Direct Line Group’s John Cockcroft will be presenting his CX story in a webinar, “Utilizing Customer Feedback to Drive Cultural Change.” If your business is among the 89% placing customer experience front and center to win hearts and minds, but still haven’t achieved CX perfection, you won’t want to miss it.
CX Day is almost here. We hope you’re as excited about it as we are!