How to show the value of customer experience

Why customer experience improvement campaigns fail

Even though a customer-focused strategy has many potential benefits (more satisfied and loyal customers, reduced customer-serving costs and more proactive employees), it can easily go wrong. Too often businesses rush in headlong without working out exactly what financial benefit resides in each customer experience.

Still more often, the emphasis of customer experience improvements is placed on innovation. Yet innovation can fall short if it is not built around an economic understanding of what the true cost to benefit ratio is. Without guarantors of customer experience value, it’s harder to build momentum from the outset.

Setting up a foolproof customer experience improvement plan

It’s best to develop a customer experience strategy geared towards early wins or gains. This kind of plan could end up creating the necessary funds to be able to make bolder, more decisive choices regarding customer experience in the near future.

One of the reasons few bother to build the link between customer experience and value is that it requires time and diligence. It’s a structured process that can be broken down into steps that build a link to value. Before you start, define the customer behaviour that is valuable to your business.

The steps for linking value to customer experience:

1. Work out which customer behaviour matters

For a travel company, more customers should return to book travel packages, while for a mobile phone operator, it might be that more customers sign up for value-added extras or take out new contracts.

2. Show how what customers say matches up to what they do

Take data collected from customer satisfaction surveys and compare this to customers’ key pain points and needs. Matching levels of satisfaction to different customer experiences (such as when customers purchase service or product upgrades) will help you prioritise customer experience changes where you are most likely to see benefits.

3. Work out the historical performance of real customers

Existing customers’ satisfaction levels can be worked out by segment, so that you can determine which segment has the best combination of dissatisfied, neutral and satisfied customers. The customers in this group will be easier to link to value as they show the full spectrum of customer experience.

4. Use historical data for forward planning

Simply looking at gains made over time can make further gains seem inevitable and this could make investment decisions over-confident. Instead, project findings into the future and focus on working out where the link between customer experience and value is evolving.

5. Track outcomes for each customer segment

To make sure that your changes to customer experience are effective for every group within your customer base, track outcomes for every segment. This will help you tweak your approach to make sure that customer experience improvements yield financial benefits.

Provided that you follow a sound strategy and can link and demonstrate the value of specific customer experiences, you can create a customer-centric experience improvement plan that is almost certain to succeed.

To learn more try reading our ebook How To Measure Customer Experience