There is not a single business that have not made customer experience its main focus. But what happens in reality ? Where are they in their journey and what’s the difference between leaders and laggards ?
That’s the topic of a recent IBM study titled “The Customer Experience Revolution“.
Only 16% of business master their customer experience
First lesson learned : if everybody’s speaking about customer experience, not everyone has the same level of mastery. There are significant differences between the leaders and the others.
The study shows that only 16% of businesses can be considered as “Elites”, compared as 48% “professionals” and 36% “amateurs”.
Having 48% of businesses doing new things with a sufficient mastery is a good news. What’s shocking is the 36% of amateurs that show that beyond the discourses on client orientation (that are older than digital transformation) most stayed at the intent level and did not turn it into action.
Without any surprise, what distinguishes leaders from others is their ability to analyse and measure what happens at each tout point, ongoingly improve their approach, use data and listen to their employees.
Measure, analysis, ongoing improvement and employee listening
Let’s focus on Elites since they personify the level of excellence towards with the others must aim. What must businesses do to excel at customer experience ?
• Collaboration
Customer experience Elites have a high level of collaboration across functions and silos. Customer experience is not a black box but a shared responsibility.
What distinguish them from offers is not only collaboration its scale.
• Data integration
Elites don’t rely on intuition but on data to measure and make decisions regarding to customer experience. But everybody’s doing it, right ? What’s peculiar to the Elites is that they use data from various sources, presented in an integrated fashion and made available to whoever need it while others are locking data into silos and provide employees with a partial – and sometimes wrong – view of it.
• Experience design starting from the customer
Elites do “Experience Design” starting with the customer’s need. They use the same approaches to design employees experience and solve various complex business problems.
• Customer feedback
At Elites, the customer is a part of the Customer Experience team and 80% have access to real time customer feedbacks. The most advanced do sentiment analyses and have permanent customer panels.
• Experience value analysis
Elites have a value driven approach to experience. They measure the business impact of their initiatives and of each improvement. They measure the value for the customer and for them and draw insights for future initiatives.
The last thing that differenciates Elites from others is that their employee play a huge part in the customer experience. Being on the front line, in charge of delivering the customer experience, employees are the best to know what works and doesn’t and what should be done.
Even if it does not come with radically new conclusions, this survey backs many convictions we already have. But it backs these convictions with figures and gives a clear roadmap to whom does not want to compete in the amateur category for long.