Prevent Your Long-Running CX Program From Stalling

The Gist

• Specify actionable value CX drivers: In order to create more actionable insights, organizations need to understand and refine their Customer Experience (CX) program’s value drivers.
• Establish the importance of each CX value driver: Using quantitative surveys, organizations can identify the significance of each value driver for the customer.
• Know the limits of the data: A CX program can’t measure all factors impacting a customer’s experience at all times.

Customer experience (CX) programs that have been running for several years are often in a Catch-22: the program has lost buy-in because it is not perceived to produce actionable insights; however, there is an understandable reluctance to change the methodology and lose trackability.

As a result, the CX program stalls — its long history becomes the main reason for its existence, rather than the impact it has on the organization.

Specify Actionable Value CX Drivers

Often, the cause of this problem is that the CX program’s value drivers are too general and don’t provide sufficient actionable direction — for instance, if the program tracks “cost of the product” or “quality of the website” in a survey. This may be enough information to identify where CX improvement is required, but it lacks insight on how to action change.

To address this problem, the organization should seek to understand its CX program’s value drivers, thereby making them more actionable; for instance, “ease of navigating the website” or “accessing the website on a mobile device.” This can be accomplished through qualitative insights, such as customer interviews and/or focus groups, that drill down into the specifics of each value driver.

Related Article: 20 Customer Experience Metrics Critical for Your Business

Establish the Importance of Each CX Value Driver

Quantitative surveys can then determine the significance of each value driver to a customer. This can be either absolute (e.g., rating importance from 1-10) or relative, using a trade-off technique, such as MaxDiff or zero-sum trade-offs.

While stated importance is useful, bear in mind the survey length: it can be onerous for customers to rate importance and satisfaction across all factors, and that can cause a drop-off in attention and completion.

Going beyond what customers tell you is important; latent value drivers use analytics to determine the importance of any given value driver without directly asking the respondent. This is useful as it reduces bias — when asked directly, customers may overstate the importance of certain factors for their own benefit (such as lower pricing) or misjudge their own decision-making process.