The optimism of #Purpose & science of #design in forging #digital customer experiences! Opinions my own!

Many companies are rolling out NPS surveys to understand how their customers view their experiences of the company during sales and service interactions.

Unfortunately for these companies, the results of surveys at this level of transaction often give a rosier result than what customers actually feel about their experience with the company.

The reason for this is that often an interaction with a customer is only one part of a much larger chain of interactions or events (a journey) which make up the customer’s experience of what they are trying to achieve, and if any part of that journey goes wrong customer’s NPS scores can drop, quickly.

Given this, as well as interaction surveys it is important to ask customers their NPS views of the company once they have achieved what they wanted in to understand how all the various interactions work together to deliver that experience journey.

For example, I recently had a problem with my cable modem and needed to order a new one from my telecommunications provider. I called up the contact centre to arrange a replacement and was offered a free replacement and was told that it would come in a few days. I was happy with this and the outcomes, and gave a Promoter NPS result for the interaction. Unfortunately that was only the start of the journey, as shown below.

As you can see, there were 7+ interaction in my experience journey. I began as a Promoter after my first interaction, moved through rating each interaction as a Passive and/or Detractor and finished with an interaction where I rated as a Promoter. However, overall I rated the end to end experience as a 6, making me a Detractor.

This example highlights a number of key activities that companies should take to really understand the end-to-end journey of customers when they are trying to achieve something.

1 Measure episode level NPS – This end-to-end experience can be called an episode, value chain or something else, but it is important to measure customer NPS based on their overall experience when trying to achieve something.

2 Link interactions – Companies should not treat each interaction as stand-alone items, but instead do everything they can to link together customer interactions if they are part of the one journey. This will give service agents history of what the customer has gone through to help them better, allow escalations of customer issues if needed, and facilitate deeper analysis of the customer experience.

3 Customer Journey maps – It is important to map out all the interactions / touchpoints that a customer experiences in trying to achieve something using a customer journey map or similar tool. It is only be doing this that you will get a true picture of what is going on from a customer perspective

It is only by seeing each customer interaction as being part of a larger journey that companies will really be able to improve their customer’s experiences and drive a real change in referrals, recommendations, and bottom line results.

The data will bring the “head,” but it’s up to you CX advocates to bring the “heart” by being able to tell compelling stories that inspire people to change and buy into NPS.

Beware of treating NPS as “more work” instead of “how we work.”

If you tie compensation directly to your NPS, you will start polluting the quality of your data. Focus instead on outcome metrics.

Roughly 70% of companies struggling to succeed with NPS do not have a systematic process to identify and act on initiatives. Remember, it’s what you do with the data that counts.

It’s important to establish trust early through training, support, and quick wins.