Understanding customer experience - Part 2

Remember the story I told you about my friend who departed company with her bank because of a poor experience? Well that particular institution certainly did not learn from that particular lesson and I doubt that it had systems in place to do just that. Probably the biggest mistake that businesses can make is not to constantly monitor what kind of experience their customers have on a continuing basis when they deal with various parts of the organisation. But how do you collect this kind of data and what do you collect?

Firstly, you need to collect past data. This is customers that have already transacted within the organisation. Here a brief online, in person or telephone questionnaire examining the quality of the experience is needed. Online forums and blogs can be another useful tool to collect this data as well. This kind of post purchase data can also assess the impact of new initiatives as well as helping to identify issues that may be emerging within the organisation that affects the experience.

Secondly you need to collect present based data. As the name suggests, its really about a just past transaction. It’s more about the customers perception of the company at the present time as a sum of all their experience. Here you’re looking for not only information on the success of the sum of transactions, but also the customers awareness of alternative suppliers, why they choose to do business with your organisation and what kind of things they want you to be good at. This kind of data is more in depth and should be collected at predefined intervals from all your customers and ideally a group of non or previous customers once or twice annually through surveys or face to face interviews.

The third type of data is intermittent data. Here you are testing particular customer segments for need. This may be prompted by a new product launch into a particular market that hasn’t gone successfully. This is very specialised where you are looking for the causes of particular trends, like lack of sales penetration, that will inform the product development process.

There is no point, however in collecting this data unless you are going to act on it. This means prioritising where you can have the greatest effect. Here mapping your customer satisfaction versus their sales on a simple matrix can help. Thus, customers with low satisfaction and high sales are an obvious first “At Risk” candidate that you need to attack first.

One last warning. Keep surveys short, make online tools predictable as to how long they will take and tell customers what you will do with the information. If you don’t do this your risk making the data collection process itself a source of poor customer experience.