On Creating a Customer-Centric Experience
So when I think about customer experience and what makes customer experience teams successful, I think about the metrics that they focus on.
There's two parts there: One is the ticketing aspect and that's how long it takes to respond to them, how many are being done in a specific day, which also informs the response time. As quick as the response time can be, the better obviously. But there's a whole other component around qualitative data, and that's how an email is written, how much empathy is provided to a customer, etc. And that can be as important as a response time.
When I think about the operations side, that's going into just the customer service team knowing exactly how an order is received by a customer and so they can speak authentically and honestly to the process and what to expect on downstream. Another component of the operations side is returns and exchanges and any sort of issues that come up and knowing what the processes look like and being able to inform the customer on what to expect.
On Metrics Related to Customer Experience
When I think about customer experience, I think about the topline metrics being number of open cases, the response time, and the quality of service which can be scored through NPS. The reason for those being important is because you get hardline metrics, like number of open cases and response time which can really affect how helpful a customer finds the customer support team being. And then the quality of service is a rating for empathy, so seeing how well we've helped that person. Those can have a massive impact on the overarching business.
For example, the response time can really affect a decision that a customer makes. So if an exchange process takes two days to respond, that can quickly turn into a return because they don't have trust in the refund or return process anymore or the exchange process. On the flipside, helping someone immediately can give them extreme trust and can really help the return rate, so how often a customer comes back to purchase more items.
Where Do Teams Often Fall Short in Measuring Customer Experience?
When a company has been running for a while, it's easy for the CX team to feel like they're on an island. And by that I mean that their number of cases that they're doing a day doesn't really play into the overarching business, and that's quite opposite of what's happening. Because a lot of times, customers are getting multiple touchpoints whether it's in-person, online via email, or online via social media channels.
It's important to have a top-rated experience across all those touchpoints because it really informs overarching metrics. And so having a customer experience leader who can share that mindset will help the rest of the group really feel empowered to perform their work.
Another thing that customer experience teams don't always do is have a close relationship with the operations team, especially when you're launching new products. It's easy to tell the customer one thing but what's actually happening on the operations side is completely the opposite. And so having those two teams aligned to help the customer ultimately is an extremely important thing that often gets overlooked - especially as the company grows.
