Seeking Higher Profits? Improve the
Quality of Your Customers' Experience
How to Define, Measure, & Manage What Matters Most to Your
Customers
By Patricia B. Seybold
WHY IS THE QUALITY OF CUSTOMER
EXPERIENCE (QCE) MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER?
In today's tough economic climate, retaining and growing your
relationships with your existing customers is job number 1. Yet
today's customers are more demanding than ever before. That's why
leading companies focus on insuring that the experiences that
customers have with their products and services are
best-in-class.
Whether you realize it or not, customers are judging you on the
Quality of the Customer Experience (QCE)SM you offer from pre-sales to
purchasing, to delivery, usage, support, repair, billing, and/or
replenishment. And, whether customers interact with you directly or
indirectly through partners, their reaction to that experience will
impact your bottom line.
What Is QCE?
We use the term, "Quality of Customer Experience," to focus
attention on this crucial, under-appreciated, and very thorny
organizational stumbling block to the process of attracting, retaining
and serving customers. Every time your customers interact with your
brand, directly or indirectly, for whatever reason, they are
implicitly or explicitly rating the experience they have and comparing
that experience with the promise you make in your advertising and your
marketing. The Quality of Customer Experience is a subjective
assessment that customers make about how they feel when they interact
with your products, your services, your organization, and the partners
who represent your products and services. Our QCE methodology and
framework provides an objective way to measure, monitor, and, most
importantly, avoid the most significant customer dissatisfiers.
What Are QCE Metrics? The Quality of Customer Experience metrics allow
you to assess, monitor, and manage your customers' experiences with
your brand. There are four categories of measurements that contribute
to QCE assessment: customer satisfaction, customer success, execution,
and monitoring and improvement.
HOW DO YOU PINPOINT THEM? Of course you can't measure everything, nor
can you survey every interaction customers' have. So what should you
focus on? We believe that you should measure those "moments of
truth" that matter the most to customers, as well as measuring
their success at reaching their desired outcomes.
Different types of
customers in different contexts will have different hot buttons.
That's why our QCE methodology begins by having customers in each
customer segment map out the key customer scenarios in which they deal
with your firm and its products. Customers tell you which of the steps
or tasks in each scenario is most critical to them and what their
expectations are for each critical step. They'll also tell you what
their desired outcome is and how you can measure whether or not
they've achieved their desired goal.
As you master each set of customer scenarios, new ones will emerge.
Managing the Quality of Customer Experience is a continuous
improvement game. You continue to improve how well you're meeting and
exceeding customers' expectations for each customer scenario, you add
new scenarios to monitor, and you retire the ones you've already
mastered.
What's the Link to Profitability?
There's a very explicit connection between the investments you make in
improving QCE and your company's bottom-line profitability. When you
focus on continuously improving your customers' experience of doing
business with you and your channel partners, your customers remain
loyal, they refer others to your business and its products, and they
purchase more. But there's an additional boost to profitability you'll
realize. In order to improve QCE, you'll be streamlining
customer-impacting business processes. That will mean eliminating
redundant, inconsistent operations, consolidating product information,
and linking transparently to operational systems and to your supply
chain. So QCE drives business-process redesign in a very pragmatic and
easy-to-prioritize manner. Customers continue to do business with you
and increase their share-of-wallet with you. And your costs-to-serve
and costs-to-produce go down.
