Our objective
Customer Experience Management implies customers’ experiences with a company or a brand in their entirety.
The objective of Customer Experience Management is to get satisfied and loyal customers, who actively recommend a company or a brand.
There are manifold points of contact between a customer and a company (so-called touchpoints): website, contact to sales people, customer complaints, forum postings and product experience are only a few examples for customer contacts with a company (customer journey).
The combination of these events implicates
- whether a customer is “only satisfied” or
- whether a customer was “more than satisfied” with a product and does not only buy a product but actively recommends it or
- whether a customer is “disappointed”, changes to another brand and even advises others against this product or brand.
Whether the customer relations are in a B2C or B2B setting, is insignificant. Although it is necessary to choose the correct approach. B2B with its more complex customer relations is different from B2C which is more emotional-oriented.
Customer experience in real-time
Whereas several years ago positive or negative experiences (customer experience) have been hardly known, this has changed completely in the digital age, especially in the B2C setting. Experiences with products and services are spread in real-time via the internet and are open to the public, everywhere.
An individual experience becomes a common experience.
Size and power of the internet make it much more difficult to fight against negative experiences and to clear them by advertising or PR etc. For a company’s success it is therefore getting more and more important to really improve the customer-relevant processes in order to avoid dissatisfaction and to change the customers’ mind in a way that they will talk as positive as possible about the company and its products.
Basis for this is a customer feedback system, which brings the “customer’s voice” into the companies, so that all internal activities can be oriented towards the customers’ requests.
Touchpoints
There are manifold points of contact between a customer and a company, a product or a brand (so-called touchpoints), either before or during purchase or after having gained product experiences, after the appearance of damages and the question of repurchase and recommendation. The total of experiences defines the customers‘ opinion, that is why you ideally should cover all possible touchpoints.
This will not be possible in practice, you normally will establish and evaluate type and relevance of the different touchpoints.
A first summary which covers all thinkable opportunities of contact and touchpoints and sorts them according to relevance is established by an internal baseline study. In doing so it is important to look at this relevance from the customers’ and not from the company’s point of view.
Feedback channels
If you know all basic points of contact between a customer and its company you can analyse it more closely in the next step.
HOW you do it strongly depends on the relevant touchpoínts and has to be determined individually for each kind of contact.
The following list shows some feedback possibilities:
- Survey after purchasing a product respectively shop visit
- Follow-up after a service case by online or telephone survey
- Call center calls or e-mails
- Online survey of sales and service staff after customer contact
- Evaluation of rating portals
Data which are already available such as CRM data or field records must be taken into consideration as well.
Experience-triggered
Classic market research projects are different from customer experience projects where the customers‘ opinion is not surveyed at a fixed time e. g. once a year.
Customer experience data are always related to a certain event such as a purchase, service case etc.
Hence it is possible to get statements on a specific case and not only an adapted and rather image-related statement on various events.
Best results and the highest willingness to provide information is gained right after the customer’s contact to a company whether it is a purchase or a service contact. At that time customers will give the most precise information and you will obtain the highest quality with regard to terms of content.
However, relation to an event requires that a customer experience project is closely linked to internal systems such as CRM systems. Only a relevant automation guarantees that customer experience data will be collected at the right time.
Voice of Customer (VOC)
While arranging the feedback in terms of content it is crucial not to lose sight of the basic objective: That you don’t only want to know whether a customer is delighted, satisfied or disappointed but above all the reasons for this.
Classic customer satisfaction surveys often reach their limits. They are suitable to find out those business units the customer is satisfied or not satisfied with, but they will not give any detailed reasons for satisfaction or dissatisfaction and as a result you will not get a basis for improvement measures.
Detailed experience reports therefore play a central role at TEMA-Q.
Customers get the opportunity to comment only on relevant points in detail. They are not confronted with irrelevant questions.
Data sources and coding
The implication of diverse feedback channels often causes problems in customer experience projects. Data may be saved in different systems or formats. Customer Experience Management means, however, to look at, to compare and to evaluate the customers’ experience comprehensively.
In principle there are two ways to reach this:
- Data transfer into a common system
- Virtual linking of the different systems
Which one might be the better solution has to be determined individually as well as whether a combination of both would make sense.
Furthermore the original customers‘ statements have to be coded in a uniform system in order to have access to the data for quantitative evaluations.
A usual method is to let a code system grow case-by-case, but the comparability with other sources might be lost.
That is why it is recommendable to think about a comprehensive code system for customer feedback right from the beginning.
Our Customer Experience Solutions
Our Customer Experience Solutions cover all aspects mentioned before. They are modular solutions and thus can be easily adapted to the respective conditions since every company is different and requires an individual approach.
It is important for us to integrate existing structures and systems of a company as optimally as possible in order to increase usability, acceptance and efficiency significantly.
In conclusion, it is always our main objective to increase satisfaction and loyalty of our customers‘ customers and to raise the company’s success persistently.