How Measuring Your Tech Will Improve Customer Experience

In this guest post, Cyara co-founder and CEO Alok Kulkarni (pictured below) shares a simple way for brands to improve customer experience that they may have missed.

Alok Kulkarni

With the rise of digital disruption, organisations now communicate with customers through a number of technologies that come together to form one journey across different channels.

Nowadays, given the ease in switching products or brands, time-poor consumers are very unforgiving and will turn to competitors after experiencing even the most minor customer experience (CX) failures.

Everyone has experienced a CX failure as a result of technology-related issues, whether it be an unresponsive chat, call drop-outs, or a customer service agent not having all your details on hand. CX failures, no matter how small, can cause customer frustrations that lead to a decline in loyalty, and in turn can negatively impact an organisation’s customer satisfaction scores.

Frost & Sullivan research commissioned by Cyara revealed that 56 per cent of companies measured customer satisfaction through the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and 34 per cent indicated they use the Net Promoter Score (NPS). However, are these widely adopted measures telling us enough about the customer journey in real time? And how can marketers leverage technology to better understand customer satisfaction?

The CSAT and NPS have become common tools to measure the state of an organisation’s CX in an effort to improve customer service. However, effective management of CX requires more than a simple scoring system – an innovative approach that avoids customer frustration and ensures integrity of the data collected is required. But most businesses are unprepared. Although the vast majority of business leaders believe superior CX is important to an organisation’s success, many lack the tools needed to understand where they are failing in the first place.

According to the research, the top five customer expectations of a contact centre were:

Knowledgeable, polite, and friendly customer service agents.
Calls answered quickly/short waiting times.
First call resolution/queries resolved quickly.
Customers don’t want multiple call transfers.
Personalised experience.

These expectations can only be fully met through providing customers with a seamless journey across all digital touchpoints, but that’s much easier said than done. Widely adopted customer satisfaction measurement tools like the NPS can offer insight into how well your CX technology is working based on the likelihood they will recommend your brand. However, these results often come months after the fact, and therefore only reactive measures can be taken after the damage is done.

So, what’s the answer?

Operational customer experience (OCX) is a framework of metrics that determines the quality of a customer’s experience with a company’s digital touch points. Measuring OCX provides an outside-in perspective using objective and repeatable methods that bypasses the need for customer involvement in the CX measurement process. For example, if an organisation is experiencing frequent drop-outs or long call waiting times, or customer service agents are unable to quickly resolve issues, synthetically measuring OCX will allow these errors to be detected and reported in real time.

By testing, measuring, and monitoring an organisation’s OCX using synthetic customer interactions, an organisation can detect errors before they even reach the customer, ultimately providing organisations with CX assurance. Doing so allows flawless customer experiences, which is critical in maintaining high customer satisfaction and loyalty.

When trying to understand an organisation’s customer satisfaction levels, it is important to first have a clear picture of its CX journey in order to know where errors are occurring throughout. This will allow organisations to better see what part of the journey is failing, and in real time, enabling them to concentrate efforts on preventing customer frustrations, rather than relying on delayed, exhaustive, and often inaccurate customer feedback methods.

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2014 Customer Experience Award Alok Kulkarni CX Cyara OCX operational customer experience