How Process impacts Customer Experience

I think many people understand that process impacts customer experience. However, I think most companies spend more time fixing front-office processes, such as call centers, rather than focusing on the back-office processes that cause the call centers to be in a state of chaos.

A study by Corporate Executive Board showed that 63% of problems (footnote) resolved by operations did not originate in operations. This demonstrates that many back-office processes, either in product development, origination, or administration, fail to see how they are impacting the customer.

That said, many front-office operations, especially call centers and web sites developers, do not interact and share their feedback with those that control your content and constrict your message. This is one place where Speech Analytics can make a big difference and bring the true "Voice of the Customer" directly to those that impact it in an efficient manner.

Front-office Processes: Front-office processes, such as call centers and websites, must be customer friendly. Through one of my consulting contracts helping a company implement Nexidia Speech Intelligence, we found that almost 20% of all customers were mentioning on the phone that they tried to perform a transaction or find something on-line and were unable to do so. Do you think this is something that call center agents were feeding to the eCommerce department? Of course not. Imagine being the call center director and realizing he could reduce his calls by one-fifth! Websites must be easy, enjoyable, and useful. If they are missing any of those ingredients, they are doomed to fail.

Call Centers are equally as guilty of not sharing information as those that create the products they must sell and service. Call Centers have a wealth of information from their direct interaction with the customer. They know the emotional trigger points. They know what needs to be simplified. They know what causes customers to leave. They know what needs remain unfulfilled. However, they do not attempt or are not afforded the opportunity to share this information.

Case Study: The Tax Extension

Retail counters are also front-office processes and some are

Case Study: Baby Furniture




Back-office Processes: Nothing I have seen creates more non-value add for a company than back-office processes. Don't get me wrong. Some back-office processes are necessary and add value, but most of them are the result of un-necessary complexity that the company has weaved through years of tribal knowledge and not examining the policies and practices.

Case Study: The Fee Waiver

Many people at some point, regardless of your credit rating, have missed a payment and been tagged with a late fee. For this example, we'll say it was $29. Upon using Nexidia Speech Intelligence, I found that for this one company, they had not empowered the agents to waive fees IN ANY INSTANCE! Instead, they had created a back-office team that processed fee waiver requests in an attempt to control lost revenue. Additionally, the call center agents instructed customers to "cal back in five to ten business days" to see if the fee waiver request had been approved. Think about this. The agents were training the customers to call back.

Take that $29 fee, and you have suddenly increased your costs by $10 (assuming customers only call twice), so you are probably overstating your profit for these fees.

When you look further into the practices of this company, we saw they had several complicated rules for determining who would and would not receive a fee waived. What they didn't look at was (1) how many of these rules overlapped each other, and (2) They weren't looking at customer behavior prior to AND after the fee was assessed.

When we examined these attributes, we saw that one rule could account for 87% of the fee waiver requests and 96% of the approved fee waivers. The company failed to realize that more often than not, customers demonstrate positive intent. We saw this on many occasions, using speech intelligence, where customers had disputed a charge and then recognized the charge and called back to have their bill adjusted and have the charge placed back on their bill.

Why is Customer Experience important?

Customer Experience bridges the gap between Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty. Customer Satisfaction deals mainly with attitude. Customer Loyalty has to do with behavior.

If you measure Customer Satisfaction and have been doing so for years, you probably have a hard time translating this into the newest metric fad, Net Promoter. The bottom line is that Net Promoter has a greater association with loyalty, so these scores will be much lower than your customer satisfaction scores. This paradigm is not uncommon. Realize that Net Promoter is not a silver bullet metric and your ability to tie this to tangible behavior (call back rate, spending, etc.) is what will separate you from other businesses. We will discuss that more later.

Customer Experience can be the difference between satisfied and un-satisfied, loyal and unloyal customers. Picture a 2x2 grid with these dimensions. 2 are bad, 1 is nearly impossible unless you are a monopoly or the barriers to exit are so high (think life insurance and surrender charges). It is truly a moment where an emotional trigger can translate satisfaction into loyalty.

Customer Loyalty can be broken down further. There is (cognitive, affective, conative, and action loyalty).

Diagram: Left to right Cognitive----->Affective----->Conative------->Action

Customer experience can change an un-loyal customer to a loyal customer, regardless of their satisfaction and that is why it is so important.

Coming up: What impacts Customer Loyalty?

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience is where Product and Service interact in the mind of the customer to deliver a unique experience, either from the competition or from yourself. Yes, if you do not deliver a consistent delivery of product and service every time, you are setting yourself up to create a variety of experiences, both good and bad, that posture you to lose customers.

The key for any Customer Experience leader within an organization is to break down the product and the service and determine where the failure points are occurring. More often than not, it is when product and service are not aligned with the needs of the customer. Furthermore, it starts when product and service are not aligned with each other as well as process, policy, and people.

We will break down each of these components and identify solutions to making each work effectively with other parts of the organization.