Ben Motteram on How to Measure Customer Experience: Advice from the Front Lines
We are excited to introduce this special guest in our cloud contact center series. With a wide array of client engagements and an extensive background in telecom and IT industries, Customer Experience Expert Ben Motteram excels at measuring the customer experience. He also understands the risks and rewards communications providers face as they attempt to align resources with customer needs. Learn from the @CXpert’s customer undertakings and wisdom.
Q1: Tell me some ways you've measured customer experience and satisfaction.
I’ve measured CX and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) in many ways. Let’s look at three.
1. Cable company. I broke down the customer journey into stages and then asked questions pertinent to each stage of the journey using an online survey after trigger events.
I measured satisfaction and customer effort in each stage using the CSAT and CES (Customer Effort Score) metrics and asked an overall CSAT question and Net Promoter Score (NPS) question.
2. Online company. I used digital analytics tools to track what customers did on web pages, the paths they took through the site, from which pages they left the site, and determined the proportion of customers that did not complete purchases.
That gave me a very good idea of where the problem areas were. Then I married that insight with customer feedback gathered from pop-up surveys which asked the CES question and why they gave us that score. The results provided a goldmine of information.
3. B2B multimedia company. I created a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) which consisted of senior stakeholders within a representative sample of the company’s customer base. The CAB met on a half-yearly basis and the company would get feedback on their performance for the previous 6 months as well as present their plans for the future which customers were then free to comment on as well.
Customers loved: (a) being asked their opinion, (b) seeing what was coming down the track, and (c) that it was held in the private dining room of a really nice restaurant!
Q2: What advice do you have for communications providers aiming to revolutionize the customer experience?
My advice isn’t unique to communications providers. It applies to all businesses in any industry looking to improve their CX. Know your customers! All great customer experiences are built on a deep understanding of customer needs, wants, pain points, expectations, and/or behaviors.
Spend time with your customers. Understand their businesses like you understand your own. Watch them using your products. Find out what challenges they’re facing and what keeps them awake at night.
And don’t just limit your meetings to the C-suite. Spend time at all levels of the customers’ organizations, particularly with the end users of your products. Only when you have this intimate understanding of your customers will you be able to design an experience that will truly knock their socks off.
Q3: What do you feel is the biggest risk communications providers currently face as it relates to customer service?
When customers of communications providers have an issue, because it involves their communications, it will generally have significant consequences and needs to be resolved quickly. If, for example, the customer of a provider has a cloud contact center that goes down, it impacts their customer experience. This could have disastrous implications for their long-term profitability.
It’s a fine line between over- and under-resourcing customer support areas. No company wants idle employees. But, the risk of under-resourcing for communications providers is that if there’s an outage, the company is not able to respond in a timely manner and one of their customers goes out of business as a result.
Q4: Talk to me about customer loyalty. What is the myth associated with it?
The myth is that customer loyalty even exists for 99% of companies! I wrote a post about this a couple of years back. You can read it here.
Q5: What do you think might enhance and expand the customer experience in 2019?
I’m really looking forward to companies integrating their support services with voice-controlled smart speakers.
Imagine being able to buy tickets to next weekend’s football game using Alexa or booking a service for your car through Google Home. Imagine troubleshooting an issue with your Macbook using HomePod.
I know there’s concerns about privacy with these speakers in your home but I love the convenience of them and I’m looking forward to the customer service opportunities they’ll enable.
CXpert Bio:
Companies that do not truly care for their customers will not survive. Ben Motteram works with clients to help them grow by placing customers at the centre of everything they do. The CXpert designs, implements, and operationalizes customer experience solutions that drive positive business outcomes such as more engaged staff, better customer relationships, and higher profits.
"The only sustainable competitive advantage a company can have is derived from the provision of an exceptional customer experience." cxpert.com.au. His core skills: customer experience consulting, management consulting, implementation of strategy, customer acquisition, customer retention, customer loyalty, and employee engagement.
Motteram draws on over 20 years of experience in the telecom and IT infrastructure industries as well as a Masters in Business Administration degree.
