How to leverage data to optimise your CX and grow your business

Finding the sweet spot

Delivering a great customer experience (CX) drives loyalty and increases the value of your brand. And when done well, it can take your business to the next level. To optimise their CX, many companies use customer journey mapping and a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to determine areas of improvement. The more complex the customer journey, the more data you collect and the more challenging it becomes to find the key to improving the customer experience. In organisations with multiple departments and numerous customer journeys, that challenge quickly multiplies. The CX Insights Framework helps you organise your data sources, your customer journeys and your metrics to meet this challenge. By providing a blueprint for your data strategy, you gain insight into the optimisations most relevant to your customers’ experience and most lucrative for your business.

“Designing your data strategy begins determining your main objective”

CX Insights Framework as a blueprint for data-driven CX

The CX Insights Framework provides a blueprint for making data-driven decisions to better serve your customers. It doesn’t matter if you have one customer journey or one hundred; the framework supports a holistic approach to optimising the customer experience that takes into account every customer journey, every point of feedback and every business metric. Step by step, it helps you design your data strategy for gaining real and meaningful insight into what drives your customers’ experience.

Going beyond the NPS

Designing your data strategy begins with determining your main objective. Let’s say your main objective is to achieve an effortless, seamless and pleasant online banking experience for your customers. As part of your data-driven approach, you likely measure your progress towards that objective using a well-known KPI like the Net Promotor Score (NPS). The CX Insights Framework goes beyond the NPS. That’s because the NPS and similar metrics like the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and the Customer Effort Score (CES) are slow-moving KPIs; it takes time to see the results of your efforts, if they materialize at all. When your CX initiative is not producing results quickly enough, or at least not visibly, it is unlikely to garner much support within your organization. Furthermore, these metrics only provide feedback after the fact. Predictive data and fast-moving metrics are much more powerful for establishing your business case and persuading your organization to put resources towards your initiative.

Energising your change programmes using CX KPIs

That’s why the CX Insights Framework helps you to break down your main objective into CX KPIs. These KPIs are used to evaluate a specific process or single customer journey, such as creating a payment request, rather than the collective customer experience. In other words, they don’t directly measure if you achieved your main objective: an effortless, seamless and pleasant online banking experience. But they do measure whether your customer was able to successfully generate the payment request or was satisfied with the process. How your customer experienced that particular journey is critical to achieving your main objective. Typically, these CX KPIs are based on the Customer Experience Index (CXI) by Forrester, which asks:

• Did the customer achieve their goal?
• Did the customer find it easy to achieve their goal?
• Will the customer remember their interaction positively?

The great benefit of breaking down your main objective into CX KPIs is that you receive continuous and immediate feedback. Whether your optimisation efforts are having the desired effect become clearer with every completed customer journey. When you’re consistently producing positive results, this has the power to truly energise your change programmes.

Balancing customer experience and business results

Even the most inherently customer-centric company invests in CX with one main goal in mind: improving the bottom line. Because what’s better than a happy customer? A happy customer who is loyal and chooses your company over the competition time and time again. In the process of optimising your CX, it’s important to understand how your efforts are impacting your business. Maybe you’ve expanded your customer service team to handle complaints and questions more quickly, resulting in higher customer satisfaction. But if that investment in your customer service capacity does not pay off by reducing churn and boosting your revenue, you may want to consider your options. That’s why the CX Insights Framework helps you assess not just the impact on CX KPIs, but also KPIs related to your business value. These can include your customer value, customer churn, but also operational costs. For example, if you improve on-screen messaging, you can use the framework to analyse its impact on the number of phone calls to customer service. That’s important, because reducing operational costs is good for your business. The framework also helps you assess the Return on Experience (RoX), which links your investment in CX to the added value for your business. Predicting and measuring the impact of your optimisation efforts on these KPIs helps you establish the right balance between a happy customer and a healthy business.

Understanding what drives your KPIs

Every positive or negative customer interaction has a reason. If your customer experiences issues with your mobile app, you’ll see the impact of this negative experience in your CX KPIs, such as low score on a survey, and on your KPIs related to your business value, such as a higher churn rate. The CX Insights Framework helps you understand what operational activities or characteristics drive your KPIs. These are the CX Drivers. Here’s how it works: you’ve set your main objective and you’ve broken it down into tactical CX KPIs connected to a single journey: creating a payment request. You’re using an analytics service to assess whether the customer achieved their goal of creating the payment request or whether they closed the app halfway through the process. The framework then helps you to structure data so that you can assess the relationship between, for example, app downtime and your analytics on the payment request process. It serves as the foundation for conducting your data analysis that will reveal the strongest CX Drivers.

CX Drivers as the key to prioritisation 

Once you know what your CX Drivers are and have conducted your data analysis to understand their relationship to your CX KPIs and KPIs related to your business value (customer value, churn, operational costs, etc.), prioritising becomes easy. The CX Drivers inform what drives a positive customer experience and a healthy business. It also helps you understand the relationship between the two. If you look at the CX Insights Framework as a control panel, the CX Drivers are the dials on that control panel. Moving these dials moves your CX KPIs and the KPIs related to your business value. When you’ve reached your tipping point and the improvements in your CX KPIs no longer add value, you have reached the optimal Return on Experience.

Putting it to work

It’s no coincidence that companies who invest in CX also frequently adopt an agile way of working. Agile was developed to move in the direction of the demand, to adapt to ever-changing consumer preferences. To implement agile effectively, companies must understand their customers’ behaviours and their feelings about your company and products. They must also be able to breakdown major projects into user stories and decide in what order to tackle them. The CX Insights Framework helps companies do exactly that, by structuring data on customer behaviours and feedback, breaking down slow-moving KPIs into CX KPIs and prioritising the operational activities and characteristics to optimise. In doing so, the CX Insights Framework and the agile way of working form a perfect marriage, supporting a cross-functional way of working towards a shared goal, rooted in data.