Top takeaways for driving customer experience success

Unfortunately, not every customer will have a positive experience with your product, service or brand. But does a disgruntled customer have to remain that way? Can you win back ex-customers?

We recently explored these questions by asking nearly 3,000 people about their biggest CX success or failure in the last decade. Interestingly, the vast majority (76%) of those surveyed recalled a failure, and only 55% could remember a success. Specifically, 64% will stop recommending the organisation, start looking for alternative brands or actively disparage the company via word of mouth, social media, etc. Brands can win big at CX if they avoid some common pitfalls – as identified by the global consumer base as points of failure on the customer journey:

The disconnect in customer experience perceptions

There can be significant differences in perception between brands and the prospects and customers those brands are looking to attract, engage and retain. Every prospect or customer is on a unique journey with that brand – and that journey makes perfect sense to the customer, regardless of how haphazard it may seem from the outside.
Remember, the good is expected, but the bad goes viral

• 76% experienced worst CX failure in the last 2 years
• 45% of them couldn’t remember a single success

Avoid engineering the customer journey and the customer experience around your internal organizational structure.

A unified customer experience process, please

The research shows that, from the customers’ perspective, there is no one thing that makes or breaks the customer experience: most often, it is a combination of customer-engaging people, business policies and processes, and the supporting technologies, that plays the most significant role, rather than just one.

Putting failures into perspective: 25% of the ‘massive’ failures took less than an hour to occur and less than the cost of lunch to fix.

Additionally, the research shows that customers blame some CX failures on one engagement capability, while in reality, a different factor is really the root cause: in one example, customers blame people and processes for brands contacting them after the customer has requested not to be contacted – this may appear to be a people problem, but is most likely a failure within the Customer Relationship Management system, where the customer hasn’t been opted-out.

Scale of effort to remedy customer experience failure

Brands often see the scale of CX failures through the lens of how hard it would be to correct the problem. Some take tremendous time and resources to fix (eg. training, IT/business process re-engineering, new staff) and some are easy (eg. fixing dead links on the brand web page, empowering customer service agents to deviate, within reason, from script to address customer questions and concerns). From the customer’s perspective, the scale of effort needed for a solution may have little to no relation to the perceived severity of the CX failure: little things may be huge issues to the customer.

Despite failures, customers do want to make it work

• 82% of customers try to resolve the issue with the brand
• But if that fails, only 1 in 5 consider coming back
• If they do return, 62% will be less loyal

What brands, or third-party observers, may see as a minor customer inconvenience may in fact be perceived by the customer as a critical, relationship-ending, customer experience failure.

Bringing a customer back after a failure

There is often a discrepancy between what consumers say will bring them back as a customer versus what will actually work. For instance, while 30 per cent of consumers say showing them how the business has improved as a result of their failure will bring them back to the brand, this only works for 8 per cent. The research found that the top three steps brands can take to truly bring a customer back after a failure include: offer a genuine and personal apology, admit the failure and offer discounts/credits related to the failure.

Top takeaways for driving CX success

• Minimise the biggest areas for failure – solve: long wait and response times;  poorly trained customer service reps; lack of empowered reps; inaccurate and conflicting information available to customers.
• Partner with your customers on resolution – when a failure does happen, your customers are not ready to throw in the towel. Partner with them and push to a resolution.
• Leverage technology to optimise for CX success – while humans get more of the blame for failures, technology gets more of the credit for successes. Audit your systems to ensure your technology and people strategy are working well together to deliver the best experiences.