Earlier this year, we featured the 10 winners of our Customer Experience Champion (CXC) awards. Leaders across a variety of industries, they each show innovation in their approach to CEM.
For the CXmas season, we reflected back on our winners and identified a key element of each of their CEM programs that helped them to shine like a CEM star. Here are the ways you can make your CEM program brighten the night sky:
1. Capital One: Turn customers into passionate ambassadors.
Let your customers do the talking! Focus on creating campaigns and experiences that bolster customer loyalty and advocacy. Capital One has made it a corporate goal to focus on creating campaigns and experiences that bolster customer loyalty and advocacy. They saw double digit improvements in NPS scores as a result.
Tip: Focus on strategies such as influencer marketing or building customer communities.
2. Autodesk: Empower your customers to self-serve
By empowering your customers to self-serve, you can improve their experience and also decrease your costs. Autodesk overhauled their web-based support and learning resources to make it easier for customers to find the answers and information they need, fast. As a result, they saw a 9% decrease in support cases as compared to last year.
Tip: Self-service offerings aren’t for every business. But when done right, they can alleviate a lot of customer frustration.
3. Verizon: Listen to 360 degree feedback
Having a customer survey program is not always enough. A survey may uncover key elements of the customer experience, but other feedback sources, like social media, call centre notes, emails, and online review sites, will likely tell a different, more complete story. Verizon, the largest telecommunications company in the US, listens to more than 60 customer listening posts, gaining insight into all aspects of the customer journey.
Tip: Map out your customer journey to identify listening posts that you should be tapping into for customer insights.
4. DIRECTV: Get the insights to the people who can act on them
Empower your employees to act by making sure they have easy and quick access to customer feedback insights. DIRECTV overhauled their entire Field Services organization. Now, customer feedback is sent directly to the service teams in real-time, empowering team members to act and constantly improve.
Tip: When sharing customer insights with other business stakeholders, don’t forget to tailor the insights so that they are relevant to your specific audience members.
5. Orbitz.com: Make it easy for customers to show their brand loyalty
Orbitz.com focused on differentiating themselves through an innovative customer loyalty program. They redesigned the entire user experience based on customer feedback they received. Customers told them that their ideal loyalty programs needs to be simple to understand, flexible in how to earn and redeem points, and fast to earn rewards.
Tip: A loyalty program needs to keep customers engaged. If it is too complex, limited in scope, or takes too long to earn rewards you risk losing their attention and interest.
6. 21c Museum Hotels: Personalize the customer experience
Customers want more than just a mass email campaign. They expect you to understand them and what they want. This can be as simple as a shoe store making sure they don’t send offers on heels to their male customers. Or, it can be as tailored as a hotel remembering your preference for an orthopaedic pillow and making sure you have one in your room when you arrive on your next visit.
Tip: There are many ways to personalize the customer experience. Some, such as rules-based thank you pages, don’t even involve human interaction! Figure out what works best for you so that you can deliver a memorable experience every time.
7. AmericInn: Involve your executive team
In order to build the foundation for a scalable and successful CEM program, you need buy-in from all levels of the organization. With a CEO-backed program, you can help transform your company culture into one with a customer-first mind-set. At AmericInn, a limited service hotel chain in the US, the executive team embraces the voice of the customer, regularly reviewing metrics and customer insight reports.
Tip: Executive support is crucial to CEM success, but isn’t always straightforward to secure. Make sure they are regularly kept up to date on CEM successes and that they are empowered to mobilize the company to act.
8. Seminole Gaming: Create an empathetic and customer-centric workforce
Employees across the company need to be passionate about the customer, or at the very least, understand why an improved customer experience is important and how they can impact it. For Seminole Gaming, creating tailored training programs was one of the ways they improved guest retention and loyalty.
Tip: There are many ways to build a more customer-centric team: regularly solicit employee feedback so that you can understand their views of what’s working and what’s not; host customer lunches so that employees can get a first-hand understanding of the customer journey; or personalize training programs based on customer feedback insights.
9. VMware: Be sincere in your efforts to improve the customer experience
Customer experience isn’t just a buzz word. To make real, meaningful improvements to the way you do business, you need to be open to real change. VMware understands this very well. Within 6 weeks of receiving critical feedback about a controversial global pricing change, VMware’s CEO reversed the policy, announcing the decision at their company conference—to a standing ovation of 20,000 customers, inspiring a Wall Street Journal article about the ‘bold’ customer oriented decision.
Tip: Customer feedback isn’t always pretty, but it is crucial to understand and analyze. Make sure you are consistently in the loop on customer insights, and when it isn’t pretty, make sure you are the first to know so that you can act and rectify. Using technology to set up real-time alerts can be very helpful here.
10. RSA Insurance: Develop a measurement framework
A clear framework outlining how your team is going to measure success is essential. This will help others understand what you will achieve, and how. It will help you get buy-in, and help align employees towards a clear common goal. Metrics will also provide a consistent way to continuously improve and benchmark your efforts.
Tip: There are many different metrics you can use, such as Customer Effort Score, Net Promoter Score, or Customer Satisfaction scores. Find out what works best for your company and align your teams around it.
Getting to CEM greatness requires hard work, but whenever a business is invested in understanding and acting on customer feedback, the customer always wins. Focus your CEM efforts on creating amazing experiences that delight your customers, and your customer will respond with increased loyalty, spend, and positive word-of-mouth. To learn more about how to create a CEM team that drives success, read: How to Hire the Perfect Customer Experience Team
Don’t forget to check out our first post in the CXMas series:
12 Days of CXMas: A Clarabridge Blog Series
11 Jolly Customer Experience Quotes
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