Why are your customer survey initiatives failing? — Part 1
Most companies regularly undertake customer surveys; however often find it difficult to realise value from them. Here’s our take on some of the big reasons why these initiatives can fail and some practical tips on what you could do about them:
1. Culture (focus of this article)
2. Lack of executive buy-in (skip ahead and read here)
3. Organisational misalignment
4. Not asking the right questions
5. Analysis paralysis
6. Undertaking surveys manually
Some of these have strong inter-linkages and we’re going to discuss each one through a 6 part miniseries.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Great strategies and strategic initiatives can be resisted by strong enterprise cultures. This is why culture is widely recognised as one of the biggest barriers to delivering a consistent customer experience. A lot of companies, we’ve engaged with, describe their frustrations with different departments working in silos and customer experience being a front line problem only.
Every company has silos to some extent; whether they are organisational, hierarchical or even channel based. Very few companies actually (successfully) organise themselves around their customers and the reality is that customers interact with a brand across its silos and not vertically within a silo.
Most employees do get the importance of customer service and will do their best to service customers; however this tends to happen within their allowed operating boundaries and constraints of their silo (refers to problem #3 — organisational misalignment — more on this later). The problem is that from a customer’s perspective, their experience can feel disconnected and disjointed when what they really want is a seamless and connected experience with the brand (and not a number of different departments). This can add to their frustration in a number of ways: repetition of basic account information, repetition of the issues being faced, being transferred to multiple departments or being continuously told that this is another department’s problem to solve.
Cultural issues are tricky to solve and while there’s no silver bullet, here are four ideas that other companies have practically implemented:
- Having a voice at the executive table
A relatively new concept in the East African markets; the role of the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) or Chief Experience Officer (CXO) is likely to become increasingly important at a strategic level. These are roles intended to lead and oversee customer experience efforts across the entire company by breaking down silos and uniting the leadership team and the broader company around customer-driven growth. They are also responsible for accelerating company-wide cultural transformation in respect of customer wants and needs. In some markets, this role is even referred to the Chief Revenue Officer; in order to really accentuate their core mandate.
But wait isn’t this what the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) should be driving? Yes and actually depending on the size and complexity of your organisation it may not make sense to have a CCO. However; having a leader obsessed and single-minded about providing compelling products, services and experiences to customers is key to winning the culture battle (also helps address problem #2 — lack of executive buy-in).
2. Map your customer journeys
Most companies have rigorously documented processes and standard operating procedures (SOPs). However these are usually presented from an internal perspective and don’t necessarily articulate a customer’s emotions, motivations or intricacies. Good companies engage their customers when designing these processes and utilise human centred design (HCD) techniques to ensure they are customer-centric.
By identifying what the pain points are across an individual or series of journeys, and prioritising what is important for a customer along the way; you can start to connect where barriers are being created or even where customer data needs to become accessible in order to provide the customer with a seamless experience. Customer journey mapping also requires multi-disciplined teams with representation from different departments. Departments are able to form a common understanding of the customer and their experience across the organisation and as a result this can foster cross departmental dialogue and collaboration.
3. Have everyone in your company undertake a customer support role
Consider rotating employees especially new hires (whether experienced or newbies) and allow them to spend some time in a customer support role.
And by this we don’t mean work shadowing but actually making the employees responsible for solving actual customer’s problems.
There are a number of advantages to this including an accelerated learning about the company itself and the different products and services offered. While undertaking customer support, employees can actually get to experience their customers and see how they interact with your products and services. Employees are able to get a sense for their journeys (which may differ wildly to the company’s SOPs), their habits, and most importantly where the company is falling short. This however can only work if there is a serious investment in upfront training and a support structure to enable them to fulfill these roles.
4. Make customer data available
Consider how easily customer data can be made available across all your touch points and channels. This will enable all the people who come into contact with customers to have accurate, timely and relevant information about the customers so that they can make the right decision, at the right time, and in the right channel.
To take this one step further consider how much information you can make available to the customer in order to continuously keep them in the loop on matters and to an extent enable self-serve.
This approach can have a number of benefits for both the customer and the company. Customers would not have to repeat account and issue information to different departments and employees. The time to deal with customer support tickets can be significantly reduced thereby saving the company on operational expenses.
