While many companies think they are leading the charge with service quality and creating an innovative customer experience, the numbers tell quite a different story. According to an American Express study, 95% of companies fail to exceed the expectations of their customers.
Customer Journey Mapping & Net Promoter Score® are great tools to support this initiative. When combined, these tools will empower a business to measure, and improve customer experience.
Our Expert Perspectives webcast, Customer Experience Beyond Surveys, was hosted on March 16th and March 30th. Thank you to everyone who was able to attend! If you missed it, here is a friendly recap. During the webcast we talked about:
- Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) & Customer Journey Mapping essentials.
- Inexpensive strategies to better respond to your customers’ expectations.
- How to bring these tools together to move the customer experience needle.
If you’re interested in learning more and are short on time, here is an overview of our top questions from the Q&A sessions:
- In your experience, does Journey Mapping or Surveying come first?
The first step is getting aligned with your team and the commitment to improving customer experience. Next, survey your employees - those immediately responsible for providing the customer experience – in order to understand the current customer journey, and identify any gaps. Once the customer journey is mapped, I’d like to suggest implementing a relationship NPS® survey first, followed by a post-transaction NPS® survey. Executing on surveys in this way, enables a business to evaluate current processes, implement changes, and measure the impact on customer loyalty.
- What is the biggest mistake when running a survey program?
The biggest mistake a business can make is not acting on the feedback. When customers respond to your survey, they’re giving you their time and honest opinion. Feedback from your customers, both positive and negative, is a gift that can be used to create better business practices. So, if you want to demonstrate that you are listening to their voice and truly value their input, it is important implement and leverage feedback to inform future business decisions and the customer experience.
- How have you measured improvements both pre and post-solution implementation?
For pre-solution implementation, this comes back to customer journey mapping. These maps can help to identify gaps in the customer experience. For post-solution implementation, it is most important to review, compile, and analyze the survey feedback. Once responses are compiled, organizations should follow-up with all respondents through a closed loop follow-up interview. This will discover the root cause of any issues and determine what area(s) of the customer experience can be improved. It is important to note that it takes time to see an increase in your Net Promoter Score®.
- You mentioned taking this idea up. How do I bring this idea to the board to make them understand the impact?
It is most important to bring this idea to the board in the language of the company, pitch the idea in a concise way, and support the idea with real numbers like Return on Investment (ROI). This information can be found online through industry use cases. In addition, Forrester offers a great tool called the ROI of Customer Experience.
- What is Employee NPS®?
Employee Net Promoter Score® surveys help your organization understand which elements of employee sentiment and engagement most affect customer advocacy. Feedback from this survey can be used to improve your work environment, and in turn, the customer experience that is affected by employee interactions.
If you’re wanting to get a better grasp on Journey Mapping or the NPS® Methodology, watch the recording (also below), download the slides, and stay tuned @SPLICESoftware to receive a copy of our brand new NPS® Whitepaper and Customer Journey Map Template.