When was the last time you spent a day in your customers’ shoes, looking at your brand through their eyes?
While ‘customer experience’ or CEx itself is not a new concept, there is an increasing push towards taking a more detailed and comprehensive look at how the interactions between a customer and a brand are shaping business.
Customers are shopping differently, with higher expectations from the brands they engage with, Robert Limb, managing director of TRACK says.
He refers to it as a ‘customer revolution’, where measuring customers’ changing behaviours and expectations can be a challenge, especially when those expectations are also influenced by all brands, not just those within a specific category.
The big names – Amazon, Uber, Google, and Netflix – are raising the bar for every brand, everywhere, concedes Robert.
To assist brands with this movement, The NZ Customer Experience Index 2017 was published by TRACK Customer Marketing and Camorra Research, with the goal of establishing a robust customer experience index to benchmark major industry sectors across New Zealand. Over 60 New Zealand service providers in financial services, telecommunications and electricity were examined to rate their performance in creating loyalty with their customer experience.
Customers rated their experience with their provider across three dimensions – efficacy, effort, and emotion. In addition, they rated their provider on the loyalty outcome indicators of likelihood to recommend and likelihood to churn.
The results confirmed a strong correlation between respondents’ experience rating, and their overall rating on loyalty outcomes. This in turn validates the use of customer experience improvement as a customer growth strategy. Overall financial services, including banking, cards, and insurance, performed well, with variable results across broadband, mobile and energy providers.
Across all industries, emotion was the dimension most highly correlated to the likelihood of recommending the service to others.
Recommendations from the Index
- Measure customer experience directly, adding another dimension to customer research
- Look outside your own category to benchmark against high-performing brands
- Examine the relationship between customer experience and loyalty in your industry
- Look at how emotional drivers impact customer experience, and use this information to improve your customer experience
Impress with efficiency
Businesses managing B2B or complex sales, such as telecommunications, agribusiness, building, plumbing supplies, fuel and furniture, can really enhance the customer experience by efficiently managing transactions.
Consider these points where efficiency can really make an impact:
- Ability to charge to account and handle cash payments in one transaction
- Managing a ‘cash and carry’ purchase in the same transaction as a delivery
- Being able to handle complex activity where components are brought together at the point of sale
- Managing customer relationships with a high level of complexity due to different levels of authority
- Multiple aspects of pricing across retail, contract, promotional, customer-specific and rules-based.
- Ordering and quoting by channel
