Customer experience continues to be a growing need and focus for many companies. Rightfully so, as it leads to customer retention, acquisition, and engagement - three things every company loves to see. As it continues to grow, companies focus their efforts on finding ways to better understand their customers and how to deliver the best experiences to them; however, one area that often gets overlooked is how employees feel about the company. Employees influence a significant portion of the customer experience. They not only engage with customers every day, but also represent the brand of your company. Therefore, how they personify your brand is just as important as how customers perceive it. Employees can give insight into customers by providing info about: How customers act in specific situations and environments What customers love most about specific products, services, or your overall brand Where the company can improve their customer experience   Analyzing employee and customer feedback simultaneously can help identify gaps in the customer experience. More often than not, the employee experience is directly tied to the customer experience. For example, let’s say employees at a retail store feel they need a better way to announce in-store promotions. If customers are asking through various communication channels about what in-store promos are offered (i.e. social, chat, phone, in-person), then you can easily marry the two insights together to prioritize and improve the customer experience. This same philosophy holds true at the corporate level. If employees don’t support a key initiative, strategy, or philosophy at a corporate level, they are less likely to embrace what the business stands for, which could ultimately damage brand equity.   When analyzing the voice of the employee, companies tend to fall short in execution. Most companies send out surveys which, when done right, can be extremely valuable; however, similar to customer surveys, employee surveys can be polarizing, inconsistent, and limiting. It is understandable why companies use surveys - they are easy, cost efficient, and have a significantly higher take rate with employees (100% if mandatory). Nevertheless, surveys can’t be the only source of employee feedback. Giving employees a forum to communicate their opinions, rather than asking them to answer a select set of questions, is much more valuable and will provide more candid feedback.   You may find these employee forums already exist on sites like Linkedin, Reddit, or Glassdoor. Because the data is so large and unstructured, companies don’t think to analyze it. That’s all changed thanks to the emergence of technologies like Khoros CXI, which allows companies to analyze unstructured voice and text data using NLP and AI technologies. Understanding your employees across any communication channel and comparing it to customers has never been easier. Connecting the employee experience with the customer experience should be a key initiative for any company that prides themselves on CX. In KPMG’s 2018 US Customer Experience Excellence Analysis, they found that the employee experience precedes the customer experience and the top companies all had leading employee experiences. Receiving feedback and insight from employees not only helps contribute to CX but also creates a more positive work environment where employees feel heard. If you are a CX professional looking for a way to improve your customer’s experiences, be sure to start by talking to the people you work with.      ... View more

Customer Experience (CX) teams have a difficult job in that they must convince everyone at a company why their objectives are important. CX is one of the few functions that must operate across the entire company, sometimes without an executive sponsor. The end goal of every CX function is to not only be experts on the customers, but to shift all business teams to become customer advocates. Given the complexity of both customers and businesses, this objective is difficult to achieve .  While there are many data, customer, and leadership obstacles CX must overcome, none of those will matter if you don’t gain company-wide adoption. In order to get company wide buy-in, there are three behaviors that must be eliminated.  Here are the three behaviors thwarting companies from culturalizing CX: 1. Complacency - This usually occurs when a company is performing well, or when there is a brand halo effect where customers overly favor a product or service regardless of the experience. When a company is seeing improved growth QoQ or YoY, it can cause them to become less aggressive in pursuing improvements to the customer experience. This may become even more apparent as we come out of the pandemic and consumer’s purchasing behavior starts to return to normal. When a company is performing well, that is the best time to prove out the value of CX and request an increase in funding from leadership and support from co-workers. Remember, it only takes one bad experience to lose a customer. Regardless of company performance, it is paramount that everyone understands the importance of CX and why it is key to continued growth. 2. Myopia - Silos: One of the most common obstacles CX is constantly battling. These silos create myopia, where each employee or function becomes so focused on the area of the experience they own, they don’t realize how they are actually impacting the entire end-to-end customer experience. I never blame these functions for their myopia. In fact, they are oftentimes doing their job very well. It’s the responsibility of the CX team to break these silos down and provide awareness for how everyone is affecting the customer experience. With silos dispersed, work no longer gets shelved between the cracks or kicked around to different owners. Business functions can more readily collaborate on projects, and with a holistic view of the customer, can better understand how their work impacts other teams. 3. Apathy - Customer Experience is emotional. The professionals that work in the industry will tell you they work in CX because they enjoy hearing and seeing how they make a direct, and sometimes profound, impact on the lives of their customers. Whether you are a food delivery service helping those with at-risk immune systems stay safe and healthy during a pandemic, or an insurance company making sure a family is taken care of after a disaster, everyone at a company needs to understand how the good and bad experiences can impact customers' lives. Customer experience functions need to make sure they disseminate the emotions and feelings of customers. A goal for any CX program should be to help the entire company become emotionally invested in the experience they provide. Everyone works harder, smarter, and will look to CX more often if they feel they are making a difference.  These three behaviors are detrimental to any CX program and will prevent full company-wide adoption for what you are trying to achieve. The behaviors listed can be solved by constantly communicating the importance of CX using key metrics such as ROI, educating business teams on how they impact the customer experience, and showing how the experiences your company provides impact customers emotionally. I would love to hear from others on how they remove these types of behaviors.  ______________________________________________________________ If you found this post valuable, I encourage you to watch  our webinar “Why CX Programs Struggle to Demonstrate Results.” Check it out on demand In this webinar, I’ll be discussing the three common obstacles to proving the business results of your CX program and how to overcome them.  ... View more

Companies are swimming in data. The amount of data that is collected on customers is not slowing down. On top of that, every business function wants data to answer questions about the customer experience or function they specifically own.  More companies are seeing their business functions operate independently in collecting data and analyzing it. Oftentimes teams create their own surveys or look at only a subset of calls, chats, social posts, or any other customer communications. This process is dividing data and does not always give a good representation of the customer experience. Disparate data and teams create disparate customer experiences. Enter Enterprise CX Analytics (Khoros CX Insights). Enterprise CX Analytics is not being discussed enough by businesses because most are not aware of the concept, or don’t understand the soft and hard benefits it can provide. The concept of bringing together all your company’s customer data into a singular analytical view is the best way to analyze the customer experience. Customers do not view a company as a siloed entity – they view it as a singular brand. Enterprise CX Analytics goes beyond your normal data lake of structured customer data – a truly Enterprise CX Analytics platform includes all the unstructured data, including customer conversations. Unstructured language data makes up more than 70% of all data in the world, and that number is growing every day*. Every interaction with or about your company, regardless of where it happens, should be analyzed. Structured data is extremely valuable; however, nothing provides more insight into how customers experience your brand than conversations. Having all these conversations in one place in conjunction with structured data will greatly help any CX program. The impact of Enterprise CX Analytics cannot be understated. Below are five of the most profound benefits of implementing Enterprise CX Analytics into a company: 1. Single Source of Truth (Omnichannel) – The greatest benefit Enterprise CX Analytics has to offer is the way it helps companies overcome the inefficiencies with data being scattered across multiple business functions. Collecting all your customers’ data is a challenging feat due to the uniqueness of all the data points you must collect; however, similar to an omnichannel experience, data needs to be connected. Establishing a data foundation that joins data where possible helps ensure a business is looking at the experiences they offer with a consistent lens. With a unified dataset, customers can be viewed holistically rather than based on the channel or platform they use to interact with a brand. No more arguments about which data source is more accurate.     2. Collaboration – Breaking down data silos inherently breaks down business silos and forces teams to work together. Without silos, work no longer gets shelved between the cracks or kicked around to different owners. Having a single source of truth expedites the entire data collection and customer analysis process. Business functions can begin collaborating sooner on projects, and with a holistic view of the customer, can better understand how their work impacts other teams. Without an Enterprise CX Analytics platform, teams often have little to no insight into how their work affects other functions. Customers often voice how their experiences are disjointed and broken, but with an Enterprise CX Analytics platform, those poor experiences are much easier to tackle, together. 3. Prioritization – Companies prioritize their work based on the information customers provide; however, if that information is not complete the wrong decision can easily be made. If you are missing conversations or data points from your customers you could be missing your next multi-million dollar priority. Enterprise CX Analytics gives business functions the ability to compare their priorities against the priorities of their customer, and because there is a single source of truth, prioritization is no longer based on a myopic survey or a single piece of feedback. Arguments about which initiative needs to be done next can be compared side-by-side with exactly what the customer wants most. 4. Natural Language Processing (NLP) – The greatest analytical technology in the last few years has been the accelerated improvements of Natural Language Processing. The ability to analyze conversational data is not a new capability; however, it was only recently that the technology became accurate enough and accessible enough for business to use at scale.  5. Actionable Information - The most important aspect of any data or insight is how impactful it can be on the business. Providing an extensive description on the end to end experience, and the cause and effect of each action throughout, creates actionable information. Most data provides the results of an experience, actionable data details what is driving those results.   The benefits of Enterprise CX Analytics are undeniable. Few analytics solutions can inherently force a company to be better at CX. The five items listed above don’t require a lot of work from engineers or IT, they are the byproduct of having a best-in-class unified platform, like Khoros CX Insights (formerly Topbox), and being customer-obsessed. __________________________________________________________________ If you found this post valuable, I encourage you to watch  our webinar “Why CX Programs Struggle to Demonstrate Results.” Check it out on demand In this webinar, I’ll be discussing the three common obstacles to proving the business results of your CX program and how to overcome them.  *Siegel, Eric (2013) Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die   ... View more