Outside-In Thinking Must Produce Inside-Out Actions
Spring is a big season for customer service and customer experience conferences. I get the chance to attend several of them. They are typically very lively affairs with great keynote speakers and glowing field reports from leading practitioners.
At a recent customer experience conference, I heard a lot of talk about understanding the customers’ experiences. Surveys, studies, journey mapping, secret shopping…you know the stuff. I observed the following:
- A heavy emphasis on surveys.
- A heavy emphasis on analysis.
Those things are good—even vital. However, while their insights are critical, they do not improve the next customer experience, interaction or moment.
The voice of the customer (VoC) is expressed in three ways: they say it, they type it, and they click it. Most companies gather the VoC actively with surveys. Some companies also gather it passively, with behind-the-scenes recording, speech analytics, text analytics and journey analytics.
Those are the leaders. They know not just the self-reporting from a sample of survey respondents—they know what almost all their customers say and do without being asked.
Armed with all that empirical evidence of what works well and what falls short, what then? I heard more than once at that conference how understaffed the CX team was and how it felt fairly disconnected from operations. These CX pros saw what was needed but lacked the tools and organizational support to enact changes.
So back to their datasets they went.
They were limited to a circle we call “Customer Analytics,” where you derive insights from both structured and unstructured data about customer engagement. And many of the vendors in the “Solution Showcase” were happy to provide software and services that keep the charts and graphs coming.
Two really important complementary circles were missing: “Engagement Management,” where interactions actually take place in an efficient and personalized manner, and “Workforce Optimization,” where employees are trained, scheduled and evaluated to make each interaction the best it can be.
Those are the solutions that help move the needle, increase NPS, customer retention, and share of wallet. They consider both customers and employees.
All three circles are important, and they each make the other better in a sweet symphony of symbiosis (did I just say that?). Seriously, there are some great things that happen when all three areas are well-tuned and working together.
Smart Moments: You understand why customers are contacting you and anticipate their needs.
Smart Workforce: You educate employees based on customers’ needs and intelligently schedule and train them to address those needs.
Engaged Workforce: You provide the right tools to accomplish the tasks that increase customer and employee satisfaction through almost effortless engagement.
Ultimately, customers just want better outcomes with less effort. (So do employees, by the way.) Outside-in thinking creates a route map. Inside-out actions drive to the destination.
The post Outside-In Thinking Must Produce Inside-Out Actions appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
