Many decades ago, as a trainee industrial engineer I was
introduced to the works of Rudyard Kipling[1].
In the context of the Customer Age his sage wisdom lives on.
A renowned English writer (born in Mumbai) he influenced my life
from that get go and here I pay homage to his life changing verse Six Honest
Serving Men
1. Why What Who Where When How
Why do you want to measure your customer experience? We want to understand the current state of our experience and see how it
impacts the bottom line, revenue growth and shareholder value.
Why is that important? We know
that a great customer experiences leads to significantly enhanced customer
lifetime value. Customers buy more, stay longer and become a part of your
Awareness for future customers.
Why do you need a measurement for this? We need
to get scientific about the customer experience. We need to understand where we
should focus to profitably improve experiences, and to measure the ongoing
evolution of Customer Experience Management.
Why is this important? Existing measures of Customer Experience are subjective and prone to bias, whether that is sample size, emotional influence or even the time of day. It is not realistic to base our future growth on a set of flaccid anecdotal measures.
2. Why What Who Where When How
What is the first step? We need get factual. What
are the real measures? The hard noised objective and accessible metrics that
move beyond the soft and fluffy emotional feedback.
What system do we need in place? Something
that is repeatable and predictable. Certainly not the latest anecdotes from the
customer service
What is the priority? To coin a phrase – where the rubber hits the road. In a very direct sense it is where the customer interactions are taking place and where the reality of the service and product offering happens. We need to measure the real interaction, less so the feelings created.
3. Why What Who Where When How
Who is the most important person in your organization? Who is the ultimate cause of all the work? The answer is the same – yes,
the customer of course.
Who should lead the change to understand and develop the Customer Experience? Well that isn’t a bunch of guys doing strategy in their glass ivory towers remote to the business. Guess what. It is everyone of us, as ultimately we all walk in the customer shoes.
Who engages the organization for success? Vision is
essential. Moving beyond the industrialized function specialist silos’ to the
sunny uplands of customer awareness requires fortitude and leadership. It is
certainly not for the feint of heart.
4. Why What Who Where When How
It
is not top down, strategy driven. It isn’t even bottom up frontline informed. Where have
those ideas come from? Yes the industrialized world of the 1700’s. Wind
forward to now. We are a bunch of able and skilled individuals aligned to
successful customer outcomes (or we should be)
