Customer Experience in 2019: Why it’s Time to go Back to Basics

TTi Global Research – 9 May 2019

Source www.tti-global-research.co.uk

If you don’t know what your customers’ expectations are, how can you meet them and manage them, let alone exceed them in a rapidly changing market?

In order for a business to truly understand and create the ideal customer experience for any organisation, it is vital to look back in order to first understand and analyse exactly what your customers expect from that experience.

In a truly customer-focussed organisation, the most important measure of success must be customer satisfaction. Satisfaction and the outcomes that affect service quality are both highly correlated with the overall customer experience and an even stronger relationship with loyalty and recommendation. We know from our research and academic sources that Customer Experience is the total journey of a customer’s interaction with the brand, embracing all contact, the lifecycle

Breaking Down Customer Expectations

Customer satisfaction is defined as meeting customers’ expectations of the ideal service or product, we see similar- or in some cases the same - applications in Customer Experience measures, given the composition of measures are often heavily developed on service. Or, how a product or service is perceived by customers to perform against what is ideally expected. It is the difference, or gap between the performance and expectation, which defines the level of satisfaction.

To enable full alignment with the customer and create experiences and services that deliver high levels of satisfaction garnering understanding of customer expectations are crucial.

5 Steps to Understanding Customer Expectations

o   Listen: High levels of customer satisfaction are created from listening to customers' needs and creating processes around delivering against their expectations.

o   Manage: We know some things are unrealistic, so we have to manage customer expectations around them. If we understand what they are this will be more successful.

o   Evolve: Customer Expectations are always changing because they are constantly influenced by marketing, communication and word of mouth. If you understand how other organisations are influencing your customers' expectations you can develop your strategy accordingly and retain market share

o   Prioritise: Some expectations will be less important within the ideal service or experience. Why place equal resources and investment on them all, when they can be prioritised according to those that will have most impact on business results?

o   Research: Tailored market research allows your business to measure customer satisfaction while embracing all the attributes that contribute to your brand’s overall customer experience.

Design a customer experience that delivers on the specific requirements of your customers.

In order to capture and measure a true picture of customer expectations and satisfaction levels, whatever the sector, TTi Global has combined the latest customer satisfaction indexing techniques with our own Strategic Alignment Model to create an advanced Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) Survey Model. This allows us to accurately measure satisfaction while also embracing all attributes that contribute to a brand’s overall customer experience.

This type of bespoke research approach is ideal for:

o   Process Satisfaction Monitoring – Identifying friction in processes and barriers to preventing excellent service delivery

o   Customer Handling – Uncovering staff training issues, and measuring employee engagement’s influence on customer satisfaction  

o   Employee Reward Schemes – Customer satisfaction ratings to support staff reward and recognition programmes, and incentivise excellent service delivery

o   Measure Success - An indicator of success of new strategy implementation

o   Competitor Benchmarking - Comparability with direct competitors to evaluate strength of market position and develop tactical strategies to increase market share

Start your CX Transformation Today

TTi Global’s new CSI approach has already been successful in research projects undertaken for clients including Ford of Europe and Renault UK. This innovative research model has been developed by expert research designers and our analysts conduct customer, employee and stakeholder research for a wide range of UK and international organisations, including energy and gas networks, retailers and automotive dealers and manufacturers.