The ROI of Customer Experience: Part 2

In our last episode, we discussed how using X- and O-data can help you prove the ROI of CX. So now let’s discuss how we can put that into practice.

The end goal of your survey is not just reporting a score. The end goal is to help the organization make a better decision. And so if you’re not aligning in some way to how the organization manages itself, then you’re limiting the impact that that data can have.

Continuing our discussion on proving the ROI of customer experience with X- and O-data on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at Walkerinfo.com.

Hello, everyone. I’m Steve Walker, host The CX Leader Podcast and thank you for listening. On The CX Leader Podcast we explore topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of your customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. In our last episode, Walker experts Troy Powell and Brad Harmon, both VPs of our advisory services here at Walker, discuss the value of using “X” or experience data and “O” or operational data to prove the ROI of customer experience. Today, we’re going to discuss how CX pros can start to put those ideas into practice. Brad, Troy, thanks for being on The CX Leader Podcast.

Thanks, Steve.

Appreciate the opportunity, Steve.

Troy, let’s start where we left off on our last episode. So if I’m a practitioner and maybe I haven’t to this level yet, can you give me some practical advice or some examples of how people can get started with delivering more value by leveraging their X- and O-data?

Yes, I think, again, to not not to beat a dead horse, really, but it is starting in the right place from the very beginning of your program or if you’re launching and just a new single survey somewhere of a really connecting with the stakeholders who are in charge of that area or, you know, all of your areas, depending on, again, what level of planning you’re at, understanding what they’re looking at operationally, because that’s going to help guide your questions that you ask, but also then help you to potentially get that data. And so it’s really starting there and thinking, what can we do to supplement. And thinking that the end goal of your survey is not just reporting a score, an NPS score or a customer satisfaction score. It’s also not just getting some view of what drives that. Looking through the survey data to say, hey, it looks like these certain things are the drivers of CSAT or of experience or NPS or whatever you’re measuring. But the end goal is to help the organization make a better decision when they have decisions to make. Where do we invest? What do we fix? How do we resource? And so if you’re not aligning it in some way to how the organization manages itself, then you’re limiting the impact that that data can have. So it’s taking it in stages. It’s knowing that you’re not going to get to some fancy ROI model right away, but. If you can use the customer feedback and some integration of operational data to get to real actual improvement initiatives beyond just following up with customers who gave a bad survey review, that’s great. That’s a place to start. You know, and you can start to do that and get some action. But if you can identify a systemic issue also in customer support, if you can identify the certain types of issues that people are calling about when they get transferred that first time, it yields a huge decline in customer satisfaction. Right now, you’ve identified a specific issue, you know, a certain type of call, a certain type of customer and a transfer. All right. Well, now let’s dig into that. And if the organization can make some changes there, you had an impact, right? So trying to think very specifically about how can we identify things that can be improved. is… it’s just the place to start and it’s not about a score.

I love that example of just how do you piece it together, because I think that’s where, you know, where it breaks down. Conceptually, it makes a lot of sense. And and then there’s there’s a lot of pushback for getting the data. But that is such an easy example of where you could really track where there’s customer pain and cost and then you can implement something that would improve the customer experience and also reduce the cost that that is just a huge ROI win. And there’s… I can’t even think about how many there are like that in a large enterprise size company. Brad, do you have any kind of practical stories or examples that you could share?

Yeah, sure. One client that I work with, we were fortunate enough to be thinking of what data might be important from a data standpoint to gather and be gathering. And what we did is we had a kind of available, not totally stitched together with the experience data, but it was close enough that we were able to really do a lot with it. So we did some exploratory analysis of the X-data that was coming in and we ended up using one question. One of their really strategic imperatives or visions was to look at where we should where we can are going to be most likely to grow. And we use the outputs from one question, a customer prediction of what you’re going to do in the future. You know, you’re going to expand the relationship or shrink it. And that ended up we were able to put their strategic accounts into two groups, a group of opportunity accounts and a group of vulnerable accounts. And when we did that, it sounded fine, just logically thinking about how we might group customers. But when we were able to then piece together the operational data, everything kind of opened up. So we had data on their number of issues that they had experience from a quality standpoint. We had information about their equipment uptime or availability. We had information on the proportion of kind of cross-sell opportunities had been already introduced to the two groups of customers. And we found that in every situation with those metrics that the vulnerable customers were having more issues. It was taking longer for the client we work with to solve them. They were having more challenges and keeping their equipment up and running. And we found that they were more likely to have been using more newer kinds of innovations. So we found that those new innovations that were being rolled out to this group of customers was creating a negative experience. And we found that they were shrinking as a result of it. They’d already been shrinking a bit and they were shrinking more from a service standpoint. So all of the ways in which the company had been kind of set up to excel and to deliver value and to grow were all working against them. So it really kind of shown the light on why we need to rethink what we’re doing, who we offer certain things to, how we personalize the service so that we can hang on to those customers where they’re vulnerable, but then also take a different approach with the companies or the customers that are more likely to be doing the things that we want them to do innovatively in the future and take a little different perspective on that. And so that really demonstrated the ways in which we can use the data and kind of what the impact can be, and we’re talking millions of dollars that were at risk with the vulnerable and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars that were to be had from the opportunity customers. And they were able to then kind of take them on a one by one basis and demonstrate that we’re making progress on each of those groups, such that all of the efforts, all the money that they were spending to create processes was all tracking towards this this potential ROI. And that was really a extremely effective.

Troy gave us a great example of sort of a functional kind of a fix. And now you’ve sort of shown us how we could do it more from an account management relationship management side. So and opportunities, the permutations of how you would apply this just you know, you can just go through your organization, think about, you know, each function, you can think about each step in your customer journey map, and you can start to find these these places where you’d want to insert yourself. So, I mean, go back to Troy here. But, you know, if you’re a CX pro and now we’ve got your thinking moving in this direction, what is important for the CX pro to do to make sure that that they’re going to be successful?

You know, I think it takes me back to actually probably some of the first episodes of this podcast we looked at what are some of the characteristics of a CX leader that makes them valuable? And I should have looked back at all of those just to make sure. But I remember part of the idea there that was talked about definitely was the CX leader, the CX pro as a as an advocate, as a connector. And I think that’s a huge role for CX. It’s not just a single function. So having somebody who manages the CX programing process well is important. But ultimately, I think CX probably you need somebody in your team that’s out there that is, you know, connected with the functions, that is advocating for CX that know, bringing people along, you know, generating that interest. And part of that process is connecting to other systems, other people and how they manage their business. And so, you know, as a CX pro to set the stage for this is you can’t just focus on your piece of the pie because ultimately your piece of the pie needs to be flavoring the whole pie. Well, is that a good analogy? I don’t know. [laughing]

You can’t just put the CX into one slice, right? It’s gotta be mixed in.

Yeah, all the yummy berries in one slice and then the rest of it’s just sugar water or something. Yeah, well, we’ll go with that. [laughing] But it really does need to be this kind of shared service function, et cetera. In order for that to work, the connections just have to be there. The other piece is to be realistic. You know, these it’s just not always easy to integrate data. And so you’re going to need to be patient and flexible and kind of find the ways to win and the places to win. One piece. We’ve seen a lot is if you get too focused on where the data is going to ultimately reside, say it’s got to all be in this one system or it’s all got to be in this other system. You can often. Get to a stalemate position there, so so it’s really being flexible with knowing that data can reside in multiple places to still have an impact. But I would say the. I don’t know if this is the number one thing, but a very important thing is we often get to this point where we have great data and findings and then we think, let’s get some O-data to better inform. And so you go and scramble around and eventually find it because CX people are awesome and they can make amazing things happen to eventually find the data. But it comes to you as a single spreadsheet or multiple spreadsheets that you combine and then you pull out your experience data from your survey and you combine that into a new Excel file and then you run some analysis and you find something interesting. But it’s just a one time deal that is not replicable over and over. So so really having the mindset of how can we get to something that we can use over and over, that we can validate, that we can trend view of, hey, this is not if we make it a one time thing, it’s not going to happen very often or, you know, an all ad hoc thing. It’s not going to happen very, very often. So they’re trying to get streams of data, not just a dump of data.

Yeah, we’ve and we’ve talked a lot about how how great the opportunities are here. But the reality is, is there are obstacles and there are issues that people run across. And maybe, Brad, if you could just share a couple of best practices for how you ultimately overcome that. I mean, you know, we often say, well, we don’t have that data. And, you know, there’s somebody in the organization is looking at that.

Right. And that gets back to the sooner you start talking about it, the better chance you have of getting it. Because many times it’s not easy to to get the information. It takes a lot of time. But if you start those conversations and you have, you know, a vision for what you want to do with it, you can you know, it kind of works. And a double edged sword a little bit that you can get people involved early on. They can also help you better design your programs that you want to execute. But then you’ve got them along for the ride and they have a vested interest in what’s going to come out of it and how you can then help them to make better decisions based on the combination of your data. So that’s one thing that that you want to be able to do. You always then have to be on the lookout for, you know, how accurate is the data, how complete is the data and not settle for second best. You really do want to get connected to your master data management people that you know and help them fight the battle that they’re trying to fight of keeping data up to date, accurate, useful, because that’s going to set the stage for you to be able to get data in a more ongoing way that Troy described. But it’s also going to help you better assess how you can aggregate data, because, you know, many companies have a very complex organization. So you’re going to want to look at it by geography or by tiers of customers or individual customers that may have different parent child relationships. You may want to be able to look at it on a quarterly basis or a weekly basis or a monthly basis. So having those conversations and discussions and understanding what the data looks like and helping to kind of be part of the group that is committed to ensuring that these obstacles can be overcome or at least, you know, indicating what progress can be made is going to be pretty vital to ensuring that you’re able to do something with it on the back end.

I want to take a break here and tell you about Walker’s newest report, “Deliver More Value with X- and O-Data,” which provides a practical framework for integrating experienced data and operational data to drive better decisions. You can download the report for free at cxleaderpodcast.com\xoreport.

Well, my guests on the podcast this week are no stranger to many of my friends at Walker, and those are frequent podcast listeners. Dr. Troy Powell and Brad Harmon are both VPs and senior leaders here at Walker. And gentlemen, we’ve reached that point in the podcast where I ask every guest for their take home value. And that’s their best tip on the topic that we’re discussing today that would allow a CX pro to go back and apply some of this knowledge and best practices that you’ve shared today. So, Brad, you want to leave this off and try to bring us home?

Well, we’ve we’ve talked about this a little bit, so I may have a two and one here. I can’t understate or overstate the importance of starting early and getting a really good understanding of what matters to your company and how you manage the business. The more business acumen that you have and know which levers are the ones that are being used to manage the business, the more effective that you’ll be. And I would also say, you know, don’t settle for less than great on this, because the audiences that you’re going to have when you try to demonstrate an ROI or value will ultimately get up to your CFO. And if you try to come up with a model that says, well, if we improve NPS by one point, it’s going to lead to three hundred million dollars in additional revenue, that won’t stand. So you’ve got to do the work. You’ve got to be diligent about it and you’ve got to take it in steps. And I think the the model that we have will help you to take it in bite sized chunks so that you’re consistently demonstrating increasing value to not only your program, but how you manage the business. So those would be where I would point to in terms of, you know, start there and then work from from a better standing and foundation as you go along.

And Dr. P, what’s your take home value this this your 8th time on the podcast might have to have a program on Dr P’s take home value. We could do a special program.

Yeah, I’d be interesting to actually hear all of them and see if they still stand up. In this case, you know, I think the the tip I would give is you’ll find someone in your organization that’s really asking for wanting to integrate customer feedback into the way they run their part of the organization, functional leader, a leader, whoever it might be, with one caveat, and that is finding somebody whose main question isn’t how can we sell more to our customers? We do get that a lot where there’s like well, the main thing I want to know is how do we sell more? Who’s going to buy more? Those are good questions. And I think those are things you want to build towards. But, you know, if you can find something a little more concrete, like, you know, the customer service example or, you know, a delivery or in some area where you can get really focused to answering the question, that’s going to have an impact. And so the way I like to think of this is just picture all the stakeholders you talk to and find the one who really is like you can almost picture them just waiting for this customer information so that they can make a better decision. And I was just sitting there saying, hey, I’ve got great information and I’m making the best decision I can, but I would love some additional input so that I can make an even better decision. And so find somebody like that partner with them and walk along with them on this journey of integrating the experience and operational data. And that gets you some great early wins that that can be used to spread, you know, out further in the organization.

Yeah, actually, I was… I never give a tip, but this one has inspired me to. And it’s similar to where you were going there, Troy. But I think if you’re a CX pro and you see people in the organization providing O-data out as a report, try to relate that back to some of the X-data that you may already have. So like you go back to your example, Troy, in the you know, in the call center or, you know, in the in, you know, tech support, you know, if they quote like some, you know, first call resolution stat or on time delivery stat, you know, go back and take a look at your your tracker and see what the customers are saying and see how it lines up, because that’s a that’s a great way to start into the process without. And I love Brad’s comment about, you know, don’t don’t go to the big calculation too quick because that that’s kind of a recipe for disaster. You really want to build this thing from the ground up and have it, you know, validate all the way through. So really appreciate you guys being on the podcast this week. You know, Troy Powell is a vice president of strategy and analytics here at Walker and Brad is a vice president for advisory services. Both of them are great thought leaders in our profession, and they’ve collaborated on this great report called “Deliver More Value with X- and O-Data.” Brad, Troy, thanks again for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

Hope we’ll have you back for your sixth and ninth times respectively. And I’m sure we will at some point. And if you want to download a copy of “Deliver More Value with X- and O-data,” and I highly recommend that you do if you’re a CX pro, because this report is going to tell you exactly how you can put this into practice. Just go to cxleaderpodcast.com and you’ll be able to download a report for free. And if you want to talk about anything else you heard on the podcast or anything else the Walker could do to help you with your business’s customer experience, feel free to email me here at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out the website, cxleaderpodcast.com, where you can download the report, but you can also subscribe to our show and find all of our previous episodes and podcast series. You could drop us a note, give us an idea for a future podcast, or just let us know how we’re doing or what your interests are. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker, we’re an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at Walkerinfo.com. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you again next time.