Improving the customer experience (CX) cuts across many business silos and someone at the top needs to have an intense interest in CX improvement and the power to make change happen.
The customer relationship determines long-term profitability and should be the apex of your CX monitoring. Customer journeys contribute to the relationship and are the place to look for process improvements. Individual customer touchpoints provide operational focus but need to be seen in a broader context.
There is no single customer metric that is right for every business. Try several and weed out those that do not help predict your desired business outcomes (e.g. profits, loyalty, new business).
Don’t let surveying of customers become a negative customer experience. Implement a judicious combination of short surveys, low survey frequency and fair incentives for participation. Stop asking questions your business already should have the answer to.
Ever been asked to rate a customer service rep a 10? Incentivising frontline staff based on CX metrics can be counter-productive and cascading metrics only down to team manager level may be a better option.
Even a moderate sized business will have many information flows to integrate into a voice of customer programme. Specialist software platforms have evolved to capture customer information across all business units, summarise results in dashboards and route feedback for follow up - all in real time.