How to Truly Understand Your Customers On Their Terms
How you engage with your customers and drive continual improvements in services and products will directly impact your customers’ experiences and whether they will actively promote you. But how do you know your customers like these services, products or experiences? Get feedback directly from them and try using Net Promoter Score (NPS) as one of the indicators.
The site www.netpromoter.com states that “Whether you are aiming for faster growth or increased profits, use NPS as the foundation of a measurement framework that is tightly tied to the customer journey”. The key point here is that if you don’t have any metrics that measure your organisation’s transformational journey, how do you know whether it was successful or not? An organisation may also use internal metrics such as % of customers using online channels, customer retention rates and response times to customer queries to gauge their success.
Personalising Customer Experience Across Devices and Channels
Today’s customers expect personalised experiences, not just during in-store visits or desktop interactions, but seamlessly across multiple channels and devices. Whether they’re browsing products from a tablet at home or managing financial services on a phone during their commute, they want the ability to engage anytime, anywhere.
For example, a customer might complete their tax return on a train using an app’s built-in support chat, or resolve a banking issue while riding the bus via a mobile app. Delivering real-time, personalised support in these moments builds trust and loyalty and sets forward-thinking businesses apart.
McKinsey & Company highlights that personalisation at scale can lift revenue by 10–15%.
McKinsey: The value of getting personalisation right
Why Net Promoter Score Isn’t Always the Right Metric
While NPS is a popular benchmark for customer loyalty, it doesn’t fit every context. For instance, asking customers if they’d recommend your product immediately after paying a bill or resolving a service issue may feel disconnected from their current experience.
Instead, consider asking how easy it was to interact with your organisation. This type of effort-based feedback focuses on the customer’s actual journey rather than their long-term loyalty. It provides more actionable insight for improving your support processes and customer experience.
Why NPS Isn’t Enough to Understand Your Customers
Metrics like NPS should only be used in conjunction with other customer/industry-specific indicators (such as retention rates or sales conversions through Live Chat) to give an organisation a complete picture of how customers feel about their products/services. Personalising your customer experience is paramount for any organisation, where products/services can be used anytime, anywhere, on any device, supported through an individual’s channel of choice (e.g. Live chat, FAQs, Email or social media).
Another area that can enable an organisation to excel in getting to know its customers is to combine the power of data to provide a 360-degree view of customers and to predict customer service needs/activity. An example of this is the provision of automated case routing or faster access to customer data for support agents to enable a customer support case to be paired with the most suitable agent.
“Today’s customers demand seamless, individualised service across all devices and channels. The best service teams know they need to personalise that service, connecting with customers wherever they are. More than one-third of high-performing service teams are already delivering customer service via mobile apps, with an expected 67% growth over the next 2 years. Among all service leaders surveyed, the use of social media monitoring technologies will increase nearly 2x in the next 12-18 months”
Excerpt from 2015 State of Service Trends, an eBook by @salesforce
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