Hi Team,

A short & sweet email from me this week, talking about a concept that I’ve been thinking about for a while.

The 3 levels of action in Customer Experience …

The 3 Levels Of Action In CX

If you’ve been around CX for a while, the best practice which is advocated for by most practitioners is that you need to “close the loop” with your customers. In principle, I agree with this concept however there are levels to this statement.

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to outline the three ways that you can “close the loop” with your customers.

LEVEL 1 (BASIC) - REACTING TO INDIVIDUAL RESPONSES

The first level of action relates to the most basic level of closing the loop with customers using a single survey response.

Using a combination of quantitative (survey scores) and qualitative data (open-text comments), your organisation should be able to quickly highlight customers who require remediation.

A CX platform like Medallia will allow you to route alerts to relevant teams with your organisation, ensuring they can diagnose the issue and speak with the customer when required.

The best organisations apply SLAs to their closed loop processes, ensuring customers are contacted / resolved within a certain time period.

There are substantial benefits to closing the loop with customers (decreased churn / increased LTV) however it is a costly exercise. Some survey programs could generate 10,000-100,000+ alerts per annum, which often require multiple teams of “closed loop specialists” to contact & resolve the customer.

Whilst I’m a big advocate for closing the loop with the customer, not every detractor is created equal. As our data intelligence evolves, surely there’s a better way to identify the “high risk” customers that require our attention? Enter Level 2 … 👇

LEVEL 2 (INTERMEDIATE) - PREDICTING HIGH RISK CUSTOMERS

In the above scenario, we talked about descriptive analytics, which is the most basic format of analytics. It allows an organisation to look retrospectively at a situation and describe what is happening.

For the second level of CX Action, your organisation needs to explore building a predictive analytics model. Predictive analytics is the use of data, statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data.

What does this mean in plain English?

Your organisation should be looking to combine multiple pieces of customer data to predict the future outcome of a certain customer.

By combining multiple pieces of customer data and comparing it with other customers who have followed similar patterns, your organisation should be able to start predicting (with an accuracy level >90%) when certain customer events are going to occur i.e. the likelihood or propensity for a certain customer to churn.

Once you are able to start predicting the “high risk” customers within your organisation, the foundation of your closed loop processes should remain the same. Attempt to make contact with these customers within a certain SLA, ensuring you document the root cause behind their concerns.

But if you know these customers are close to churning, shouldn’t you treat them differently moving forward? Enter Level 3 … 👇

LEVEL 3 (ADVANCED) - PREVENTING FUTURE ISSUES

The final level of CX action requires your organisation to adopt a type of analytics known as prescriptive analytics.

Prescriptive analytics is the use of advanced processes and tools to analyze data and content to recommend the optimal course of action or strategy moving forward.

Luckily, there are journey orchestration tools out in the market which makes prescriptive analytics easier than it sounds.

In plain English, I am suggesting that you use the intel you have about your customers to course-correct their journey.

Let’s use some examples so this makes more sense:

• If you know that a customer is dissatisfied, remove them from future marketing campaigns
  

• If you know that they’ve had multiple poor experiences within the contact centre, assign them to a high-skill agent for their next interaction
  

• If you know that they’ve been having broadband issues, trigger a push notification in the app to check in and make sure things are working

To conclude, taking action on the customer doesn’t just mean that you should close the loop with them after a poor interaction. It requires your organisation to continuously close the loop with them after every interaction - adopt technology which can course-correct their journey according to previous behaviours and predicted future outcomes.

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