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By José M. Rivera

Customer Experiences What’s it...

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Customer Experience What’s it... By José M. Rivera July 15, 2012

Customer experience (CX) is a concept that many people talk about but not everyone knows how to address. Customer experience is about perception, how the customer thinks and feels concerning the company. This includes every aspect of a company's services. Customer experience is an interaction between the company and the customer.

Let me give an example: The customer interacted through different channels of contact with your company as Customer Care, IVR, Website, POS and others. The most important item for the business is to create a better blue print of the experiences in the customer's memories.

Something very important we should understand about CX; for the customer, it is not important how many departments a company has or how complex is their organization, customer wants fast services, good quality and price, and want to feel that they are important. This means they want to feel the company appreciates doing business with them.

In my 10 years experience in customer experiences and continues improvement through Six Sigma holistic approach, I have classified companies in three different types of CX approaches:

A. Pro-acting and innovating: Company who has the internal philosophy to add value to their services before the customer requests it. This company is proactive in continued improvement and innovation of their services looking out for future customer needs. This type of company thinks like a customer.

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"It takes months and even years to get a new customer and only a few minutes to lose it"

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B. Reacting: Company that reacts to what the customer wants or needs through customer satisfaction surveys and social media research. This type of company waits for customers input to improve customer experience.

C. Conservative: Company only reacts when customers escalate concerns and complaints through calls, correspondence, social media, emails, and other channels.

Parenthetically, let me explain one of the misconceptions between customer experiences and customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is the culmination of a series of customer experiences: the net result of the good ones minus the bad ones.

This is important to understand because some companies focus and invest a great effort to improve customer satisfaction, but only get temporary or partial results.

Here is a concise description of how to conduct an analysis of CX.

Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of CX

The purpose is to conduct a depth analysis to identify what the customer wants and needs. During the analysis, you should answer the Why, Where, and How to enhance or improve the customer experiences, through different channels of contact as Contact Center, IVR, Website, POS, and others.

You could have different data sets and information sources as customer satisfaction surveys, CRM, IVR, Website, PBX, and other internal data sets, also you should be included calls recording, employee’s feedback and external data to conduct the analysis.

Voice of the Customer

• You can start with Quality Function Deployment (QFD). QFD is a methodology used in Six Sigma measurement phase.

o Collect the Voice of the Customer (VOC). What the customer wants and needs including concerns and complaints. If you collect customer verbatims, do a text analysis. Then, classify by category issues. Prioritize the above collected on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the most important. This ranking is based on the VOC data.

o Then, translate all this through Critical to Quality (CTQ) by channels of contact. At this point you are identifying areas or processes needing improvement by channels.

o Determine Cost of Poor Quality (COPQ) impact. o Create a SIPOC diagram. A SIPOC diagram is a tool used by a team to

identify all relevant elements of a process improvement before work begins.

o At this point you have these answers to: Why and Where

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Measurement Analysis

• Through sample random data you start to measure using statistical tools. For this you can use software such as SAS, SPSS, Minitab or Excel to do it.

• Select the channel data set you are going to study. In this phase, you will identify the relationship Y= F(x)

• Apply the hypothesis testing: Hypothesis tests are designed to statistically determine the probability that a certain hypothesis would be considered accepted at certain significance level or not to optimize decisions

o First step is to specify the null hypothesis. For a two tailed test, the null hypothesis is typically that a parameter equals zero.

o Second step is to specify the level, which is also known as the significance level. Typical values are 0.05 and 0.01. (T-test, ANOVA)

o Third step is to compute the probability value (also known as the p value). This is the probability of obtaining a sample statistic as different or more different from the parameter specified in the null hypothesis, given that the null hypothesis is true.

Depth Analysis to Determine the Root Cause

• Now, you will go more in depth to identify and verify the root causes. • Tools you can apply for statistics are Regression Slope, Kano Analysis, CPM,

Histogram, Standard Deviation, Gage R&R, 5Whys, Correlation, Crosstab, Pareto Analysis, Cause-and-Effect, Fishbone, SLA, MSA, FMEA, ANOVA, Tree Diagram, and others.

• At this time you should have a complete flow process or processes and identified key bottlenecks, overlapping, and gaps.

• It is very important identify the customer services level (SL) tolerance by category issue. This will help you to set parameters for improvements in its implementation plan. Keep in mind the purpose is to offer the customer a positive experience through greater efficiency and effectiveness of process.

• Now, you have these answers to: Why, Where, and How

Understand customer experience ensures you invest in the right areas and lets you deliver a positive experience to them while keep control of operational costs and increase your market share.

If you have comments about this article do not hesitate send your email at jmrnovo@yahoo.com.

Linked in: http://www.linkedin.com/in/josemrivera1157