Knowing the Customer Is a Winning Strategy for Customer Experience
(This post is the fourth entry of a week-long series celebrating CX Day, CXPA’s annual event for CX professionals to network and share knowledge regarding the latest customer experience trends, insights and successes.)
One NICE client, a Fortune 500 company with annual revenues surpassing $6 billion, is a U.S.-based provider of loyalty and marketing solutions. If you’ve ever opened a credit card with a clothing retailer, it’s quite possible they represent the machinery behind those branded credit programs. Much like NICE, they’re the type of business well-known consumer brands turn to when they wish to broaden customer engagement (and thus profitability). They manage more than 100 such credit programs, reaching millions of cardholders.
The client understands the value of customer loyalty. When a business such as theirs fails to deliver for its clients, it effectively passes on the dissatisfaction to that brand’s customers. To avoid that unpleasant outcome, they pride themselves on using the deepest available customer insights, analytics, and tools to deliver increased sales and engender loyalty to those brands.
Overseeing multiple contact centers across the United States, the client deployed several thousand live agents to handle more than 20 million inbound customer care calls annually. These interactions offered a wealth of useful customer data, yet manpower alone was insufficient for gaining a comprehensive, 360-degree view of the customer; identifying and eliminating customer pain points; and systematically optimizing the customer experience.
“Early on, it was a matter of highlighting what was possible with newer technology,” said their director of insights and analytics. “When we just had call recording, it was not possible to gain quick insights from the voice of the customer.”
As high-profile retailers turn to them for what they do best, so too did they turn to NICE for what we do best. First, they implemented interaction analytics technology, empowering them to understand the unique customer experience for each caller; by providing them (and their brand partners) a visualization of the complete customer journey, the technology helped identify pain points, critical interactions, and inefficiencies. Next, they proceeded with a voice of the customer application to obtain instant customer feedback, which could present a clear roadmap to giving customers what they want, at both the individual and macro levels, thus ensuring long-term satisfaction and loyalty.
Where the client once received about 5,000 customer surveys per quarter, they now receive nearly twenty times that number, giving them a far more complete view of their customers’ motivations, pain points, preferences, potential selling points, and more.
“Having data and insight from a post-call email survey, directly from the minds of our customers, lets us take a more targeted approach and provide more actionable insights to our brand partners,” said the director.
Today, 100 percent of calls are recorded and stored, with extended retention for compliance purposes. As a result of these initiatives, the organization has observed the following results:
- Overall customer satisfaction (CSAT) score has improved.
- Customer effort score is up.
- First call resolution (FCR) rate has improved.
The client uses these broadened insights to collaborate with its brand partners, continuously improving policies and processes to better align with customer sentiments. Internally, the organization isolates specific customer calls as reflecting positive or negative experiences, with a mandate that each call analysis session yields a recommended course of action—either to enhance customer-facing measures that work, or correct those that do not.
Furthermore, customer data is used to rank associates according to a number of customer service and satisfaction factors, on an individual level, informing compensation bonuses.
“NICE solutions help us keep customer feedback at the forefront of our minds, and to ensure that decisions are not finalized until the voice of the customer has been considered” the director said.
With a greater understanding of its customers, the organization is well-positioned to keep said customers satisfied and your favorite retailers on board. Is your business doing everything it can to know, and build loyalty from, its most valued customers?
Watch our on-demand webinar, “Know Thy Customer: Transforming Insight into Effective CX Strategy,” and learn how you can use customer insights to ensure long-term success from your customer experience program.