Chances are that your organization is lying to itself about the quality of the customer experience (CX) it provides. But this lie is so pleasant, so comforting, that organizations continue to tell it even as the problems it creates pile up.
The lie is based on fairy-tale data — data that tells a charming fiction about the org’s CX. Fairy-tale data comes from two sources:
- Inflated customer feedback scores. Customer feedback data often tells a story that’s more pleasant than accurate, either because organizations consciously manipulate scores or because they don’t follow customer feedback best practices. Scores are manipulated at nearly every one of the 58% of orgs that provide bonuses or other incentives based on feedback numbers. Scores are also fictitious at orgs that ignore best practices, like the 71% that fail to pre-test customer surveys.
- Operational metrics that fail to reflect the CX. These customer-incorrect metrics are self-serving, inaccurate, and inadequate (Forrester client access only). For example, an e-commerce company may mark an order as complete when it prints the shipping label. If fulfillment delays occur after that, the customer will receive their item late — while the company congratulates itself for an on-time order. Or a billing department may report 99% billing accuracy while customers complain of inaccurate bills. The problem? Although bills are technically accurate, they’re confusing to customers.
Hopefully, it’s obvious why this is a problem. Organizations that make decisions based on fairy tales make mistakes. They make the wrong decisions about which customer pain points to fix and about how to fix them. What’s worse, organizations often fail to act at all because they don’t realize that there’s a pain point to fix.
So put away the fairy tale and tell an accurate story about your organization’s CX:
- Stop incentivizing fiction. Wean your organization off score-based incentives (Forrester client access only) and instead coach employees on the behaviors that you can prove will create better experiences.
- Create customer-correct operational metrics. Highlighting the most obvious discrepancies between current ops metrics and customer perceptions may be enough to prompt change. If collaborative approaches fail, go it alone to develop new operational metrics (Forrester client access only) alongside existing ones.
- Adopt a metrics framework. Ensure an accurate, balanced picture of your organization’s CX by building a framework (Forrester client access only) that measures interaction, perception, and outcome metrics at the relationship, journey, and touchpoint levels.
- Evolve your VoC program. Turn your stagnant voice-of-the-customer (VoC) program into a feedback management practice (Forrester client access only) that’s more proactive, effective at monitoring impact, and integrated across the organization.
