Enhancing the Customer Experience: Drivers, Metrics and Prioritizing Improvements

If nothing else puts the importance of customer experience (CX) into perspective for businesses, this Forrester Research, Inc. figure should — “By settling for a subpar customer experience, brands are walking away from as much as $1.6 billion in revenue.”

The potential loss of revenue due to a poor customer experience is a global issue, even for a service-orientated country like the U.S. According to Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CXi) most large brands in the U.S. are delivering a mediocre customer experience. In other words, it’s OK, but not great.  

Don’t Leave Money on the Table

So how can you tap that potential revenue? According to the Forrester report, “What Drives a Profitable Customer Experience,” while there are numerous ways of improving the customer experience, the challenge is prioritizing these ideas. The report details how Forrester’s CXi can demonstrate which experiences will do the most to create and sustain loyalty. It also explains which drivers are universal — across brands and industries — and why it’s so important to identify other drivers that are specific to your business.  

Room for Improvement

In developing a customer experience strategy, the key objective is to enhance loyalty and ultimately get customers to spend more money over the long term. The best way to achieve this is to constantly find ways to make the customer experience better. Measurement should be intrinsically linked to any improvement program.

The right metric can be used as part of managing and enhancing the customer journey and can give you an accurate view of the customer experience. This includes helping you benchmark your company’s performance against others in your sector, and identifying areas that need improving. There are a number of metrics in the market, with the Net Promoter Score (NPS) being one of the most talked about. In a detailed Q&A paper, Forrester answers the top 10 questions on the metric. The paper, “Executive Q&A: Top 10 NPS Questions Answered for CX Professionals,” discusses Net Promoter scores in detail, from explaining what they are and whether they can be tied to financial success, to why NPS is so popular and what other CX metrics are available.

Partner for the Journey

Customers expect a seamless, personalized and consistent experience across all communication channels and at every point at which they interact with an organization. Regardless of drivers or metrics, CX can be a challenging discipline, particularly when it comes to the technologies used to deliver and manage it.

To learn more about how Verizon can help you overcome the challenges associated with understanding your customers and to download your complimentary copy of the full Forrester Research, Inc. reports, visit “What Drives A Profitable Customer Experience” and “Executive Q&A: Top 10 NPS Questions Answered for CX Professionals”