NETTING IT OUT

Do you know what your customers really care about the most? Can you monitor and improve the things that matter most to your customers?

Many organizations are refining the ways in which they identify and monitor the customercritical issues that will dissatisfy and/or delight customers. These companies are establishing and/or refining operational customer experience metrics.

This report provides an overview of operational customer experience metrics: What are they? Why do they matter? How do other companies identify and monitor them? How might you discover your customers’ metrics?

We also provide a “how to.”  We describe how your customers can help you identify the moments of truth and customer metrics they care about. We’ll show you how to turn customers’ metrics into operational performance goals you can use to monitor and improve your ability to meet customers’ moments of truth.

What’s the bottom line?

Customers’ moments of truth—the things they care about the most—are subtle. You can’t always find them by asking or surveying.

Customers have a lot of emotion connected to these moments of truth. Whether you use these opportunities to frustrate prospects and customers or to delight them is your choice.

The good news is that customers’ moments of truth rarely relate directly to the price of your products and services. There are other factors that are actually much more important to customers’ experience in doing business with you (or not).

ARE YOU MONITORING WHAT MATTERS MOST TO YOUR CUSTOMERS?

One of the hottest topics in the customer experience field is the buzz around “operational customer experience metrics.” The good news is that many companies’ executive teams have decided that the time is ripe to go beyond customer satisfaction and loyalty scores to focus on the drivers of customer satisfaction and loyalty––and of revenues and profits. We often find that this new or renewed focus on operational customer metrics coincides with either a top executive-sponsored customer experience initiative and/or an effort to implement a Customer Experience Scorecard, or both.

Since there’s a lot of buzz and a lot of confusion around the topic of operational customer experience metrics, we’d like to help clarify and focus the dialog. The bottom line: if you’re trying to identify, monitor and improve your firm’s performance in delivering a great customer experience, you need to identify and monitor your execution on customers’ ....

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For more information about creating a Customer Experience Scorecard, see “Design Your Quality of Customer Experience (QCE)SM Scorecard: Create a Small Focused Set of Metrics: Measure What Matters to Your Customers,” by Patricia B. Seybold, March 24, 2005, http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/bp3-24-05cc.