Pragmatic vs. complicated: Adopt CX standards that work

In July, Kantar announced the launch of the ‘first ever global CX standards’ in partnership with Bain & Company and Qualtrics. While the idea of measuring CX and setting benchmarks for success excites us, the standards set out by Kantar and Co. are almost impossible for most companies to execute. They miss the mark when it comes to making practical improvements to your customer experience that result in revenue and growth.

Through our experience working with thousands of service brands across the globe, we’ve learned that the most effective way to measure and improve customer experience is by starting small and building your maturity over time. 

The value of standardizing CX 

There is no denying that the effort to standardize CX practices is a step in the right direction. CX has been a buzzword for years, yet many companies are still in the early stages of truly integrating it into their business strategies. Having useful metrics and a framework that allows companies to understand where they are now, and what they can do to level up is critical for driving improvement. 

The global standards put forth by Kantar and others also bring much-needed attention to the importance of CX and its unquestionable impact on a company's bottom line. As they point out, brands that deliver meaningfully different experiences are 2.5 times more likely to significantly increase their market share, which broadly aligns with the findings of AskNicely’s CX ROI calculator. 

The three categories under which the Kantar and Co standards fall are a great starting point, as culture, feedback, and execution are all equally important for driving consistently awesome customer experiences.

The practicality problem 

While the Kantar global standards are well-intentioned and theoretically sound, they fall short of being practical for most organizations to execute. 

The framework outlines seven pillars with seven to 10 standards each, amounting to over 70 standards that companies are expected to continuously measure and meet. While this might be feasible for (some) Fortune 500 companies with vast resources, it is an unrealistic expectation and largely unnecessary for the majority of businesses. 

The truth is, most brands are still in the early stages of their CX journey. Many are not even measuring CX consistently, operating from a position of "I don't know what I don't know." For these companies, the thought of implementing such a comprehensive set of standards is daunting, if not impossible. What they need is not an overwhelming list of expectations but a clear, manageable path to get started on their CX journey. 

Keeping it simple 

One of the most important things we can do when it comes to measuring and improving the customer experience is to keep things simple. At AskNicely, we believe it’s all about getting one percent better, every day, and consistently doing the things that create an amazing customer experience, one step at a time. 

For our customers, those steps happen within our growth flywheel. No matter what stage of customer experience management you’re in, your current feedback methods align with one of the steps. Then as your feedback program matures and grows over time, you might find yourself moving through the other stages of the flywheel. These steps drive business improvement and earned growth.

Regardless which tools or processes you adopt, your brand should be working through this five-step flywheel:

Collecting: Understanding your customers’ business-critical feedback starts with collecting the right data. This part of the flywheel involves determining what feedback you want to collect and then setting up the tools and processes you’ll use to collect feedback.

Responding: This next stage in the flywheel involves responding to your customer feedback and conducting real-time case management. The focus is on closing the loop through automation and empowering your team to take quick, meaningful action on customer feedback to turn detractors into promoters.

Assessing: In responding to feedback you might find you’re taking the first steps towards assessing feedback as well. At this stage you and your team are tracking customer feedback metrics across variables like locations, customer or service type, and analyzing trends to inform business decisions.

Transforming: Next up, this is typically for somewhat mature brands, you’ll use what you’ve learned from collecting, responding, and assessing to unlock insights at every level of the company and to inspire, motivate and recognize your customer-facing teams. This is where you’ll identify training needs and implement changes, identify negative trends to turn positive, and praise a job well done internally.

Growing: The fifth flywheel element unlocks all that operational improvement to drive growth to your business’s bottom line. This is done through generating positive online reviews and referrals and highlighting successes to acquire new customers efficiently while retaining your existing ones.

This probably sounds great, or incredibly daunting, depending on the stage and maturity of your business. That’s because the reality is that many brands aren’t even collecting customer feedback and what those brands need to do is simply start.

When you start collecting feedback, we recommend that, at a minimum, you respond to and assess the patterns in the feedback.

As a rule of thumb, if you’re gathering customer feedback: 

• Respond to detractors: Customers don’t want to speak into a void. Even if you’re not ready to make a sweeping policy change or train teams on a new skill, you can and should respond to unhappy customers to let them know they are heard. We’ve all had a bad experience that, when addressed in a timely fashion, made us a bigger fan than before. There are simple and easy workflow and automation tools to make responding easy and resource-feasible to get going now.
  
  
• Assess patterns: Take a look at the common themes across your services, staff members, or locations. Then identify what changes can be made to improve the experience for customers.

The magic of this earned growth flywheel happens when you can make progress on all five aspects – collect, respond, assess, transform, and grow – with strong alignment from the top executives of your company, all the way to your customer-facing staff. Too many customer experience programs fail because they're ideas crafted in an ivory tower and lack connection to teams directly engaging with your customers.

Once you start with the foundations of collecting, responding, and assessing, there’s a manageable path to grow your CX maturity over time.

Introducing the AskNicely customer experience maturity model 

We’ve developed a simple, accessible, and easy-to-use maturity model that any service business can start using today. 

There are four levels of maturity, based on the flywheel below. 

As you level up, you can expect an increase in your NPS and/or CSAT scores, which in turn boosts your revenue. As cited by Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, every 1-point increase in NPS leads to a 0.147% increase in revenue growth rate, and every 1-point increase in CSAT leads to a 4% increase in overall revenue.  

We see these figures come to life for AskNicely customers across a variety of industries from home services, to elective medical to high-stakes professional services. One of our customers, NZ Home Loans, was able to increase its maturity over time and as a result, gained a whopping 7x increase in referrals in just twelve months. 
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“Consistently delivering on our brand promise is crucial. AskNicely gave us the power to understand where the gaps were, then made it super easy to coach for those gaps. From there, automating follow up on referrals from our happy customers is icing on the cake.” — Chris Wong, Head of Customer, NZHL.

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Thanks to their location-specific coaching, NZHL has seen a 13-point improvement in NPS from their bottom-tier locations. They have also seen a marked increase in the number of referrals captured from their bottom and middle-tier locations, and automating the follow-up on referrals has resulted in an 80% close rate.

The combination of happier customers and an automated referral pipeline created a 7x increase in referrals for the year, driving $530k in earned revenue.

Start simple, start today

Improving your customer experience doesn’t need to be complicated. Start by measuring, understanding, and responding. And over time, use those insights to find the nuggets that will make your business better every day. 

Unsure where you sit in the maturity model? Book a free call with our team to get clear on where you’re at, where you want to be, and how to get there.