Why it is time to Occupy Customer Experience? #occupycx

You must have read this recent article, “Three Months in Customer Service Limbo”, by David Segal in the New York Times. The article discusses the fate of a customer at the hands of customer service, customer's trials and small successes, and well! spoiler alert -- "Still! Unresolved issues". Oh! What drama. I suggest you read it too.

It is time for us to Occupy Customer Experience.

You, the (B2B or B2C) Customer

As you searched, vetted, purchased, used and reviewed products/services that will help you, you too experienced some degree of failure or had instances where your expectations were not met (if not to this extreme degree in the Times article). Some of you also use social-media channels such as Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and Yelp to communicate your frustrations and delights. Some of you will also agree with me that Revenue and Operational Margins are the two KPIs that your company/organization/institution closely manages.

You, the Manager

Given that you and your team deliver products/services, you are always looking for ways to increase your revenue while reducing operating costs. Among all channels of customer interaction (voice, chat, web, face-to-face and social media), social media is still the cheapest way to find and manage customers who reach out to you via social media.  Also, let’s not forget the amplification effect on your brand. Who can forget the Alec Baldwin tweet on American Airlines, or the Komen Foundation fiasco with Planned Parenthood?

"Customer Experience" is why companies/organizations/institutions exist. Customer experience drives both revenue and operational costs. Your customers are just like you; they want to do business with you using these channels. What is stopping you from delivering exceptional customer experience?

Coming Soon at a PAKRA channel near to you – "Thought-provoking Discussions". Please join the discussion.

In the coming weeks, we will present to you, a series of blog posts where we discuss and grade companies that are using social-media channels to address and enhance customer experience. We will grade the operational maturity of the companies in how they leverage social media in all customer-facing processes (such as brand management, lead management, sales management, order/service management, and customer service/recovery and cash/billing management).

Over the last 15 months, we found that companies are spending money to explore social media channels but we were surprised at how many (irrespective of size) are NOT doing the following:

-       Optimally resourcing

-       Optimally messaging

-       Optimally leveraging

-       Setting up processes and management metrics

The selected companies that are discussed in this series, are based on our findings, as we track these companies. Over 15 months, we started tracking #fail, failed sales conversions on facebook, failed linkedin usage. We tracked how companies make themselves available on these channels and how they are using various social-media channels. We use publicly available data for our analysis. The data that we will present will be recent and timely data, closely timed to the time of post.

For brand management, lead management and sales management processes:

We measure and rate the following leading metrics.

In our experience, these metrics drive customer experience and operational performance of the social-media channels.

For order/service management, customer service/recovery and cash/billing management processes:

We measure and rate the following leading metrics.

In our experience, these metrics drive customer experience and operational performance of the social-media channels.

The operational maturity score for all processes will be based on:

Come back and visit us soon.

Disclaimer: This study’s intent is to identify opportunities for improvement for companies that are using social-media channels to optimize customer experience. The analysis is based entirely on publicly available data.

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