There is more to customer experience than simply listening to the customers. The information gathered from them needs to be collated, distributed and then dealt with effectively.
So said Keith Schorah, CEO of SynGro, speaking at the International Customer Experience World event in Johannesburg yesterday.
"Customer experience is how we're going to compete in the future," said Schorah.
He is of the view that integrating the information with other forms of data to make it make sense, like financial information, can give organisations contextual value and help create change that brings about the right outcomes.
"The link to financial performance is not always obvious, so try different scenarios and ways of looking at the data."
He pointed out that a customer experience system should be enterprise-wide and be able to automatically deliver surveys, manage complaints in any language, and absorb results from all forms of customer feedback.
Schorah suggested the use of a sentiment analysis to analyse free text and determine whether customers are happy, sad or indifferent; and storing the results in a database in the cloud to allow globalised access.
"While data analysis must be statistically valid and believable, if the frontline and the board don't understand it, it's worth nothing. You have to display it graphically so that people understand it, and bring it down into simple actions," Schorah notes.
Also speaking at the event, Amanda Cromhout, CEO of consultancy firm Truth, said data is meaningless without insights. "It's what you do with the insights to drive a different business strategy that will bring you long-term profitability. It's all about how to combine the science with the soul."
In order to make good use of data, the data should be about the customer, rather than just the product, she added.
"You want customer data on who buys baby carrots, rather than just baby carrots data," she noted.
Schorah recommends unique customer identifiers as best practice. "We tend to have data silos, with the customer represented in lots of databases. A unique ID is essential to proper data management.
"If you have an overlay of financial data of those individuals, you can understand their value to the organisation."
He also believes that it is vital to do a root cause analysis: "Many institutions deal with the symptoms - the complaints themselves, rather than finding the source of the complaint and fixing the people or processes that cause the complaint."
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