5 Critical CX Insights You’re not Gathering Today

Insights shine a light on hidden opportunities. CX insights can help you connect experience to your business goals, beat the competition and deliver a consistently delightful experience to your customers. Gaining insight is essential to your success.

At CloudCherry, we want to disrupt the customer experience industry. There’s a lot of noise out there about what CX teams should be doing. But rarely do platforms actually deliver on the thought leadership they put out through their PR efforts. Did you know – every time a buzzword is used, an influencer gets their wings?

Thought leadership is nice, but action is better. Here are five insights that your CX platform is probably not equipped to gather (but should be)

Journey-based insights

Everyone is talking about journeys. Everyone! But 99% of enterprises don’t bring those journeys into their CX programs. Most journey mapping exercises start out great with gathering everyone in a room, brainstorming touchpoints and designing a visual journey of how customers move through their interactions with your company.

However, that’s often where it stops. If you’re lucky, you might get your design team to take the sticky notes off the wall and put together a well-designed map. Most teams will never look at their journey map again – and very few companies will actually use it to inform their CX strategy.

Here’s how this needs to change. Your journey map is the most critical document your CX team has available to you. It helps you understand the context around your customer’s interactions with your company. It should frame every decision and every conversation you have with your customers. For example, as customers are becoming familiar with your product or service, you can send them relevant information at each stage in the journey to move them forward. Even better, you can see how each conversation resonates through NPS and CSAT feedback. The only way to do that is to bring your journey into your CEM so that you can coordinate activities along the journey.

Journey insights move your team from running surveys to having real-time, contextual conversations with your customers.

Connecting CX to ROI

Think about the business insights you’re getting from your CEM today. Are you being sold vague intangible ROI metrics or are you given a direct connection between CX and the money?

In the past, CX professionals have had to rely on proxy metrics like NPS and CSAT to show their impact on the business. If they were successful, NPS increased. But that’s where the connection stops. Did a higher NPS drive more revenue? How did it impact the overall bottom line?

Today, CX professionals need to connect their CX activities to the financials in order to show value to the business. The only way to do this is by integrating operational data like ARPU and churn rates with your experiential data.

Path Insights

We all learned that correlation doesn’t equal causation in high school science. So why are we using correlation analysis to make CX decisions? The thought process often goes like this: 50% of our detractors are between 25-35 years old. That must mean millennials don’t like our product. We’ll focus on older customers instead. But the insight you need is buried at least one step further back. In this case, it might be that millennials are more sensitive to an issue with your online store and expect more from your ecommerce solution. Without digging into the cause of your detractors’ frustration, it’s impossible to effectively address it.

Path analysis helps uncover the next proximal cause. Instead of only looking at the direct cause, we need to go a step further to find the experience drivers that actually impact customer actions. This requires using a platform that offers analysis using causal models.

Prescriptive Insights

Most companies today are pretty good at collecting descriptive analytics – data that describes the current state of your experience. Any of the data that you get from surveying customers about how they feel belongs in this category. But as Bruce Temkin describes in his webinar with CloudCherry, “to successfully implement a transformational CX program, firms need to move from descriptive analytics to prescriptive analytics.”

Translating descriptive analytics into tangible action insight is tricky. It requires understanding how each experience driver impacts what customers will do, and by how much. For example, improving the speed of service will usually improve customer satisfaction. But will it make people buy more or recommend you more often? And at what point do the returns from improving the speed of service start decreasing?

A platform like CloudCherry can pull out the action items and tell you exactly how each improvement will impact the financials – before you even spend the money to start experimenting.

Transformational Action

Companies collect so much information about customer behavior with every purchase, every click on the website and every conversation. But rarely do companies bring all of this data together to uncover the valuable hidden insights. Rather than just relying on survey data, operating with actual operational data reveals a whole new level of insight into what your customers do.

By integrating transactional and operational data into your customer journey, trends begin to emerge. Identifying these trends across departments and functional groups allow you to take transformation action based on real data.

Without these insights, you’re relying solely on what customers tell you they want – which is rarely what they actually need.

Beat the competition with insights that matter

Stop guessing at what customers will respond to. Customer experience is an art – but it’s also science. It’s possible to use the data that you’re already gathering to glean important insights. These insights will give you the competitive edge because you’ll be taking action faster, more effectively and more cost-efficiently than your competition.

In summary, the five insights every industry leader needs are:

* Journey-based Insights – take that customer journey map out of the desk drawer and start using it to measure your customer experience.

* Connect CX to ROI – understand how CX improvements affect real business metrics.

* Path Insights – discover the true drivers of the customer experience, rather than just the obvious correlation.

* Prescriptive Insights – move beyond descriptive analytics to understand what changes need to be made to improve the CX – not just describe it.

* Transformational Action – make changes based on real data and insights.

To learn more about how CloudCherry delivers on each of these insights, request a demo today with one of CloudCherry’s product specialists.

https://cloudcherry.com/blog/5-critical-cx-insights-youre-not-gathering-today/