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New Customer Experience Survey Reveals Many Opportunities for Corporate Program Improvements

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Written By:

Lezli Harrell

March 28, 2017

The 2016 Corporate Edition of the Customer Experience Management Benchmark (CXMB) Series was recently released at the Execs In The Know Customer Response Summit held in Las Vegas in February. The 86-page report developed by COPC Inc. and Execs In The Know covers a broad range of topics and has revealed many areas of opportunity where companies can greatly improve the customer experience.

This year’s Corporate Edition report saw a number of new questions around topics such as quality assurance, program structure, channel consistency, and performance measurement practices.

Below are some of the most interesting results:

–Only 31% of corporate survey participants believe they currently offer support in all the channels their customers want to use.

–Fifty-nine percent of respondents indicate their quality assurance (QA) programs are aligned with their customer satisfaction (CSAT) results, but only 38% of respondents feel their QA programs are helping to monitor and improve issue resolution and CSAT rates.

–Only 26% of companies think they are providing a consistent experience when customers engage their companies through a multichannel approach.

–Only 15% of companies monitor the entire customer experience.

–Sixty-four percent of companies do not measure multichannel performance against single-channel performance.

Regarding multichannel, this year’s Corporate Edition report delved deeper into this topic than ever before. One of the biggest discoveries is that more than 60% of organizations are actively shifting channel traffic, often resulting in forced multichannel engagements for their customers. This finding comes right on the heels of a powerful discovery from this year’s Consumer Edition that confirmed a direct relationship between forcing customers into a multichannel approach and lower satisfaction and issue resolution rates.

According to the Consumer Edition survey findings, issue resolution rates were 26 to 16 points lower for consumers who were forced into a multichannel journey, either because of the process or because of the complexity of the issue. As for customer satisfaction, CSAT rates were 26 to 20 points lower for consumers who were forced into a multichannel journey, again because of either process or issue complexity.

The fact that the path-to-resolution choice plays such a significant role in both issue resolution and CSAT rates should give companies pause,especially as they invest money and energy into directing the customer journey along specific paths to either meet business needs, or conform to the confines of their own rigid program processes.

This year’s Corporate Edition report also revealed significant lapses in consistency in how different channels of service are monitored and measured. For instance, while 83% of brands indicated that they were measuring first contact resolution in Traditional Care channels, only 37%, 22%, and 8% indicated the same for Interactive, Social Media and Mobile Care channels, respectively.

A similar story also emerged for CSAT measurement. Ninety-four percent of brands indicated that they were measuring CSAT in Traditional Care, while only 49%, 31%, and 18% of brands were measuring the same in Interactive, Social Media and Mobile Care, respectively. This begs the question, “How can companies ensure a consistent experience across channels when basic measurements of channel performance are conducted so inconsistently?”

The answer, it seems, is they can not. Therefore, it makes sense that  only 26% of companies feel they are providing a consistent experience when customers engage their brand across multiple channels, as previously stated in this post.

These are just a few of the findings that make the 2016 CXMB Series Corporate Edition a compelling and valuable read for customer experience professionals at all levels. If you are interested in gaining access to the entire report, or previous editions of the CXMB Series, we invite you to visit the CXMB Series resource page on the Execs In The Know website.

 

About the CXMB Series

The CXMB Series was launched in 2012 as an industry benchmark survey, and was aimed at capturing best practices and norms of operation within the customer experience industry. Since then it has grown into a bi-annual report series, including both Corporate and Consumer Editions. Topics within the report are wide-ranging and typically evolve from year-to-year.

A joint research project between COPC Inc. and Execs In The Know, reports based on the survey findings are released at Execs In The Know national leadership conferences, held twice a year in September and February.

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