The future of CX: Identifying and driving financial ROI
The customer experience industry is evolving, and with it, a need to evolve the approach to helping organisations protect their brands, delight customers and make more money. The days of simply putting in measurement systems and reporting on results just don’t deliver enough value.
The customer experience industry is evolving, and with it, a need to evolve the approach to helping organisations protect their brands, delight customers and make more money. The days of simply putting in measurement systems and reporting on results just don’t deliver enough value. Best-in-class organisations are leveraging multiple customer experience measures, including mystery shopping, customer surveys, contact centre services, and social media review tracking, among others. In addition, those same industry-leading companies are integrating these measures and linking them to financial performance at the location level. Market Force refers to this approach as “Better Together” and it remains a key differentiator of our approach. With these integrated measures, multi-location businesses are then able to apply analytics and location segmentation to figure out exactly what to do and where to invest in CX for the highest ROI. Forrester recognised Market Force Information in 2107 as a Break Out Vendor for these kinds of capabilities.
A case in point is one of Market Force’s fast casual clients. They had a dilemma. Although the majority of their stores were seeing positive comps, 31 %were seeing negative sales trends. The chain wanted to understand how they could increase same-store sales growth across the system. They collected mystery shopping, customer surveys and provided their customers with a guest recovery contact centre service. Our PhD statisticians and data scientists linked those results to same-store sales and growth by store to develop what we refer to as a “Criticality Index,” that short list of attributes or behaviours that when executed, in combination, drives the KPI in question, in this case, same-store sales.
Using different measures of CX gave a fuller picture of the drivers that impacted financial performance. Interestingly, this brand’s Criticality Index showed that there was one unique driver across each of the three measurement methods. Mystery shopping highlighted speed of service and whether a store delivered food within the pre-defined time frame. Customer surveys uncovered a driver of how often a store received a top box score for food quality according to guest feedback. The contact centre driver was connected to the store’s ability to minimise the number of guests that called to complain about food quality. So the analysis showed that food quality and speed of service were most important to guests. It was not location, cleanliness, staff interaction issues, or the plethora of other issues that a store needs to consider. It was not to say they weren’t important, it was just that they did not specifically contribute to same store sales growth based on the model that was developed with their CX data.
What was most important for this analysis was the store segmentation work that accompanied the insight. The analysis showed that stores that executed at a high level on all three had 7 % greater same-store sales growth than those that did not. Bear in mind, that the stores in the upper quadrant weren’t perfect. They didn’t get perfect mystery shop scores and not every guest survey was a home run. The key is that this brand was given specific attributes on which to focus that were shown to drive sales a statistically significant level.
To further emphasise the value of these attributes, these measures were communicated to the field and performance on them was tracked. What was most compelling about the insight was that for those stores that worked the hardest on these qualities and drove improvement, their same-store sales growth was 11 % higher than those stores that did not. Now that is CX insight that you can take to the bank! The key to any good CX programme is that it helps a business i) understand what matters most to guests, ii) identify where gaps exist, and iii) determine the financial ROI of driving change.
