Uthaman Bakthikrishnan

Customer touchpoint effectiveness – what should you measure?

You run a customer service function, and you want to offer the best possible experience to your users. The demography of your users ranges from 18 to 70 years across geographies.
To address their demands and needs, you have a presence in all the channels – telephone, emails, web, and social. Besides, you have integrated your customer service system with your CRM, ERP, and Accounting. At the click of a button, your agents and intelligent systems have access to all the customer information.
You need to have the right systems and the right resources to manage and maintain high-quality service across every channel.
While you are optimistic about all the channels, are you putting your money where it is needed the most?
Organizations use multiple metrics to measure customer satisfaction levels across channels. They are:
Customer Satisfaction score (CSAT)
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Churn Rate
Customer Health Score
Abandonment Rate
Not all of these metrics would apply to your business. You need to be aware of why you are measuring, which would help define what you need to measure.
Voice of the Customer
Customer listening is an essential practice of any CX program. It would help if you had the feedback from customers – without which you can’t understand customer’s perceptions and make plans to improve.
About 90% of customer experience initiatives use surveys. You, as a brand, request your customers to fill out a survey, at the end of a completed experience. Structured questions can help you calculate scores like CSAT, NPS, and CES.
The biggest drawback of surveys is that they are solicited feedback, and only happy and unhappy customers provide the input. Response rates of less than 10% are standard for most customer satisfaction surveys.
Survey-based listening gets you only less than 10% of responses. While the reactions provide you a direction on what needs improvement and what needs optimization, brands should not stop at solicited feedback.
How do you extend your customer listening?
There are a bunch of things that you can do that are right up your alley. Few pointers are:
Begin with call recordings – analyze them to learn about customer sentiments and issues

Seek feedback from your frontline employees and service technicians. They tend to see and observe several unstated needs of customers

Text captured in customer emails, web site forms, call center agent notes, chat interactions, or even SMS

Social media mining – listen to comments posted on social platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Blogs, and review sites

Customer churn rate – keep monitoring this and figure out why they are leaving

Google analytics – if you observe a high bounce rate or abandonment rate on your website from visitors coming from Facebook, it’s indicating a disconnect between your website and social marketing

Customer health score – a combination of product/service usage, customer support, customer satisfaction, and business outcomes. An average of this would provide a view of your customer’s health.
While surveys are the foundation of customer experience feedback, you should complement it by extending your customer listening to even inferred input based on customer interactions.

Building intelligence at the customer touchpoints: real-life experience

My bank blocked my card, and the reason given was that I did not submit my KYC (Know Your Customer) documents for renewal. I was asked to submit those documents by mail to reactivate the card.

I promptly sent my scanned and self-attested KYC documents. I received a response with the ticket number. In a couple of days, I received a mail and a message stating that the address in the documents that I submitted doesn’t match the address they have on file.

I was stuck.

So, I called their customer service number. I was told to submit my KYC for the previous address where I lived about eight years ago. Once that is accepted, I was told to change the address and submit the documents for the new address.

I felt stupid listening to this suggestion. Also, I did not have any documents for the old address where I lived.

I explained to them the situation, and the customer service representative politely asked me to write about this situation to another email address.

I wrote to the new email address explaining the situation. I promptly received a ticket number, and within a day, I received an automated response stating that the details they have in the file don’t match the new KYC documents that I submitted.

I was surprised by this response. So, I decided to cancel my subscription and hand over my blocked card back to the bank.

Within a few hours, I received another response stating that my KYC has been accepted and the card is reactivated.

They saved me the botheration of calling up the customer care again and cancelling my subscription with this mail.

What are the touchpoints that I used here?

I used email and telephone as two touchpoints to reach the bank. Were they helpful in resolving my issue? Partially yes, as there was some intervention from someone that made the resolution possible.

What could they have done differently?

They could have provided me with an option to update my address in their records and provide the KYC documents for the new address
They could have confirmed my new address with a phone call
They could have provided me with a web link to upload my KYC documents along with the change of address. They could have automated the process of document acceptance
They could have provided access back to my Internet login for a couple of days, allowing me to update the change of address and then submit my KYC documents

Intelligence at the touchpoint level

This entire process of updating the KYC took about ten days. This could have easily been just a couple of days.

There was very little intelligence with both the touchpoints. When I sent an email, it had the intelligence to generate the ticket number and nothing beyond that. When I called up the customer service, the executive had the intelligence to provide me with the new email address to explain my issue and nothing beyond that.

If there were ways that these two touchpoints can be made intelligent, it’d make the lives of customers and the customer service staff easier.

Measuring touchpoint effectiveness in customer experience

As a brand, you can influence some of the touchpoints, and some are beyond your influence. I will take a moment to define what a touchpoint is.
Touchpoints are channels that your customers encounter or use to interact with your brand. This can include channels like email, website, chatbots, IVR, telephonic interactions, and social. Some of the touchpoints beyond your influence include online review sites and 3rd party websites where they write about your product.
Let us not worry about the touchpoints that are beyond your influence. Let us look at the touchpoints that you as a brand run and how effective they are.
Before getting there, why do you have so many touchpoints for people to interact with?
It is driven by the demography of the customers that you have. A sizeable percentage of your customers would prefer to reach you by email and phone, a portion of your customers is fine with self-service options of your chatbot, few are comfortable with websites, few prefer the social channels, while a few prefer talking only to a live agent.
Being available on a channel is the easiest part, but servicing customers through each channel is challenging. You will need to have the necessary infrastructure, workforce, and integrated systems.
This is where measuring the touchpoint effectiveness becomes essential. You can continue with the ones that are effective and drop those that aren’t.
But, how do you measure the effectiveness?
Some pointers that you can look at include:
What percentage of your customers use a particular channel? Any channel used by <10% of your customers should be a red flag.
What does it cost for you to run a channel? If the percentage of your total customer service experience is higher than the percentage of customers that use that channel, then that is a red flag
How often are you able to resolve customer queries using a particular channel in the first instance? If >50% of the questions are resolved in the first instance in a specific channel, continue with it.
Rate the customer questions on a scale of 1 to 10, with ten being the most critical. See if a touchpoint is effective in resolving critical questions. Any touchpoint that can resolve more than 60% of the critical questions is a key touchpoint.
Device means to gather the voice of the customer, such as feedback forms, market surveys that help you understand how your current and prospective customers respond to your brand in each channel.
Your operational goal of having a touchpoint should be directly proportional to the customer experience effectiveness on that touchpoint. Anything that scores high here is a definite choice for you to continue serving your customers.

What do the Customer Experience (CX) leaders do differently?

Leading-edge companies outperformed lagging companies on business outcomes like profitability, quality, growth, market share, and customer retention rate.

Source: HBR

Seven out of ten leading-edge companies say that customer experience is a strategic priority, while nearly half of the lagging companies don’t consider customer experience important.

This seems to have affected not just customer satisfaction scores and net promoter scores but also the intangibles like stock price and profitability.

What are the leading-edge companies doing right?

While building their customer experience programs, leading-edge companies allocate sufficient budgets, systems, processes, and plans.

Some of the critical things that customer experience leaders do include:

Develop the proper organization and skills to provide systematic customer experience management.
Set up the right tools and systems to make data-driven customer experience decisions.
Optimizing the processes to leverage inputs from customer experience support tools. For instance, they have processes in place to manage customer dissatisfaction and, if the issue is hot, they have processes to escalate to the senior management
The CX leaders don’t rely on past behaviors and patterns. Instead, they focus on the process. They understand and map the whole flow of the customer experience so that there is a true understanding of all the touchpoints
They respond to individual customers based on their feedback about an experience

The biggest lesson that you can take out of CX leaders is that they think like the customers. A host of different people can impact customer experience. You need to put it all in the customer’s voice from the get-go, not just for the frontline employees but for all the support personnel as well.

Here is an example.

One of the leaders in the CX space makes their leaders taking phone calls from customers. This allows them to understand what it’s like to be a customer and what it’s like to support that customer. This starts a change in the customer experience culture of the organization.

Here is another.

A CX leader created centers of customer excellence within each business group. This is not just another flavor of the week kind of message, but true customer service champions lead them – not just at the VP level but also deeper.

While the customer experience champions the initiative, it eventually turns out to be a business initiative. After all, the customer journey is not limited to one or two functions, but it is pervasive.

Everyone plays a key role in effective customer experience management.

Do customers have a choice in their customer experience with brands?

I recently wanted to switch my Internet connection from one location to another. I called up the customer care facility and gave my request. This process took me about 20 minutes.
The service provider accepted my request and suggested that they would check the feasibility of migrating the connection to the new location. The new site did not have additional ports, and hence they could not fulfill my request. It took them 72 hours to come back with this information. However, they did not offer any solution.
So, I called them again and asked them about the next steps.
They mentioned that they would add ports and provide me connection at the new location in 72 hours. I had to be on the phone for 20 minutes to get this done. I waited 72 hours, and nothing happened.
So, I tried reaching them three more times. Every time, it took me 20 minutes to speak to an agent, and every time they promised me immediate resolution. However, they did not migrate the connection.
Then, I decided to cancel the Internet connection, and despite trying repeatedly, I could not do that on the phone or their official mobile app. So, I went to their experience center and went through all the Covid formalities before meeting with a representative. I filed my request for disconnection, and they accepted it.
Then, as soon as I reached home, I received a call from their disconnection team asking me to reconsider my decision. They also suggested that they’d waive my charges during the period of inactivity due to this migration. Also, they made sure that the new connection was up and running in the new location within four hours.
What does this teach you?
This means that you have ways and means by which you can deliver excellent customer experiences, but your process does not allow you to do so.
You end up creating friction at every stage of your customer journey.
Let us look at all the friction in this journey of mine:
Friction 1 – there was no automated menu option for shifting my connection to a different location. There wasn’t an option for me to reach a customer service representative directly. I had to go through the entire IVR menu that was unnecessary for me before speaking to a live representative. This process took me 20 minutes.

Friction 2 – the feasibility took about 72 hours, which ideally should have taken only a couple of hours. Even after figuring out that it is not feasible, they did not offer a solution.

Friction 3 – I tried reaching them multiple times, and every time I had to wait for 20 minutes before contacting a representative. Instead, if they let me key in a complaint number, they can address my queries faster

Friction 4 – there was no choice for me to disconnect on their official app or the customer care number. This requires an OTP authentication, and that never happened.

Friction 5 – I had to take time out to visit their experience center to file my disconnection request. That took me about 90 minutes, including travel time.
After all this, they were able to fix my issue within four hours.
Is it that difficult for a service provider to map this journey in a way that I feel delighted?
I understand that organizations are trying to make the customer experience a self-service process and automate more than 80% of the tasks. While this would save the service provider money and make things easy for the customer, is it being implemented correctly?
In my case, they should have just provided me the choice to speak to an agent directly when my request is not a part of your automated customer service process. This would have eased things and reduced the friction.
As a service provider, with any automation or intelligence that you add to your customer experience journey, you have to ensure zero friction. Else, it would affect the customer journey and result in dissatisfied customers.

Is Customer Experience (CX) the new brand differentiator?

Gone are the days when people competed on product’s capabilities and pricing alone. Today’s customers have thousands of overwhelming choices, making purchasing decisions challenging to choose.

The entire ecosystem has become commoditized, and how do you differentiate yourself from the pack?

It has to be through Customer Experience (CX) and not just Customer Service. CX is the total sum of customer’s perception of how a brand treats them. These perceptions affect behaviors that lead to customer loyalty.

Do we agree that CX is going to be the differentiator?

Let us look at some of the CX numbers:

Gartner says that 89 percent of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience
A Walker study reveals that by 2020, CX will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator
The Temkin Group found that companies earning $1 billion can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within three years of investing in CX

Bain reports that although 80 percent of companies believe that they deliver awesome experiences, a mere 8 percent of customers agree.

This means that companies have a long way to go. Delivering excellent customer experiences can be a tremendous opportunity to disrupt a competitor and gain market share.

Focusing on customer experience management may be the most critical investment a brand can make in today’s business environment.

How do you provide remarkable customer experiences?

There is no silver bullet to this question. However, there are two critical elements that you should be aware of, and they are:

Personalize everything

Personalized experiences win over customers every single time. This means that the company remembers you, anticipates your needs, and delivers relevant and timely information. What does this do?

Forty-nine percent of customers have bought items that they did not intend to buy due to personalized recommendations from brands.

Besides, brands should create a one-view of their customers across all channels. McKinsey reports that only 1 percent of the data collected is ever used, stressing the disparity between the potential of data and the company’s ability to convert it into value.

When you set out to turn data into value, that would help improve customer experience.

Focus on the customer journey and not touchpoints

The customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that the customers go through while interacting with your brand – awareness, pre-sales, purchase, post-sales support, and repurchase.

Each journey consists of multiple online and offline touchpoints. While each touchpoint is important, the sum is always greater than the parts. The experiences will have to be consistent, and for that, you need to have integrated systems and channels.

Aberdeen Group states that the companies with the strongest omnichannel CX report an average customer retention rate of 89 percent versus 33 percent for businesses with a weaker presence.

How do you make your life and the lives of those around you better – the customer service way!

Sales are down, the competition is brutal, and we have zero chance of hitting our year-end profit target if we don’t bring down our costs.

This is what your CEO tell you when you meet with him. He further adds the target for customer service is 20%. You have till tomorrow morning to come up with a plan and present.

This wasn’t the first time the costs have been reduced. You did all the possible cost-saving measures and managed 20% savings with automation. You addressed it by not filling open positions, and nobody had to be fired.

The Plan

Within a few months, you are pressed to target another 20% cost reduction. This time it is going to hurt. The agents taking the calls are already stretched beyond capacity. You are 20% lower than your required strength. That’s what your CEO wants to reduce.

You set out to look for more automation to reduce the costs by 20%. You spend the next few hours squeezing out the possibilities, and now you say, “Tada, the numbers seem to work out,” and you are ready with your presentation for your CEO.

You leave for the day.

New day

You get up in the morning, and you realize that all of your automation that you are attempting to do will make your customers wait longer to talk to your agents. You are already getting complaints about the existing system, and people are looking for ways to bypass the whole thing and get to an agent.

You don’t provide that choice as you guess that many of your customers would choose to talk to the agent directly.

You feel that the entire work you did the last evening was wrong. Your system is designed to make your customers spend more time and effort so that you wouldn’t require as many agents.

You have heard some of your existing recordings, and you have figured how frustrated your customers are.

Making your customers work harder and spend time to cut costs on your end is a death spiral. Your sales will go down, and you’ll again be in cost-cutting mode.

So, you start to think, what if I ask my supervisors to take customer calls during peak periods. No way, they are all busy preparing reports.

What if I cut out a lot of that stuff? This looks workable to you. Why don’t I automate the report generation? It’d make things easy for your supervisors. They would be available to take customer calls, and that’d make things easier for your customers.

Everyone is happy

Employees would be happy as they would be working less on mundane stuff like generating reports and work on actionable stuff like improving sales. Customers would be pleased to get the personal attention they constantly sought. The organization would be happy as they have achieved the necessary cost-cutting, while the outlook for improved sales looks promising.

Frictionless customer experience – should this be your goal?

In 2016, an estimated $4.6 trillion of merchandise was left in abandoned eCommerce shopping carts
The US economy loses $3 trillion in productivity annually due to excess bureaucracy
China’s economy as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) grew a cumulative $82 trillion more than India’s from 1987 to 2017, even though the two economies were initially similar in size
In March 2020, about 88% of all shopping carts were abandoned across these verticals – automotive, childcare, luxury, car rental, travel, airlines, fashion, gardening, cruise & ferry, mobile providers, departmental stores, hotel, cosmetics, consumer electronics, retail, sports & outdoor, groceries, pharma, and insurance.
All these are distressing statistics.
Can you attribute one reason to all of these?
It will be difficult, but the common thread would be friction in customer experience.
The most important thing that any and every customer servicing organization should do would be to reduce friction in their experience.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon calls customer obsession the most significant success factor for any organization. Customer obsession is equivalent to zero friction on customer experience.
Jeff Bezo’s famous quote on customer friction is, “When you reduce friction, make something easy, people do more of it.”
How do you reduce friction for your customers?
How do you become a relentless advocate for the customers and minimize customer efforts?
Some pointers that you can look at:
Talk to your customers regularly – this would help you discover friction and act on it.
Remove everything unnecessary or something that does not improve the customer experience – stamp out ridiculous rules and pointless procedures
Provide choices to your customers to reach you. If they want to speak to an agent, so be it.
Don’t offer an omnichannel experience without putting in the necessary infrastructure to address customer needs across all the channels. The experience will have to be consistent.
Have one view of your customer journey so that the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves whenever they have to interact with you
Promise only those that you can deliver and deliver beyond expectations
Ask them this question, if they are willing to refer your service to their friends or relatives? If the answer is no, there is a lot for you to work towards
Focus on reducing friction one step at a time. Sometimes, friction is not apparent. You will have to put yourself in the shoes of your customer to ensure that their journey

The contactless approach to customer service

In the last year, most things have moved remote and online as far as customer service is concerned. Agents working from home will be the norm from now on, and the customers would want to get in touch with an agent only when necessary.

The contact centers have discovered that moving their agents to work from home hasn’t affected their productivity, and they continue to provide world-class service to their customers.

Customers still demand accessible, high-quality support, but the liking towards speaking with a live agent has come down considerably in the last few quarters.

With face-to-face interactions coming down, most organizations have migrated to multi-channel and omnichannel operations. They are looking at migrating 60% of their customer service to be handled by intelligent apps and automated bots that would be offered as self-service.

The self-service world

What do you need to do to make the self-service world up and running?

You need to get the technology in place and integrate it with your enterprise systems, which would help solve your customer issues.

The most important thing is agents’ ability to access your enterprise systems from a remote location – cloud access or VPN access. Once this is done, look at having automated IVR, chatbots with natural language processing, web self-service, FAQs, asynchronous messaging, SMS service lines, among others.

An example

I use a broadband connection at home. Whenever I have Internet connectivity issues, I was initially calling their customer service and registering a complaint. Once I register the complaint, I get an SMS with a complaint number. Then a support engineer calls me up to understand the issue. After a point in time, they provided me with an app to easily register my complaint.

Once the pandemic set in, they migrated the entire support part of the app into an intelligent application. There is no need for you to speak to anyone as all possible combinations are available in the chatbot itself.

Though it is only a rule-based engine, you do not have to talk to anyone, as every possible combination is captured as a part of the chatbot. They have all the options like:

Internet not working at all
Internet access is slow
I am not able to access a few sites
Whenever there is a power shutdown, and upon resumption, my Internet doesn’t work
Router configuration
A few others

You provide every information needed for the support engineer to address your issue within a minute and with just a few clicks. You get your ticket number with the approximate resolution times.

I can’t be happier.

This is a straightforward example that I have quoted. This is only the tip of the iceberg on what is possible with self-service. Imagine building intelligence to your self-service, and you would be laughing your way to the bank with happy, satisfied, and loyal customers.

Agent Experience is an essential piece in the customer experience journey.

There is very little room for error when it comes to customer experience.

In 2021, as is the case with every year, consumers will care even more about the customer experience than they did earlier when deciding which companies to support or buy from.

Any friction in the customer journey will mean loss of business and potential gain for your competitors.

How do you go about consistently ensuring great customer experiences?

It is an arduous task, but you have technology and tools to help you make the customer experience a genuinely seamless one for organizations and customers.

The most critical aspect of any customer experience journey is your agent, and putting them in the middle of your customer journey would greatly help your customers and business.

Agent Experience – What should I look at?

What is that one thing that an agent is expected to provide when it comes to agent experience?

An agent is expected to resolve customer queries and challenges in the shortest possible time to their satisfaction. How do you make this available?

It would help if you equipped them with all the tools that would allow them to provide resolutions in the shortest possible times for your customers.

Some of the key things to keep in mind include:

Do you provide an omnichannel experience, with agent access to all your customers’ interactions with your brand?

Do you have all of your enterprise applications integrated to allow the agent to pull information together that will enable them to offer resolution in the shortest possible time?

Do you have intelligence built into your systems that allow the agent to access information based on customer preferences and needs?

Do you have frequently asked questions and their responses documented so that the agent can access them easily?

Do you have systems in place to allow your agents to access the right talent by the click of a button to help resolve customer queries?

Have you defined the performance metrics of your agents that are aligned with customer outcomes? People often look at call hold times, and resolution times without giving weightage to the customer’s challenge or issue.

Is your agent training in alignment with your customer experience vision?

Do your agents have the means to provide feedback to the customer service and product management functions on ways and means to enhance to customer experience journey?

As an organization looking towards providing delightful customer experiences, you should invest in these eight areas to make your agents successful and make your customers happier.