Month: July 2016

A broken link on the IVR tree? seriously?

ahhhh…holiday time and people frantically and happily using travel services! This until an exception occurs, and then, as a user, you are prompted with some of the worst examples of customer experience ever configured in the past 20 years:

  • on websites, when you need help, before you are actually prompted with contact options you need to disentangle yourself from a literal maze of Q&As , FAQs, instructions, banners, etc…so that when you finally get to a contact option you are already half pissed off. This is somehow called “deflection” and I have already treated this topic in previous posts.
  • let’s talk about contact options, as there is really only one option: phone numbers, not even toll free. No digital channels although it would make totally sense, since you are navigating and operating in digitised mode, why not offer a chat or email together with the old phone? Are your clients not also millennials who we now know prefer chat over voice?
  • I even stumbled in a badly broken IVR tree where they would give me the option to change support language and access to a larger pool of agents, but when pressing the instructed key nothing happens and you keep getting prompted the option again. Seriously? Did you not test your whole tree before putting it into productions, as per 1997 best practices guidance???

thank God this is only happening once a year, then, as CX recipients, we’ll be back with the usual stuff.

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I’m back…and so is NPS!

If you were wondering why I haven’t posted for a while now, it’s because on top of thCCXP Logoe usual work-family load, I have embarked in the CCXP certification, which I was able to get at the end of June (yayy!).

While I was studying the CX transformations that companies went through in the past 3-4 years, which somehow revolves around “the ultimate question” to users and consumers, I sometimes raised my head and noticed that there is a big wave of Net Promoter Programs that is hitting Europe at this time. As a customer and consumer, I have been now asked the question at least 7 times from different companies in the past 2 months only, all varying from bank institutions, to airlines, mobile operators, hotels and healthcare insurances. The cutest one, was in the form of a Whatsapp mobile chat with the brand (on a web page), asking the nps question and the open ended comment. They are all asking the same thing, with different levels of variation, but having studied thoroughly what a Net Promoter program is within a company, I now realise where this is getting us.

The greatest achievement of NPS, so far, has been something no other metric within the CX world ever dared to: it was able to link emotions to revenue. Emotions come from the complex evaluation mechanism that make you, as a user, decide to recommend a brand to your friends and family. Reasons for this evaluation are so complex that relevant statistics analysis can be applied to some extend to split the subset of emotions leading to the final score. But linking it to revenue? This is the beauty of it: you can finally understand why brands that become trendy and fashionable also increase their revenues substantially and on the other side, why brands that are providing mediocre experiences are set to, basically, disappear in the mid-long term.

So the CCXP exam, or to better phrase it, the books I read to pass the exam  (suggestions in the bottom), were really eye-openers to me, as in the past I simplistically considered NPS as a quick metric, while in a serious program it’s clear that it is so much more.

And its wave is coming so strong that my recommendation to all those companies that are still sceptical or unaware of such program, is to start quickly working on it, or prepare to be out of market in a few years.

Finally this also brought some consciousness as a consumer: I now know what to expect from a serious company doing NPS. With a low or very low score, the closed loop-back process implies that I should be contacted and given voice to report my issues. It means that I am valued as a customer and that the company is keen on fixing any issue to keep doing business with me.

But wait…. what if I don’t get any feedback? 🙂

 

good NPS reading: these books were suggested to me by a nice colleague who is a true CX expert, and I have to admit they all were eye opening.