Customer Experience Improvement is a Team Sport

A company is a team, funded by customers. A company is expected by customers to operate as "one". Nobody likes to hear evidence that the company is not a real team: "That's handled by X" or "We don't have access to Y". And even worse, recurrence of an issue that customers have already voiced is evidence of disrespect of their precious time and funding.

This is why cross-functional collaboration in acting on voice-of-the-customer (VoC) is paramount to achieving customer experience ROI (CX ROI). Company-wide employee engagement in customer experience improvement is an absolute must!

Employee Engagement Urgency
Should you wait to improve customer experience (CX) cross-functionally? No! Your initial pilot of anything you start off with in managing CX should include employee engagement. Otherwise, it will be a long time before you can claim sustainable business results from CX management. Widespread and early employee engagement in systematic CX improvement has these advantages:

• Build goodwill with customers, especially those who have graciously provided feedback to you.
• Fast-track cost reductions as you minimize wasted time, resources, and energy in things that irk customers.
• Build employee morale as your company's alignment with customers becomes more apparent.
• Reap ROI from investments in VoC, CRM, customer care, etc.

Systematic CX improvement efforts are essential to achieving CX excellence that customers reward. A good analogy is the desire to look great in your swimming suit: you can collect data about how others view you now, you can advertise how you want to be perceived, and you can follow-up with individuals who give you feedback — but ultimately, you'll have to do the actual work required to look great in your swimming suit. A pill or a quick diet or occasional gym visit won't do the trick. It will take concerted effort to monitor the positives and negatives in your eating and exercising if you really want to reach your goal. The same principles hold true for CX!

Success Factors
In our 4-year study of CX practices, companies that presented VoC to all employees and expected action by owners of CX key drivers tended to have stronger business results tied to CX efforts. Yet, less than half of companies are making these practices an essential part of their CX strategy.

Advantages abound for sharing VoC with everyone, and expecting every department to manage their respective ripple effect on CX. These practices are among the best ways to instill customer-centric culture, create shared vision for CX, reduce costs, and stimulate innovation that creates mutual value for the company and customers.

Look for patterns across all of your customer intelligence, and prioritize CX improvement areas by customer lifetime value. These practices have strong motivational value.

Systemic Customer Experience Improvement
Most customer surveys have closed-loop case management, where an action alert is generated when a respondent voices a concern or complaint, and managers are committed to following up with the respondent within a specific time period. This practice has been common in satisfaction and experience surveys since the early 1990s. As surveys are a representative sample of the buying population, it's important to think of these action alerts as early warning signals. It's necessary to look for the patterns among these signals and address them systemically so that your entire buying population is spared of repeated concerns.

"Systemic" means "affecting the entire organism or body". This is a critical principle for CX excellence, as we noted: customers think of a company as "one". Think of those pharmaceutical ads with extensive disclosures of the potential downsides of the product. If we were fully honest about the realities of the customer experience, ads for any product might include something like: "Get yours now for $9.99 … Side effects may include extensive waiting time for delivery, incomplete usage instructions, unexpected urgency to contact customer service, confusing billing paperwork, information in disparate systems, …". You get the picture.

Customer experience is more than a product. And more than an interaction. Customer experience is "all interactions people have with or about a solution: messages, people, processes, policies, prices, products, and services." And everyone in the company has a hand in how well these CX components play out for customers.

Cross-Functional Teams Improve Customer Experience
When I led CX improvement at Applied Materials, company-wide employee engagement was key to our CX strategy from the beginning. We provided each account team, business unit, and functional area with their cut of the customer survey results, to minimize finger-pointing and maximize ownership of customer feedback. We reviewed the company-wide survey results to show the context of the organization's situation, and spent time with a cross-functional team in each organization discussing the interpretation of the feedback. Our mantra was "Good news is no news, no news is bad news, bad news is good news."

The cross-functional teams read through customer verbatim comments related to the biggest bad-news topics. Then they worked together to ask "why" five times, in order to identify the root causes of what customers were experiencing. The teams then created action items to address each root cause. And they identified a metric that would track the progress of action item execution.

We treated this metric as a leading indicator of future customer feedback. If we had correctly identified the root causes, and if we successfully eradicated or minimized the root issues, we could expect future customer perceptions to improve — and future buying behavior and recommendations to increase accordingly.

Our CX governance team oversaw all the plans so that synergies could be developed among teams with similar goals. This was very important for systems thinking and nurturing cross-organizational collaboration.

Accountability was emphasized by publishing teams' action plan progress company-wide for quarterly review side-by-side with our financials, as part of executives' preparation for industry analyst calls. Motivation was accentuated by placing significant weighting on action plan metrics in the executive incentive plan, and by providing widespread visibility to achievements through a self-reporting team recognition program.

CX ROI
Our 4-year study of CX practices revealed strong emphases on VoC and customer engagement — and relatively weak "middleware": systemic customer experience improvement and innovation. We call it middleware, because VoC informs CX improvement and innovation, and customer engagement is earned by CX improvement and innovation. ROI on VoC and customer engagement is dependent upon the middleware.

The CX ROI building-blocks model shows this as a left-right flow of CX activities in tandem. All of the building-blocks are needed simultaneously in order to maximize CX excellence and ROI.

Stepping stones within the Improvement of Customer Experience building-block include:

• Engage everyone in VoC actions: present VoC comments to everyone and expect everyone's action on key drivers.
• Resolve & prevent customer pain systematically: use root cause analysis, formal complaint management, quality tools, organizational learning, and systematic prevention and communication.
• Enable customer-focused daily work: empower employees by helping them use CX excellence criteria in their decision-making.

Dozens of tools are available to help deploy these stepping stones. Most are quality tools that are learned through six sigma and lean training. They include Pareto chart, force-field analysis, activity network diagrams, and so forth.

Make continual improvement of CX a way of life in your company. As customers' pressures and interests evolve, your company needs to readily adapt — and ideally, anticipate and prevent issues from occurring in the first place. The cost savings are likely to be quite significant, and the unity across your company may propel productivity. Systemic CX improvement is the key ingredient in the recipe for building trust, which organically encourages customers to be raving fans of your company.

This article is 7th in a 10-part series providing glimpses into the ClearCX^TM customer experience maturity assessment.

1. Customer Experience Maturity Roadmap
2. Customer Experience Strategy is Uncommon
3. Customer-Centricity is Controversial
4. Comments are Customer Experience Gold
5. Customer Experience Intelligence Inspires Innovation
6. Customer Lifetime Value Prioritizes Customer Experience Management
7. Customer Experience Improvement is a Team Sport
8. Customer Experience Innovation Creates Mutual Value
9. Employee Engagement: Living Your Brand Promise
10. Customer Engagement is the Capstone of Customer Experience Management

Increase Your Small Business Blog Engagement by 288%

January 21, 2015 - Posted: Luke Jordan

Running a small business can be tough, particularly online.

How many times have you been preached to that your business needs to blog in order to survive – and thrive – within Google’s search engines?

If you’ve taken this advice on board and tried blogging for your website, or even hired people (whether part-time, permanent, freelance, outsourced or otherwise) to do your copywriting, you’re missing out on something HUGE.

You may have had a dig around in Google Analytics, or any other analytical software you may use for tracking how many visitors land on your website, and been surprised at how many visitors your blog receives – or how many it doesn’t receive, rather.

Increase blog engagement by 288% with Comment Collection. Find out how…

CLICK TO TWEET

Let’s say you’re really proud of a blog post you’ve written for your website. How many views has it had? How many social shares has it had? If it’s a lot, then I’m genuinely impressed.

However, the reality is that the majority of a website’s blog posts – particularly for small businesses – will go virtually unnoticed.

This is because, despite people preaching about creating great content, writing blog posts is only a small piece of a rather large jigsaw puzzle.

 

How to Get More Views on Your Small Business Blog

I’ve come up with a simple technique that I’ve dubbed Comment Collection, which will increase the views, comments, social shares and links back to your blog articles with just minimal effort.

In fact, using this technique has led to my brand new website receiving a comment for one in every 50 visitors. This is a great figure, although the average is brought down by me responding to each comment I receive.

Better than this, I’m averaging a social share for one in every 5 visitors.

That’s right – one in 5 readers of my blog posts shares, likes, +1s, stumbles or whatevers them on social media.

This is on a brand new website that I started just six weeks ago with zero social following and zero link opportunities to start with. In other words, I started from a completely blank canvas.

I’m about to talk you through the Comment Collection technique, something that has given my website the following statistics:

• Increased Avg. Time on Page figure by 288.55% on first article I trialled it on
• Bounce rate dropped by 15.65% on the same post
• Overall Avg. Time on Site figure increased by 92.55%
• Overall website bounce rate dropped by 5.34%

Increased engagement, social shares, links, returning visitors and more will all lead to increased search engine rankings in the future.

Not only have my web metrics improved, I’ve also increased my email subscriber base and met some great new contacts along the way.

How much time have I invested in using this technique so far? Just a few hours. Seriously.

However, I’m going to invest a significant amount more time to keep my small website community growing – and these impressive figures improving further – using Comment Collection.

The best thing yet? Anyone can do it. Including you.

 

How Comment Collection Works

This is going to so sound so simple. That’s because it is.

Interestingly, you’ll probably find yourself asking “how didn’t I think of this?” or “how didn’t anyone come up with this sooner?”

My honest answer – I don’t know!

This process is so easy and gives great results.

Step 1

Firstly, you’re going to need to create a great piece of content. I’m sure you’ve heard all about the need to create amazing content over the past couple of years, so I’m not going to bore you by going into more detail about that.

Let’s say your business is something to do with cars. You therefore create an amazing blog piece about cars – all easy so far – something that will intrigue, interest, amuse or invoke emotion from a wide range of people.

Once the piece of great content is finished and live, you can move onto the first stage; finding engaged content. In fact, this process only has three main stages:

• Find engaged content
• Find engaged people
• Re-engage people

Using Google, or a handy tool I use called BuzzSumo, you should be able to search for “best cars blog” or anything similar – the closer to the content you’ve produced the better.

I recently wrote about my blogging resolutions, so I searched for “blogging resolutions” from the past fortnight to see what other bloggers were saying.

Within BuzzSumo, you can filter by the amount of social shares that a piece has – the more the better. You can bet that popular social posts have a good few comments on them.

Hopefully, you should be able to find at least 3 or 4 blog posts that have been recently posted that you would consider popular.

That’s it! Stage 1 complete.

Step 2

Now, you need to move into the comment sections of these articles.

Who’s commenting? Do they have a website attached with their username? More often than not, users will attach one.

If not, they might have a social media profile attached, another good avenue for you to use.

With stage 2 – finding engaged people – you’re looking to find people that are engaged with content (i.e. commenting) and then hoping to find a way of contacting them; through their website, email address or social media.

Step 3

Finally, with stage 3, you simply need to re-engage these people.

How can this be done? I usually find a quick, polite email is more than enough to get the job done. You might want to do a quick bit of research on email outreach if you aren’t otherwise familiar with it, just to make sure you get the best response and results possible.

The best thing about the people that comment – if they like your content, which they should if it’s of a high quality – they’re likely to share your piece on social media, subscribe to your email newsletter and also return in the future. Perfect!

With them sharing your content, you’re amplifying the reach of your post to an even greater audience; further expanding your views, shares, comments, email subscribers and more.

Reap What You Sow

Sound too good to be true? For once, it actually isn’t. Put in a couple of hours work and try it out for yourself. 

My aim is to contact at least 50 people to ask for comments for every piece of content I write. You set your own targets – the more you put in, the more you’ll get out.

6 Steps to Prepare, Monitor and Measure Your Next Brand Awareness Campaign

BY KATE DUNHAM

Brand awareness campaigns have one goal: to raise awareness and visibility of your brand. While it’s important to focus on the creative elements and execution of your campaign it’s equally important to set a social media monitoring plan so you can follow the progress of the campaign in real time. Plus, you’ll want to ensure you fully understand the effectiveness of the campaign once it has wrapped.

Not sure where to start? Use these handy checklists to prep for your next brand awareness campaign.

1. Set your KPIs. How will you measure success?

Before launching any campaign you first have to clearly define your objectives and goals. The objective of a brand awareness campaign is to increase brand awareness. In order to evaluate if that objective was achieved, you need to pre-determine what metrics you’ll measure to determine the level of success. These metrics are called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Make sure you and your team (and your boss!) have agreed-upon goals and a list of KPIs before launch. It’s important that everyone has the same criteria for evaluating and measuring the campaign.

Brand Awareness KPIs:

• Increase in brand mentions: Mentions measure the size of a social conversation around a specific search term or phrase—in this case the name of your brand. Mentions are simply the number of times your brand name was used across social media, helping you understand just how much (or little) attention you’re receiving.

• Extended impressions: Impressions measure the size of your brand’s potential audience. Impressions are based on the number of followers that are in the networks of the authors that generate mentions of your brand.

• Increased engagement: Engagement metrics represent how much and how often people interact with your content on social media. A subset of engagement metrics are sharing metrics, which represent when people amplify your content.

• Improved Share of Voice: Share of voice helps you understand how you are performing on social in comparison to your competitors. The metric details what percentage of mentions within your industry or space are about you and what percentage is about the competition.

2. Benchmark

Once you decide on your KPIs, document the starting point for each metric so you’ll be able to track any changes throughout the campaign. Establish the length of the campaign and record your benchmark metrics with the same range. For example, if you’re going to run your brand awareness campaign for three months, determine what your average number of mentions were for the three months prior to the start of the campaign.

In addition to your KPIs metrics you’ll also want to benchmark other metrics to see how they change over the course of your campaign. Not all of these metrics will necessarily help evaluate the success of campaign, but it’s important to understand any shifts the campaign causes for your brand on social.

Pre-Launch Campaign Metrics Checklist:

• Total number of mentions of your brand name
• Exposure
• Share of Voice
• Engagement: average number of RTs, Likes, Shares, Comments, Repins etc.
• Followers/Fans on each platform
• Sentiment
• Geographical breakdown: In what city, state, country do you see the most mentions?
• Gender distribution

If you want to see how your awareness campaign performs on each social platform, isolate these metrics for each platform and benchmark.

3. Set up additional monitoring

In addition to monitoring your brand name on social you’ll also want to set up a campaign-specific monitoring plan before launch so you don’t miss out on mentions and important metrics. Isolating for what’s being said specifically about the campaign and not just your brand will help you evaluate how the messaging and positioning are being received.

Pre-Launch Campaign Monitoring Checklist:

• Campaign name or title with brand or company name
• Campaign name or title without brand name
• Hashtags or other elements specific to the campaign

4. Monitor the brand awareness campaign

Once the campaign launches keep a close eye on mentions of your brand and what’s being said about the initiative so you’ll be able to respond quickly to any issues that arise or make adjustments as necessary.

Look Out For:

• Dramatic shift in mentions.
  • Find the cause. Was it due to one of your tweets, or post by an advocate or influencer?
• Sentiment level: are you seeing an increase in positive or negative mentions?
  • If people are responding negatively, make adjustments based on the feedback or consider halting the campaign.
• Are the topics shifting?
  • Are the conversations around your brand changing? Are people talking about what you want them to talk about? Is the campaign getting any traction?

5. Report up

After your brand awareness campaign has ended it’s time to report on the effort. Create a report that features all the social data you’ve collected over the course of the campaign.

Brand Awareness Campaign Report Elements:

• Your brand’s social metrics pre-campaign and during the campaign timeframe listed side by side. Show the percentages of change where possible. (ex: Brand mentions increased by 10%)
  • Total number of mentions of your brand name
  • Exposure
  • Share of Voice
  • Engagement: average number of RTs, Likes, Shares, Comments, Repins etc.
  • Followers/Fans on each platform
  • Sentiment
• Geographical breakdown: pre-campaign vs. campaign timeframe
  • Did the city, state, or country you previously saw the most mentions from change?
  • Can you tie the change to a specific cause?
• Gender distribution: pre-campaign vs. campaign timeframe
  • Did the ratio of male to female mentions change?
  • Can you tie the change to a specific cause?

• A breakdown of campaign-specific metrics: This will include data from your three monitoring searches* (Campaign name or title with brand or company name; Campaign name or title without brand name; Hashtags or other elements specific to the campaign)
  • Total number of mentions of the brand awareness campaign
  • Exposure
  • Engagement: number of RTs, Likes, Shares, Comments, Repins etc.
  • Sentiment
  • Geographical breakdown
  • Gender distribution

*You can also compile the data from each specific search if you want to evaluate if how people chose to talk about the campaign affected the performance.

6. Evaluate and analyze the campaign

After you’ve gathered and reported on all of the campaign’s data, it’s time analyze your findings to determine if the campaign was successful in increasing brand awareness. Evaluate your KPIs: Did you see an increase in brand mentions, exposure, engagement and Share of Voice? Highlight where you were successful and where you weren’t.

The next step is to take a deep dive into the metrics and the campaign and analyze what aspects of the campaign worked and what could have been improved upon. Should you have posted more or amped up engagement? Did you see positive or negative reactions to your messaging? Take the time to analyze what worked and what didn’t in regards to each KPI and the overall sentiment levels and mentions of the campaign. Use the social data behind your brand awareness campaign to guide changes to your ongoing strategy or to reinforce what’s working for your brand.

Customer experience success factors

The ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management Benchmarking Study
monitors the implementation of best practices in customer-focused management for sustainable high profitability.

Here are 6 customer experience management success factors:
   

   

   

Where Customer Experience is Going in 2015: 10 Trends to Watch

In 2015, a number of customer experience-related trends continue to gather steam, further raising the bar for companies that need to compete in a world where traditional industry boundaries are disappearing and commoditization is becoming ever more commonplace.

While I don’t see any “net new” trends on the immediate horizon, the impact and implications of several existing trends continue to grow. With this in mind, here is a list of ten customer experience-related trends that every business leader – B2B or consumer – should be aware of as we enter another New Year…

1. Your Competition is Investing in Customer Experience. Just 10 Years ago, the phrase Customer Experience Management (CEM) didn’t even register according to Google trends. Yet Gartner predicts that by 2017, 50 percent of consumer product investments will be redirected to customer experience innovation. And research firm MarketsandMarketsstates that CEM will be worth $8.39 Billion by 2019. The challenge, of course, is to intelligently prioritize these investments.
2. Employee Experience is as Important as Customer Experience (If Not More So). The connections between employee engagement and customer experience are obvious. After all, your employees actually deliver on the promises your brand makes. But did you know that companies with more highly engaged employees enjoy 147% higher earnings per share(EPS) than their competition? CX winners in 2015 and beyond will prioritize their culture, and their people.
3. Customer Experience Design Will Gain Traction. As widely discussed as customer experience is, the process of designing these experiences is a discipline that few organizations have embraced. Ranging from identifying and closing experience gaps to true innovation, the ability to bring customers and their expectations into the design process – testing solutions and iterating improvements before scaling – will be a hallmark of the most customer-centric organizations.
4. Competition for Customer Experience Talent Will Grow. According to a recent Temkin Group report, sixty-five percent of companies have a senior exec in charge of CX. Yet until recently, the phrase “Customer Experience” was barely recognized outside of a handful of companies and consulting firms – which might account for the fact that only 10 percent of companies have reached the top two levels of CX maturity. As a result, highly experienced CX professionals are thin on the ground, and will be for some time.
5. Customer Expectations of Experience Continue to Increase. Customer expectations of experience in any industry are set by the best across every industry. Think about the fact that Amazon’s user experience has set expectations for a B2B software company, or that Disney is setting expectations for a retail clothing manufacturer, and you get the picture.
6. Demand for Personalized and Customized Experiences Will Continue to Grow. In the age of smart, connected customers, personalization is the future of experience. As more companies get better at using data to truly understand their customers, the more important personalization and customization is going to be. Better yet, customizing products and services to meet the needs of individual customers based on an understanding of what they want is one of the hardest things for a competitor to copy.
7. The Physical Web Will Continue to Expand. Already, we’re seeing digital extensions to physical products – consider “smart clothing” that has companion apps to sense your health and exercise stats.  Forrester Research predicts that companies will be able to connect nearly all products and machines by 2020 – with sensors, tags and ever smarter products and devices allowing customers to truly access anything, from anywhere, at anytime.
8. Customer Journey Mapping Will Remain a Key Tool. According to Google, shoppers use an average of 10.4 sources of information to make a purchase decision. True across all categories, customers use multiple devices to access online reviews, company websites, TV ads, recommendations and more. Customer journey maps will continue to be a good tool for understanding the unique journeys of your customers, including the ability to identify gaps and pain points in your customers’ experiences.
9. Physical and Digital Channels Becoming Even More Integrated. The importance of seamlessly integrating digital and physical experiences is here-and-now, as customers fully expect to leverage in-store technology to educate themselves or find the products they want, and be able to start transactions in one channel, and finish in another. For retailers, the need to understand in-store customer behavior has become as important as tracking user behaviors online.
10. The Role of Emotions in Customer Experience Will Become Clearer. At heart,customer experience is what your customers think and feel it is.  These feelings and the emotional connections you have with their customers are a key driver of brand loyalty. Which is why understanding and measuring the emotional impact of experience is one of the key disciplines any customer experience effort needs to embrace.

Michael Hinshaw

MCorp Consulting

A poem about selling

Selling is . . .
. . . the one game in town that pays the bills,
that keeps the doors open, that nobody wants to admit they do.

"I'm not in sales, I'm a supervisor, doctor, lawyer, banker, administrator, accountant."
"Don't look at me, I'm just the secretary, nurse, receptionist, shipping clerk."
Funny - if nobody sells . . .
how do you get new students, new patients, new clients, new customers?

Selling is everyone's business and when it's not, you're in trouble.

Think about it . . .
remember the time you decided not to go back to a company,
because the shipping clerk sent you the wrong item,
the receptionist was cold and surly;
the manager didn't have time to talk to a mere customer,
the doctor had you wait two hours.

That's selling . . . negative selling.

Remember - everyone sells, and not just externally, but internally as well.
When you want a raise, you sell your boss on your skills and value.

When you set new policies and procedures you sell these to your staff in a way they can accept,
or you'll soon find they'll ignore them.
When you expect more of your staff than you're willing to properly train and supervise them for,
you're whistling up a hollow tree,
because they're only as good as the training you give them.

But there's more to selling than that . . .

Selling is knowing . . .
Who's your competition?
Who's your customer, client, patient or public?
And what's important - you or them?

Selling is knowing . . .
What your service, idea, or product is - and isn't;
what your public's needs are;
and what services or products you offer to fit those needs.

Selling is knowing . . .
When to market and where;
Where your competition isn't and then being there;
Why some things are accepted and others not.

Selling is knowing . . .
How to treat your public as you would like to be treated;
How to market and merchandise better than your competition;
How to listen and learn from your staff as well as your public;
How to assess your own knowledge, or lack of it about your services, ideas, goods or products;
and how to make it easier for your public to accept what you are offering.

And finally, Selling is knowing that this business is after all, a profession . . .
The Profession of Selling.

Let us not pretend it's someone else's problem.

Metrics for Customer Experience Management

Metrics selection may be your most important decision for customer experience success. Metrics drive thinking and doing, because they communicate to executives and employees what matters most to the company, what will be visible to peers and the chain of command, and what will be rewarded. The gravity of upside and downside to customer experience metrics selection cannot be overstated.

If you had to choose two words to sum-up what customer experience managers do, you might say "measure progress". Voice-of-the-customer tools and customer engagement efforts are essentially about "taking the temperature" of customers as the complement to, and hopefully, a predictor of the selling company's financial growth.

Laws of Metrics
This in itself is a clue to the "laws of metrics" (like "laws of physics"): they're not stand-alone figures, but rather, quantifications of a process flow. That probably brings to mind something like touch-point mapping or customer journey mapping, but those aren't the process flows to zero-in on when designing customer experience management metrics.

Instead, think of customer experience as a chain of activities and decisions that originate with your company's suppliers, proceed from department to department throughout your company, and eventually result in products, policies, business models, processes, services, touch-points, and interactions that collectively influence what customers experience in their dealings with your firm.

It’s Like Physical Fitness

The tendency to focus your metrics attention on end-results, such as NPS, CSAT, uplift, repurchase, and so forth, is faulty. Think of what it takes to meet other goals in business or life, and you'll see what I mean. For example, if your friend wants to lose weight, you would probably laugh if he focused his attention on his bathroom scale, shapewear, flattering patterns and lines in his clothing, and charming the people around him.

Your advice would probably be: "as much as all that is certainly more fun to do, you're really going to have to hit the gym on a regular basis, mix cardio and strength training to manage heart rate and metabolism, be religious about portion control and a balance of carbs-fats-proteins, and get enough sleep." Pure and simple, that's the hard truth you’d give your friend, right? You might even suggest a tracking device or website or coach that can monitor activity, exercise, food, and sleep. Bingo: that’s the way it works in customer experience management, too.

Two Predictive Paths
There are two paths of metrics you should be monitoring in order to see clearly what's predictive of the beloved end-results: (1) action plan metrics and (2) program metrics.

Action Plan Metrics

Like the fitness example above, these metrics can be diagrammed as internal process check-points that give you an early heads-up about whether you're on-track. If your in-process metric indicates that you're likely to produce scrap, re-work or disappointment down the line, then you should be able to make adjustments in your work to get it back on-track before those nasty things happen. When you've identified something to measure that allows this, it's a leading indicator. "Leading" because you see it before your stakeholder is aware of its output.

To identify good action plan metrics, start with voice-of-the-customer: (a) what are the most severe hassles customers deal with? (b) what are customers’ most-desired innovations? You may be tempted to zero-in on (b) because it appears to be the ticket to revenue growth. Yet change management studies show that humans are slower to embrace the positives when there are still a lot of negatives in-play for them. Think of it like a sailboat: rough waters or heavy anchors mean that attempting to catch strong wind in your sails could be disastrous with rips in the sail cloth or even cap-sizing of the boat. This gives you a clear idea of why it's absolutely necessary to address (a) in a systemic, root-cause-eradication way.

Read the customers' comments associated with the most severe hassles, and define a problem statement from the customer's viewpoint. Then identify the key themes among the comments. Conduct root cause analysis to identify the reasons why these hassles occur. Identify a metric that gives you a heads-up about your progress in eradicating a root cause. This is a predictive leading indicator.

Program Metrics

The key role of a customer experience management professional is to facilitate ownership of the customer experience across all departments and employees. Everything they do contributes one way or another to what customers experience. As such, it's essential to monitor their ownership progress and your facilitation progress. Examples include: % of employees who know what the top three customer hassles are, % of relevant departments participating in eradicating a root cause of a chronic customer hassle, % of action plans on-track, % of employees participating in cross-functional teams to tackle a big customer issue, % of employees who know how to use lean/six-sigma methods to address problems wisely, and so forth. These are leading indicators of the action metrics, because they reflect internal engagement necessary to "moving the needle" across the flow of activities that lead to what customers experience.

Connecting Leading & Lagging Indicators
To empower your friend in his ongoing pursuit of physical fitness, you'd probably recommend that metrics from his tracking device be placed side-by-side the metrics from his bathroom scale and clothes sizes and compliments from friends and acquaintances. The tracking device represents leading indicators (predictive heads-up trends) and the scale/clothes/compliments represent lagging indicators (end-results).

When leading and lagging indicators are shown together on a dashboard, it's empowering and enlightening. Do this with your program metrics, action plan metrics, and customer engagement/voice metrics. Add context with operational and financial metrics, and you'll enable others to see the whole picture toward your company's financial growth. Metrics for customer experience management may be the most influential facet of your strategy.

Contact the author, Lynn Hunsaker, to find out how to customize these tips to your situation.