Why your CX Measurement Program Needs to be Real-Time

Technology has changed customer expectations by leaps and bounds. Customers interact with brands through a multitude of channels and expect brands to deliver a consistent experience across each channel, be it a physical outlet or a website. These channels bring in unprecedented complexity across the customer journey. According to Marketing Week, consumers today use an average of almost six touch points across the journey, with 50% regularly using more than four.

Considering the volume of interactions and complexity, traditional CX measurement strategies are ill equipped to capture the experiences of customers across the journey for the following reasons:

• Low frequency of measurement
  Traditional CX measurement takes the form of market research activity (pen and paper surveys, focused group discussions, interviews etc.), which resulted in an annual or quarterly reporting of key insights derived from the activity. This approach, while intensive in its own right, results in a lack of visibility on the day-to-day trends that are influencing the industry. Today’s world is far more dynamic than it was 20 years ago, and annual reporting of insights cannot keep up. The need is for a platform that can measure daily, while providing insights instantly for businesses to take action on.
• Lack of actionability
  The sooner you get insights on issues affecting the growth of your business, the sooner you can act to resolve these issues. The traditional market research approach relies on surveys that capture data a long time after the moment of experience has passed. Add to this the manual effort required for analysis, and the insights are generated a long time after the actual issue took place, hence losing its actionability. Businesses today need a platform that not only reports issues, but also empowers frontline employees with the ability to resolve them.
• Lack of context
  While customer experience data (CX metrics, unstructured feedback etc.) provides a lot of insight when analyzed in a silo, the quality of insights increases exponentially when viewed in context. This means combining your CX measurement with data pertaining to the transaction (transaction value, touchpoint, location, customer category etc.). Traditional methods miss out on this element of context, which leads to insights that are not representative of the business scenario.

Fortunately, while customers have access to brands across all channels, brands have access to customers as well. Technology makes it possible for brands to reach out to customers immediately at the moment of experience, making measurement of CX possible in real-time.

Why does real-time need to be the cornerstone for CX measurement? For the reasons below:

• Real-time = Actionable
  Customers today are quick to give feedback on their experiences with the brand. In our experience with implementing CX programs for 125+ brands, we have seen that 50% of customers respond to invitations within an hour of receipt. Customers also expect brands to respond to them with the same speed. According to McKinsey, 75% of online customers expect help within 5 minutes. A real-time platform helps businesses respond to customers with near-perfect information on the issue at hand, making sure that the customers do not go on to more social channels to rant about their negative experiences.
• Real-time = Accurate
  The closer you measure to the moment of experience, the better you can capture the entire context of the interaction. As time passes, good experiences with brands tend to be forgotten, while negative experiences live on. Measuring CX in real-time makes sure that these positive experiences are captured. We have seen that in our real-time projects, 87% customers rate their experiences positively, with some customers going out of their way to show appreciation by naming employees who made their experience great.
• Real-time = Continuous improvement
  Measuring CX in real-time allows you to see the impact of the changes you implement to bring customer centricity to your business. Metrics that reflect, minute-by-minute, what your customers feel about your brand across all touchpoints provide you with the speed to identify what’s working and what’s not. Brands that leverage these capabilities efficiently can dramatically improve the experience they deliver. Eureka Forbes, a leading consumer durables brand saw an improvement of 25% in NPS over 1 year through real-time close looping of customer issues at the mandatory servicing and complaint management stage.

In short, real-time measurement of CX provides you with data that is accurate and contextual, insights that are actionable and metrics that showcase how customer-centric your brand really is, minute-by-minute. In order to equip your organization with real-time capabilities, you need system integrations to enable seamless transfer of data and actively engage your customer. But more importantly, this also puts responsibility on you as a customer-centric leader: to respond to customer feeds within minutes, not hours. Just measuring in real-time is not enough. Businesses have to be as fast-paced as their customers are and respond instantly to drive lasting value.

Shreyas Nayak
Shyreyas is a business graduate from XLRI Jamshedpur with specialization in Marketing.