by Ken Brisco
Your customers are talking. Are you listening? Many of them speak volumes about their experiences with you but deny your requests to give formal opinions. They provide critical feedback about your brand, but they don't want to talk to you about it. These customers are known as your "silent majority." You won't hear from them directly through traditional methods such as phone and online surveys. While sentiment scoring captures valuable interactions with live customer agents, the majority remains silent. They express the joy and pain of doing business with you through their journeys. However, they still fully expect for you to hear and respond to what they are experiencing. They are a majority. Are you listening?
Organizations create effortless customer experiences by knowing their customers through their journeys. When you know customer history, your ability to serve them quickly and effectively significantly increases. Customer journeys communicate the steps customers make and the amount of effort they give, good or bad, to complete a task or accomplish a goal. So here's the rub, or more accurately the missing metric. If you do not measure the quality of your customer journeys, then you cannot hear from this silent majority. Without their valuable feedback, you are forced to play guessing games with improving their customer experience. Every journey counts. Our latest whitepaper details a newly released metric, the Journey Excellence Score (JES) that measures customer experience quality across every journey.
Measure the Journey to Manage the ExperienceOrganizations that measure omnichannel customer journeys will manage seamless customer experiences. A recent Gartner study reveals that 96% of customers with a difficult or high-effort service interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% who have a low-effort experience. (Gartner, 2018). You can hear their disloyalty via complaints or even worse churning to your competitor. Using customer journey analytics to measure journey quality allows organizations to quickly see which business processes are broken, at scale. With advanced analytics, you will hear customers communicate high effort, problematic journeys with repeated interactions, long channel duration, channel switches, and drop-offs from the journey. Hear what your silent majority is saying, so you can help them get where they are going.
Knowing the Customer StoryMeasuring the customer journey begins with knowing the customer's story. Connect customer interactions across channels and over time to better understand consumer behavior. For example, the customer's issue does not always begin in the channel where the customer made the complaint. The customer that called to complain about unexpected charges on his bill is the same customer that repeatedly tried to understand these charges on your website and then through your chat channel. His frustration started with a misunderstanding of the monthly bill and then escalated as he went through the journey.
Managing channels in silos will result in organizations missing the root cause of customer behavior. Measuring journey quality helps organizations identify which touchpoints in the journey need to be streamlined to improve the customer experience.
So let's start listening to not only what customers are saying through formal channels but also what they are experiencing across multi-channel journeys. Your silent majority has volumes to say and the best way to interact with them is through measuring omnichannel journeys through customer journey analytics.
To learn more read our White paper about the Journey Excellence Score (JES) or visit our webpage.
Ken Brisco Ken serves as Product Marketing Manager for NICE Nexidia's Customer Journey Solutions (CJS), bringing nearly 20 years of product marketing experience in both software and technology solutions. Ken is responsible for establishing the vision and messaging, as well as promoting the value and competitive advantages of NICE's CJS within the Customer Experience industry. He is also responsible for optimizing product profitability by maximizing product sales for Customer Journey Solutions, which consists of IVR optimization, Digital Containment and Customer Journey Optimization to enable organizations to seamlessly organize, analyze and operationalize the customer journey to improve customer experience.