David Beinhacker

Customer-driven companies are those which work tirelessly to discover and act on the essence of customer expectations. These pacesetters know that customer focus isn’t a sometime thing; it’s an unending journey. After all, the marketplace is always in flux, customers change, and companies never stay the same. Customer-driven companies beat their competitors because they’re persistent and vigilant in their dialogue with customers. They don’t wait for lagging indicators of customer discontent; they use the voice of the customer to define extraordinary customer experiences that their competitors chase.

Customer experience leadership isn’t about asking how you’re doing – it’s about doing something with what you hear. Today’s customers expect to receive customer satisfaction surveys from companies they do business with. But they’re quickly learning that providing feedback can be a waste of time. Many companies have become experts at asking but they’re novices at listening and acting. Real leadership in the customer experience requires that you enter into a truer dialogue with the customer. There’s a commitment to an ongoing conversation and these data are taken seriously as a change management tool.

My experience tells me that those companies achieving the best ROI for improving the customer experience are those taking the road less traveled. They appreciate the vital distinction between chasing scores and improving performance. Improving performance is considerably more complex than simply showcasing a number or calculating a net promoter score. Improving performance and optimizing ROI are inextricably linked to an intensive and deliberate two-step process. Step one is using sound science; asking better questions and using more sophisticated, predictive modeling. Step two is accepting the premise that data doesn’t make decisions – managers do. You need a much more deliberate process of interpreting and applying the results to the urgent needs of the business. Many companies either lack the resources or the intestinal fortitude to follow through on this two-step process.

Accessibility to web surveys, insatiable corporate appetites for customer feedback, and an infatuation with overly simplistic analytics (like net promoter) have really watered down the actionability of customer experience data. Too many surveys, featuring increasingly less meaningful questions, are fielded too often. Most companies are spending too much to get too little. Getting actionable data and real value from your customer experience metrics is only possible when the results compel actions AND establish the bottom line payback for successfully executing those actions.

The ubiquitous results from syndicated benchmarking studies and rampant self-promotion by individual companies – think JD Powers – have made it considerably more difficult to distinguish pretenders from true customer experience champions. Everyone seems to be a “winner.” If you really want to know whether the customer experience you’ve created is competitively superior, ask your own customers, “Who’s the best in the industry?” If 10% or more of your own customers say a competitor is “the best,” it’s probably time to put away the hats and balloons.

Don’t be a score chaser; running after a score feels comfortable in the “one-number” boardroom, but it’s insufficient to sustain real performance improvement. Think instead about building a customer experience business case that will transform the customer experience; a business case predicated on improving performance in those areas that are the intersection of customer-meaningful and bottom-line influential. Manage the customer experience in this way, and the “scores” will follow.