THEMES

A common mistake among novice chess players is to bring out the queen early in the game. But this often leads to a loss. In our client work, we often see a similar phenomenon in competitive strategy. Executives get lured into bringing out their queen without developing all of their pieces.

There is no shortage of customer experience metrics today: digital data feeds, customer profile data, cross-channel performance, operational data, etc. The trick seems to be in fully understanding and focusing in on the key sets of metrics that really matter to build and sustain customer lifetime value across all channels.

Customer service representatives have a tough job. They must represent the face of the company to customers while being internally monitored and measured via a myriad of metrics: first call resolution, call length, and percent of transfers, to name a few. Fortunately, when done well, upselling customers and ensuring customer satisfaction go hand in hand.

Every company now has mechanisms for capturing customer feedback. As the discipline of customer connectedness matures, the real challenge lies in orchestrating these feedback mechanisms across the customer touchpoints and throughout the organization.

If you capture feedback from your customers, odds are that you use some form of a performance scorecard to determine how well your company is doing at delivering a great customer experience. You probably also have competitive and industry benchmarks that you can reference to ensure that you’re performing at the level of your peers. This is good . . . but it may not be enough. If you’re not careful, you might actually allocate resources to the wrong areas of the business.

While the number of credit unions that offer mobile apps is rising, many do not yet make them an integral part of their member acquisition and retention strategy. This is a mistake that can open up significant risk to credit unions. A recent CFI Group study found that 12% of credit union members may consider leaving their credit union if it does not offer a mobile app. Creating an attractive, useful and convenient mobile app for members can reduce the risk of member churn.

It’s not enough to have a complete customer feedback system that reflects the customer experience across the organization’s touch points: branch, contact center, online and indirect brand engagement. You need to setup your approach to analyze the results and take concrete action from the feedback.