Apr 30, 2010
Introducing…customer experience stat of the week
As a line executive, long before the phrase “customer experience” had found its way into our business lexicon, I noticed something about what worked best for business performance. The closer my team matched its daily decisions to what would solve a clear need for a defined set of target customers (and purged everything that didn’t contribute to a need solved well), the better our financial performance on both the top and bottom lines.
I noticed that if we matched our customer-facing actions like service and sales we made some money. And I noticed that when we aligned all our operating decisions – from product to fulfillment to staffing and pricing – we made the most money. Aveus was founded on this thinking.
Complimenting our work with clients, we’ve done research to validate the link between customer experience and performance. We’ve learned how leaders define customer experience, how an experience strategy gets translated to action, and what kind of performance payoff is won for the effort. Sure, the research in whole is available. But this week we had a different, bite-size idea:
Introducing…customer experience stat of the week.
Perhaps you’ll find something to reaffirm a decision you’re about to make. You might find data to inform how to operationalize a decision you already made. (You might simply sound amazingly brilliant among your peers!) In any case, I hope you’ll find data that helps you get a bigger performance payoff from your customer experience.
Here we go:
We asked 644 leaders across industries and leadership functions: “Do you have a definition of customer experience that is well understood throughout your organization?”
62 percent of leaders say yes.
This finding was a healthy increase from our first study, when roughly half of leaders surveyed reported their organizations held strong understanding of customer experience. Is there an shared understanding of customer experience across your organization? What do you think is happening for the 38 percent of organizations who said no?
Oh, I’m also hoping you’re up for a bit of co-creation. We’ll be launching our third study later this year. As we cover stats each week, I would treasure your ideas and questions about new ground you think we should cover in our upcoming effort.
I wonder what the percentages would be if you asked the front-line employees? I would bet much less than 62 percent.
What do you think?
Tim,
Great question! Our study covered leaders from manager level and up, so we’ll have to imagine together what the front line employees at these organizations might have said. I suspect your instinct serves you well. Stay tuned, though, because future stats will cover who thinks what across the organization.
Thanks for stopping by. LCI
Had exactly the same reaction as Tim. Still, also the 62% is surprisingly high. I would be really curious on what leaders define as ‘definition’. Nice check might be “annual reports and mission / vision”-statements. I guess that if you ask the second or third question on this definition, the real percentage is much lower.
Lerou,
Another smart instinct. We did ask what the definitions were – and I’ll share that soon. I can see this ‘customer experience stat of the week’ series is going to be fun.
LCI