Most organizations are measuring Customer Experience, yet they are not at the top of their Customer Experience (CE) curve. The most important reason is the yardstick used for measuring CE.

1. Customer Experience: Beauty lies in the details | growZbeyond Consulting
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Most organizations are measuring Customer Experience, yet they are not at the top of
their Customer Experience (CE) curve. The most important reason is the yardstick used
for measuring CE.
Some organizations use NPS (Net Promoter Score), a widely used measure, but they fail to
dive deep into the NPS rating details.
For example, rarely anyone is capturing the reason for getting a 7 as NPS. It is usually cited
that capturing reasons are costly, customers do not find time to provide feedback and my
customers are happy customers.
Customer Experience: Beauty lies in the details
By Vikram Bawa

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1. If most of my customers are advocates should I care to capture reasons for
them being advocates?
I have been using a digital payments app for the last few years as it is convenient and secure
to use.
Convenience of transacting and bill payments and Security of not exposing my bank account
in every online transaction has been the USP. I have been rating this app 7/8/9 depending on
the ease of transacting on a particular day. Nevertheless, with proliferation of social payments
mechanisms, will anyone bother logging into the existing app for payments?
I think, the simple answer to this will be No, because it will be more convenient to use an
instant messenger or a site used for social interactions to make payments, an app still remains
monolithic and it keeps on increasing the memory requirements in the phone.
So essentially even if your customer is an advocate, it is important to capture the reasons for
being an advocate as it will provide methods to improve the product and service and may help
the product evolve in the ever changing digital landscape.
Lack of qualitative feedback
here may result in ‘7’
slipping to ‘5’ or so on

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2. “Ask me when I am in the mood to provide feedback”
Let’s revisit the argument why capturing feedback becomes costly or customers do not provide
feedback.
Feedback is Costly to capture: Yes, if you are using the wrong touchpoint or capturing
unnecessary information.
Customers do not provide feedback: Let’s understand the reasons
1. Lack of incentives: There is no incentive to the customer to provide feedback.
2. Time consuming: Longer and vague feedback forms result in no or incomplete
feedback. So ensure a customer is investing minimum of his or her time in providing
feedback.
3. Wrong touchpoint being used to ask for a feedback. Many times I have been asked
to rate the services by retailers when I had cited an issue with their product or service,
further irking me to a point that either I provide a harsh feedback or provide no
feedback.
The example below highlights such an experience
a) Chief Manager is trying to resolve the complaint while assuring of better experience in
the future
b) A day later the customer relationship team asks to rate the experience

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I get tons of feedback requests on products and services over emails, phone calls, SMS.
The senders of these requests assume customers are free and awaiting such requests.
Seriously, do you expect the customer to open your email with the feedback form, spend
more than five minutes in filling and submitting? So, either you get junk feedbacks or you
get no feedbacks.
Example: A digital payments major sent me this survey which according to them will
approximately take 10-15 minutes, which was too long a time to spare for a feedback form.
Had it been 2-3 minutes with the form embedded in the email itself, the chances of
providing feedback would have been much higher.
Keep it short (2-3 minutes)
and relevant
Embed the survey in the mail itself
rather than taking me to another page
CRM/ Customer Experience
measurement is not integrated with
Customer complaint resolution
process/ tool

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3. What is the right time to ask for a feedback?
Simple Answer: At the Point of Sale. And I advise my clients to KIS(S) – Keep It Simple
(Stupid)!
Additionally, if there is an after sales service request, do it during the service closure
request.
Another Big question: How big should be the feedback questionnaire?
Ask no more than three *simple and **relevant questions, if there is no human
interaction, do it while presenting the invoice (say over an app) or over the invoice email
alert.
Junk one size fits all theory: Should you use analytics to draft questions and use
segmentation to ask different questions to different customers? YES, you must use the
analytical tools to discover customer preferences and gauge satisfaction levels.
*Simple: Keep the questions short and easy to understand. Do not ask too many open
ended questions.
**Relevant: One size fits all should not be the motto here. Use the analytical tools you
may have invested in to segment the customers and use this segmentation to design the
needs of the customers. Your feedback queries should be geared towards finding out if
these needs were met or not. Essentially, these needs will be different across different
segments and hence the requirement of asking different questions.
Note: Your customer segments are dynamic entities which need to refresh every now and
then, I have seen beautiful charts at big corporations displaying customer segments and
their behaviour but without a start and end date. Depending on the nature of your business
the expiry dates would differ but should essentially be there, otherwise your targeting
(Campaigns, Customer Service) would deviate by at least 10% and would also result in
poor Customer Experience over time.
4. Responding to Customer Complaints
Complaint Resolution Time: I often hear the need for faster complaint resolution time,
usually 48 hours and it’s very prudent to do so, however in the hurry of resolving complaints
usually the customer service desk does not resolve the complaint to the satisfaction of the
customer.

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Example: The telecom service provider claiming to be the fastest network takes almost 3
months to resolve a complaint. The resolution, as is the case mostly is not satisfactory,
hence the subscriber is planning to switch network. Once the subscriber switches due to
poor customer experience, what are chances of returning ever in his/her lifetime?
Example: Overcharging by an Online Grocery Retailer
Trust in any relationship once broken can never be restored. The customer service is
always in a hurry to close tickets without understanding the long term implications it may
have on customer experience and customer churn. In the example below customer service
is in a hurry to close the ticket (short resolution time) without ensuring customer
Delivering bandwidth which is
20 – 40 times less than what
was promised leading to poor
Customer Experience.
Perfect example of
Customer Churn

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satisfaction. Both the metrics, issue resolution time and customer satisfaction should be
taken into cognizance in measuring the performance of the customer service team.
a) Customer service not aware of the SKU price but in a hurry to close the ticket
b) Two days later Customer service apologizes for overcharging and processing the
refund
4.1 Social Media Stack: It’s very common to see complaints being unattended on social
media suggesting the organization's lack of responsiveness to the experience of the
customers. Another common occurrence is the lack of complaint resolution on the Social

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Media itself, suggesting the organization is trying not to be transparent on the pretext of
gathering more information by taking the communication away from social media to a private
communication channel like email. It might be challenging to resolve and post a solution on
the social media especially in case of an aggrieved customer, but doing so would help the
organization in maintaining its credibility and sending a positive signal to its prospects and
customers.
The examples of incidents we visited above may appear minor in nature, but they definitely
spoil the overall customer experience, making customers switch to competitors and thus
eroding value over time. A comprehensive approach to measuring and improving the customer
experience will be to use qualitative feedback in conjunction with quantitative feedback and to
use touchpoint analytics. Even a six sigma like approach in reporting, resolving along with
managing the quality of incidents will be useful.
The ever-evolving digital landscape with an avalanche of data has hastened the pace of such
measurements. While the pace has increased and will continue to increase, the changing form
and structure of Customer Experience need to be looked at. I have seen Customer Experience
led digital transformation programs to fail miserably due to the fact that the form and structure
of such transformations were overlooked in the process of hasty implementations. One such
program at a $5.4 billion Financial Services major, in the middle of its implementation had
issues in measuring, comparing and knowing if the program implementation will result in
improved Customer Experience, and thus they had to change the entire approach and some
parts of the implementation, incurring more than twice the amount of dollars and time it would
have normally taken.
5. Takeaways
Organizations on the long-term Customer Experience journey must strive to dive deep into the
details lest they may lose the plot in the long run. In brief, the following measures should be
used.
1. Use a comprehensive method to rate your customer's experience than using a purely
quantitative method.
2. Even the biggest of corporations make common mistakes of either not understanding the
basic customer psyche or not integrating the customer service and marketing systems to
enable uniform customer experience.

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3. Always think of customers’ convenience and time while capturing feedback to avoid the
risk of getting useless information. Keep the feedback requests concise and precise.
4. Use analytical tools to ask the right questions and use the right touchpoints to capture
feedback.
5. In the hurry to resolve customer complaints, do not lose focus on customer satisfaction.
Use the two metrics in tandem to ensure a positive experience for the customers.
P.S: As I was finishing this article, my air conditioner (ac) manufacturer sent me the third
message reminding me of the ac service due along with the toll-free number to book the same.
It was convenient and quick to book and get the service done. The service engineer was at
work even before I got an SMS update from the ac manufacturer. Once the job was done I
received an SMS to share the feedback or call for any grievances.
Experiences like these influence not only the service decisions but also the purchase
decisions. Organizations looking to improve customer experience must look at every
touchpoint in the value chain of the lifecycle of the product/ service, this being a true case of
EBD (experience based differentiation).
About the author
Vikram Bawa is a partner at growZbeyond consulting having 15 years of consulting
experience across multiple industries spanning the US, EU and Singapore. He holds a
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India
and an MBA in Marketing and Strategy from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
and Kelley School of Business, USA.

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growZbeyond Consulting is a Customer Experience advisory firm helping clients in their
Customer Experience Journey by Defining Customer Experience Strategy, Designing
Processes and Developing Digital Transformation solutions.