The customer experience performance metric: Bridging the gap between the actual and the perceived

Customer experience is all about the perceptions and related emotional value caused by the most recent, historical, one-off or cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, channels, systems, products or services.  Customers expect to have a consistent, connected, personalised, and efficient experience across all phases of the customer lifecycle and across all their channel interactions.

Today, an operator primarily uses the research method to get the pulse of customer experience. These are primarily well established industry framework and metrics named as follows:

• Voice of customer, CSAT for  improving the service quality and reliability mainly driven by customer service delivery function
• Instant customer feedback (ICF) collected at the end of complaint by customer care agent
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) to understand the loyalty and advocacy mainly driven by marketing

Each of the above metrics has own merits and de-merits and some of the shortcomings driven from substantial time lagged information, limited samples, non deterministic to act upon, fragmented, siloed within function that complicates comparability etc. It’s well known that each individual has own behavioral, and attitudinal traits and it changes rapidly with time, technology, services, device. During one of my consulting exercise, which comprised of advising an operator on customer experience management from NSN, I noticed that significant gap exists between an operator’s perceived assumption of delivered customer experience and the real experience perceived by end customers. The perception gap is substantiated by the fact that, while 80 per cent of the operators are convinced of delivering a superior customer experience, only 8 per cent of their customers believe that they receive it (Bain & Co, 2007).

Hence I suggest that the operator should move towards measuring real-time customer experience metrics that TMF defines as the Customer Experience Index (CEI). The CEI should be computed based on individual subscriber network transactions in real-time and correlating with historical customer journey touch-points based on “functional” and “emotional” value levers. For example, one should be able to understand the CEI score for a person using on-net video from iPhone5 with iOS6 using safari browser while at home at 10 pm. To accomplish the objective of CEI the following 3 are salient procedural steps:

• Customer journey map with measurable functional and emotional value levers:  The customer journey is evolving rapidly and varies according to channel used. The reason is that people are empowered with more information than ever: product reviews, recommendations from friends or experts, store inventory, and competitive pricing. All these things are now instantly available, primarily due to ubiquitous mobile proliferation and information available in internet world at the click of button.
• Create the customer survey questionnaires: The survey questionnaires should be prepared in such a way that it can be mapped to technical KPIs for respective touch points. The network transactions and other touch-points data gathering mechanism should be enabled for those people, whom survey is sent. This will help in understanding the technical KPIs that drive CSAT, its importance and significance that can be measured and acted upon continuously.
• Compute CEI the hierarchical model with its weight:  SERVQUAL method can be used to understand the gaps and then run the statistical model to calibrate the weight as per its importance and strength of relationship with customer perception.  There is industry defined methodology for accurate assessment of customer experience as defined below:
  • ITU-T Recommendation P.10 [i.37]/G.100: KQI is influenced by “users expectation and context”
  • ETSI TR 102 643 V1.0.2 (2010-01):  “A measure of user performance based on both objective and subjective psychological measures”

This single value CEI can be used to trigger as well as plan the action by different functional group network and marketing to prioritise, resolve, communicate and offer to the relevant impacted subscribers in right context. This score can also be used for doing the “experience segmentation” that will highlight the customer behavioral aspects and then devise right retention, up-sell, cross-sell, investment strategy.