The three Cs of customer satisfaction: Consistency, consistency, consistency
It
may not seem sexy, but consistency is the secret ingredient to making customers
happy. However, it’s difficult to get right and requires top-leadership attention.
“Sustaining an audience is hard,” Bruce Springsteen once said. “It demands a consistency of
thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.” He was talking
about his route to music stardom, yet his words are just as applicable to the
world of customer experience. Consistency may be one of the least inspirational
topics for most managers. But it’s exceptionally powerful, especially at a time
when retail channels are proliferating and consumer choice and empowerment are
increasing.
Getting consistency right also
requires the attention of top leadership. That’s because by using a variety of
channels and triggering more and more interactions with companies as they seek
to meet discrete needs, customers create clusters of interactions that make
their individual interactions less important than their cumulative experience.
This customer journey can span all elements of a company and include
everything from buying a product to actually using it, having issues with a
product that require resolution, or simply making the decision to use a service
or product for the first time.
It’s not enough to make customers
happy with each individual interaction. Our most recent customer-experience
survey of some 27,000 American consumers across 14 different industries found
that effective customer journeys are more important: measuring satisfaction on
customer journeys is 30 percent more predictive of overall customer
satisfaction than measuring happiness for each individual interaction. In
addition, maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not
only to increase customer satisfaction by 20 percent but also to lift revenue
by up to 15 percent while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as
20 percent. Our research identified three keys to consistency:
1.
Customer-journey consistency
It’s well understood that companies
must continually work to provide customers with superior service, with each
area of the business having clear policies, rules, and supporting mechanisms to
ensure consistency during each interaction. However, few companies can deliver
consistently across customer journeys, even in meeting basic needs.
Simple math illustrates why this is
so important in a world of increasingly multichannel, multitouch customer journeys.
Assume a customer interacts six times with a pay-TV company, starting when he
or she undertakes online research into providers and ending when the first bill
is received 30 days after service is installed. Assuming a 95 percent
satisfaction rate for each individual interaction—whether measuring
responsiveness, the accuracy of information, or other factors—even this level
of performance means that up to one in four customers will have a poor
experience during the on-boarding journey.
The fact is that consistency on the
most common customer journeys is an important predictor of overall customer
experience and loyalty. Banks, for example, saw an exceptionally strong
correlation between consistency on key customer journeys and overall
performance in customer experience. And when we sent an undercover-shopping
team to visit 50 bank branches and contact 50 bank call centers, the analysis
was confirmed: for lower-performing banks, the variability in experience was
much higher among a typical bank’s branches than it was among different banks
themselves. Large banks typically faced the greatest challenge.
2.
Emotional consistency
One of the most illuminating results
of our survey was that positive customer-experience emotions—encompassed in a
feeling of trust—were the biggest drivers of satisfaction and loyalty in a
majority of industries surveyed. We also found that consistency is particularly
important to forge a relationship of trust with customers: for example,
customers trusted banks that were in the top quartile of delivering consistent
customer journeys 30 percent more than banks in the bottom quartile.
What is also striking is how
valuable the consistency-driven emotional connection is for customer loyalty.
For bank customers, “a brand I feel close to” and “a brand that I can trust”
were the top drivers for bank differentiation on customer experience. In a
world where research suggests that fewer than 30 percent of customers trust
most major financial brands, ensuring consistency on customer journeys to build
trust is important for long-term growth.
3.
Communication consistency
A company’s brand is driven by more
than the combination of promises made and promises kept. What’s also critical
is ensuring customers recognize the delivery of those promises, which
requires proactively shaping communications and key messages that consistently
highlight delivery as well as themes. Southwest Airlines, for example, has
built customer trust over a long period by consistently delivering on its
promise as a no-frills, low-cost airline. Similarly, Progressive Insurance
created an impression among customers that it offered lower rates than its
competitors in the period from 1995 to 2005 and made sure to highlight when it
delivered on that promise. Progressive also shaped how customers interpreted
cost-reduction actions such as on-site resolution of auto claims by positioning
and reinforcing these actions as part of a consistent brand promise that it was
a responsive, technology-savvy company. In both cases, customer perceptions of
the brands reinforced operational realities. Such brands generate a reservoir
of goodwill and remain resilient on the basis of their consistency over time in
fulfilling promises and their strong, ongoing marketing communications to
reinforce those experiences.
Becoming a company that delivers
customer-journey excellence requires many things to be done well. But we’ve
found that there are three priorities. First, take a journey-based approach.
For companies wanting to improve the customer experience as a means of
increasing revenue and reducing costs, executing on customer journeys leads to
the best outcomes. We found that a company’s performance on journeys is 35
percent more predictive of customer satisfaction and 32 percent more predictive
of customer churn than performance on individual touchpoints. Since a customer
journey often touches different parts of the organization, companies need to
rewire themselves to create teams that are responsible for the end-to-end
customer journey across functions. While we know there are an infinite number
of journeys, there are generally three to five that matter most to the customer
and the business—start your improvements there. To track progress,
effectiveness, and predict opportunities, you may need to retool both metrics
and analytics to report on journeys, not just touchpoint insights.
Second, fix areas where negative
experiences are common. Because a single negative experience has four to
five times greater relative impact than a positive one, companies should focus
on reducing poor customer experiences, especially in those areas in which
customers come into contact with the organization most often. For instance,
training frontline service representatives to identify and address specific
customer issues through role playing and script guidelines will go a long way
toward engendering deeper customer trust.
Finally, do it now. Our
research indicates that since 2009, customers are valuing an “average”
experience less and have even less patience for variability in delivery. In
addition, companies that experience inconsistency challenges often expend
unnecessary resources without actually improving the customer journey. Making
additional investments to improve the customer experience without tightening
the consistency of experience is just throwing good money after bad.
By Alfonso
Pulido, Dorian Stone, and John Strevel http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/Consumer_And_Retail/The_three_Cs_of_customer_satisfaction_Consistency_consistency_consistency?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1403
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