5 Rules of CX to hold on to in Volatile Situations

The business world is trailing a horrifying landscape of managing shifting customer demands at a pace like never before. The dynamics of markets are such that it makes almost no sense to have a plan. The leaders are exhausted and find themselves caught up running around and looking for some sanity in never-ending chaos.

The pressure of delivering on business outcomes is an uphill task considering the declining top-line because of low customer acquisition. The focus for leaders transcends automatically to the bottom line that has a ripple effect on operational costs reduction.  The Customer Experience (Cx) program is one low-lying baby that is first to face the banter, and this needs to change.

Anyone witnessing this panic caused by volatile customer demands or market dynamics and on the verge of withdrawing funding or pulling resources from Cx must press the STOP button NOW!

To begin with, this is the time to remind oneself of the benefits expected from Cx. The whole premise of Cx is based on understanding the consumer expectations and defining your strategy around them. It would help draw focus on key metrics like customer retention, loyalty, and advocacy and lends you an opportunity to stand out in your competitive landscape.

In conflicting situations like shunting the project completely vs. bearing the budgetary constraints or financials to keep the effort moving, these five rules will help progress on the Cx path:

1.       Stay glued to the customer

Never lose sight of the customer! Irrespective of the challenges, one cannot compromise on this aspect. It is even more important to listen to the voice of consumers in volatile conditions. The Clients are part of the same world, and they might be equally uncertain and unclear about their demands. Hearing their concerns and being empathetic goes a long way in building customer loyalty and advocacy. This would allow organizations to know better about the delivery of experience and the demand from the real world rather than hearsay.

2.      Stick to your vision BUT be open to adjusting your plans

It sounds cliched but still holds so much relevance in our decision-making on transformation programs. This particular rule is more of a mindset game than anything else. The Decision-makers often succumb to the change by activating their victim mode. The feeling of losing control, being trapped, and being directionless are a few drawbacks in this situation. An important point to recall in these moments is that no change has any power to impact a vision. A firm belief in Cx-Vision and making progress towards it, with few minor bumps or adjustments in the plan, may provide immense strength to an effort of driving results.

3.  Check your employee pulse

Like we can’t lose touch with our customers, staying connected to our workforce is equally important to work through uncertain times. The term VUCA (volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) stands true for all, be it the business market, consumers, or employees. The stress and panic emerging from harsh situations hit the entire business ecosystem, including the employees. An employee stands at a risk of losing focus and disengagement and hence directly impacting productivity or quality of work. An enterprise must keep its workforce motivated by feeling valued and empowered in the system. Cx philosophy lays a lot of importance on how employee experience strengthens the overall customer experience.

4.       Take calculated decisions

There is enough said about data and its importance in the decision-making process. Cx program and its governance are no different. At the time of program review, decisions are better driven when they are more fact-based and do not result from feelings. Cx metrics and measures carry a lot of importance at this critical point. The leaders must have key performance indicators at their fingertips to make better decisions. Do, Defer or Die, whatever the decision may be on ongoing Cx initiatives, it better be based on quantifiable factors. An impulsive decision that is “one for all” stalling all running programs is a NO GO!

5.       Communicate Effectively

Ability to translate one’s thoughts into the right words at the right time to the right audience! Especially in the business environment, panic or stress could easily take the form of fear or rain insecurities of all kinds to the ones involved. Effective communication is an established tool for seamless operations and goes unnoticed in decision-making strategies. Effective leadership in current times is an ability to accept the change, understand the impact, and communicate relevant and timely information to all stakeholders. A genuine and transparent communication helps keep all the unnecessary noise at bay and allows the trust to flourish amongst resources, directly or indirectly, associated with the Cx program.

Building futuristic leaders is the biggest challenge that organizations face today. A big part of new-age leadership is staying resilient, empathetic, and innovative in a volatile world. Staying grounded and sticking to our basics always comes as an aid to effective decision-making and helping businesses thrive in the most challenging situations.

How feedback is an effective tool for Business Success 

Feedback is an essential tool to build a person's leadership, empathy, and communication skills by listening, identifying, and acting on thoughts, feeling, and experiences. Feedback is underrated both for the transformation of individual skills and importance in a business. It is a process to listen and understand ways, actionable to make things better. Feedback is instrumental for actionable insights in a business by capturing customers'’ feelings, thoughts, and expectations across the complete journey.

 If feedback is such an essential ingredient to becoming better both from an individual and business point of view, then why is it not that utilized? Why do organizations yet have to wake up to this underrated tool to organize, scale-up, innovate, and enhance customer engagement, including internal and external customers? Is it lethargy in collecting feedback or simply ignorance in the process and its importance? Most of the time, it is both, and we, through this blog, are trying to reason out an effective way to collect feedback and how it impacts business success.

One of the primary reasons for the lack of utilization of the feedback process is that feedback collected doesn't yield many actionable inputs for the business. We often discover that intensely critical feedback that is awkward and harsh can have a detrimental effect on the business plans for employees and suppliers. In the times of the digital age, when data and each interaction provide some input as feedback, this sleuth of data and the sheer thought of collecting and making sense of it usually overwhelms decision-makers and organizations. So ignorance for the feedback process or simply getting defensive in understanding the intent has become a common norm.

Feedback in today's time can give insights to a business to enhance customer satisfaction, product improvement through innovation and by designing new ways, features, approaches, and even enhancing customer support. For instance, think about creating a website and utilizing the feedback of a representative group to assess the flow, patterns, and ease in usage to enhance customer satisfaction through the website. Sounds exciting and needs focus and discipline by the business to invite and use feedback in improving its deliverables while also remaining vigilant to the feedback giver’s perspective and time. Usually, the absence of this crucial feedback diminishes the chances of customer engagement.

Feedback also collected to make performance better usually gets hindered due to its limited scope. Research proves that feedback if taken to improve performance doesn't help much as thoughts and feelings are limited by customers' knowledge, understanding, and unconscious biases. More data points and then averaging those improve the learnings from the feedback process. But most of the time, it is limited because more data points improve the random error in the data but not the systematic error. By definition, random error is one time, out-of-turn error due to chance; hence the statistical and thoughtful process can eliminate it.

In contrast, systematic error is a part of the process and can have far more ramifications to improve. Systematic errors are part of the process and not by chance. Thus, a feedback process through an objective viewpoint and process while considering the various biases and errors can provide a business with actionable inputs for action through their digital interactions and structured feedback collection process including cumulative and transactional ones.

We highlight three tenets through this blog to improve the feedback for actionable inputs. 

Use feedback with the Intent to listen and understand

Intent on why the feedback is being captured and analyzed makes all the difference. Customers, both internal and external, share experiences and feelings when describing an event, an occurrence, and a transaction while interacting with a business through a touchpoint. Hence along with scores, the open-ended questions are instrumental in analyzing what is working and why so? 

When captured with Intent to understand, improve and get better, feedback will always find takers and the candid view from employees, customers, and suppliers. There will be candid, harsh truths that can be detrimental to business motivation and plans. This doesn't mean at all that harsh feedback should be discouraged or should be constructively put aside. Instead, it will need an objective, outcome-based analysis to filter, analyze the feedback, and correlate with other indicators to utilize for actionable inputs.

Importance of feedback Process

 There are a lot of tools that are utilized by businesses, including "Voice of Customer," "Customer Satisfaction," "Live chat," "Social Media Interaction," "NPS," or simple "email" surveys with different modalities and Intent to capture. All are instrumental at different points of time to listen, analyze and act. For instance, NPS is used to analyze the pulse of customer feedback by first a score-based question and then an open-ended question to find the reason for the same.

 1. Seeking feedback in real-time or when the event is happening, or you just completed the execution can have different viewpoints due to time-lapse and various biases that come into action. Insights in real-time by different stakeholders are instrumental in gauging the friction during performances, interactions, and corresponding emotions.

2. Language, too, can make a lot of difference. So instead of just asking if there is any feedback for me, more thoughts can be assessed by the business by asking how they can improve the product/service deliverables.

- What was worked for the customers?

- What was that which needs more work?

Effective feedback is about Intent, context as it is about remaining open to listen and receive. Thus finding the reasons behind the scores is more important than dashboards to show where and how the organizational deliverables provide an impact.

Closing the feedback loop

 An essential part of a feedback process is about closing the feedback loop. 

Closing the feedback loop means the following –

1. It is to humbly and graciously accept the thoughts, feelings, and experiences shared by the customer, including internal and external, for their interaction through the entire customer journey. More quantity or more feedback pointers will slowly support in enhancing the quality of actionable inputs.

2. Creating a follow-up implementation and action plan after scrutinizing the relevant information in an unbiased manner without errors will support achieving the business objective.

3. Communicating the resultant action plans to the customers who gave feedback is the most crucial part to close the feedback loop and to keep the loop open for more candid feedback in the future. It is also true in complaints or regular interaction on social media or feedback for a relevant tool to business.

 Actionable input for business will improve deliverables, clarify objectives to employees, and identify touch-points where deliverables faltered for the customers. Feedback at the business ideation stage improves innovation as product/service can be tuned in as per customer needs, expectations, thus enhancing the chances of creating the right product-market fit. Feedback is instrumental for business success through more engaged employees, customers, decision-makers, and above all, deliverables to ensure the business remains agile to achieve its objectives. 

 Write to us to know more about feedback, and how it can support your business success at contact @pinkguava.org