Want Better CX? Don’t Give Customers Your Best

All too often when people hear “CX Optimization”, they immediately think it is about improving CX scores to perfection. I would sternly disagree with that idea for two reasons. First, you can’t ever bat 1,000 when it comes to making human beings happy all the time. It just won’t happen.

Second, some customers are not profitable. Sometimes customers create problems for a company. Sometimes customers just won’t ever be satisfied.

In fact, you really don’t want every customer to be completely satisfied because achieving that status would likely mean you’ve eliminated your margins, overstaffed and overbuilt, and probably have a ton of returned and unusable merchandise. You will have sacrificed your business on the altar of achieving that perfect NPS score.

Unfortunately, that is what many companies aim to do.

All too often I see companies reacting to one customer rather than all customers. For instance, that Instagram Influencer who “inquires” about free products and/or services in return for a positive mention to their “followers” (or the one who suggests the threat of a negative review if the business does not capitulate). Or the customer constantly returning items beyond the date or without receipts. Or the one that consistently asks to speak to “the manager.”

So I’ll say it: not every customer deserves your best. Some might disagree with me, citing statistics about the cost of acquisition. I prefer to focus on lifetime value. If a customer is a drain on your employee’s happiness; if a customer is a drain on your margins; or – most importantly – if that customer will never be a raving happy fan, then you should let them go.

There are many places beyond surveys where CX can be optimized. You need to go beyond measurement and looking at the root cause, then relate that root cause back to Churn Risk and build ideas through customer co-creation that can solve these problems.

The simplest approach often goes against the expectations of many survey providers in CX: reduce survey frequency by creating smarter surveys. I am not implying that you should not seek feedback, in fact, you should give customers every opportunity to have a conversation with you. Rather you should only ask for feedback on things you cannot get from internal data and you should give more credibility to those that give insightful honest feedback and are good customers.

The promise of NPS when it first emerged in the CX space was to make the survey experience easier for the customer. Instead, they still get the long surveys so there can be drivers’ analysis and an attempt to link to financial outcomes. However, the analytics rarely give great direction because customers tend to rush through the survey and the averages wash out any differentiation.

Instead, use an approach that highlights or teases out the key reason behind the score (the original intent of the open-end in NPS). By forcing that one section, not only do you find the root cause, but you are also able to attribute traits that common across both Passives and Detractors that allow you to determine which responding customers might be a churn risk.

Also, as we democratize data internally, we should understand that customers talk about our companies outside of surveys. By leveraging ideas generated by customers and allowing other good customers to vote on those ideas that are generated, we let them engage in our innovation process and co-create ideas that can increase loyalty and profitability.

If a firm fails to optimize CX, then they’ll likely continue to suffer from all those problems above – no matter how high their CX scores are.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels