The next-generation customer experience

More insights, more value…

On 10-11th September 2015, Trilations participated in the annual “Customer Passion” Net Promoter Conference in London, where current best practices and future trends for loyalty and customer experience (CX) were discussed. We are happy to share the main topics of the conference and our view on the next-generation customer experience.

The NPS conference: main trends

During the conference a lot of attention was paid to transactional NPS surveys and the operational use of this data. The contributors mainly focused on three trends in customer experience management:

1. The hunger for continuous insights
2. Value as a service
3. The importance of customer journey mapping

For more detailed info on these trends, please see below.

Our Reflections

We were happy to see that in all conference presentations recommendation was reconfirmed as a critical success factor, due to the continuing rise of social media and the increased impact of thought leaders. In a rapidly moving digital world, facilitating dialogues between all stakeholders, recommendation will remain crucial not only to acquire new clients, but especially to retain existing customers. This is also clearly being shown in our analyses: more loyal customers generate (much) more sales.

We, as Trilations, feel however that the conference and the above mentioned trends had a too narrow focus on the operational use of NPS in companies, i.e. aligning your company processes with the customer expectations. In our experience it is crucial to also gain insights in how customer loyalty is driving your performance, allowing you to take customer experience to the strategic level.

This is why we do not only look for action-oriented improvement opportunities, but more important we focus on finding the right priorities. Often companies do not have the budget nor the time to work on all identified action points at once, that is why our consulting is focused on giving direction towards priority areas generating the biggest impact on one’s business.

If you have any questions about these topics or about customer experience management in general, do not hesitate to contact us.

Tel: +32 3 877 64 00

The main trends discussed during the conference were:

1. The hunger for continuous insights

We acknowledge that doing research through traditional stand-alone one off surveys is often outdated. Many of our clients can and will no longer rely on insights coming from data collected months ago, considering we are living on a digital highway, where data from yesterday will be replaced by new insights from today. An increased survey frequency will generate a more continuous flow of insights and facilitates continuous improvement instead of periodic shocks.

2. Value as a service

The suggested increase in survey frequency and data collection, requires a new approach to manage, analyze and visualize the data and resulting insights. Dealing with thousands and millions of data points will only work in a well-designed framework, flexible enough to provide everyone in the organization with insights tailored to his needs, but still structured enough to allow for harmonized reporting.

Our brand-new dynamic and interactive app-based reporting of results, is an important step Trilations has taken to provide added value in this changing landscape. The app facilitates our customers to look at results in a dynamic way and to tailor the analysis and insights to individual needs.

3. The importance of a good customer journey mapping

Delivering the right insights is only possible if the correct touchpoints and customer processes are being surveyed. A good customer journey mapping is therefore crucial to track the actual moments of truth for the customers. This mapping needs to reflect an outside-in view rather than an inside-out view. Focusing on internal company processes throughout the customer journey is therefore not the road to success. What the customer sees as make-or-break moments for a successful customer experience, is what this mapping should start from.