Hi, I'm Augie Ray, and I'm a vice president of research, at Gartner for Marketers, and I cover customer experience. And one of the things that we cover with our client's quite a bit is how to engage leaders and how to secure their commitment for customer experience. Because that's so important. They get a lot of questions about benchmarking, and generally we recommend against it. With customer experience, you want to be focused on what your customers want and with benchmarking, you're focused on what your competitors are doing. Also, the goal of customer experience isn't to beat your competition with a score, it’s to always be improving things for your customers. So we'll try to talk to our clients about the dangers of benchmarking.
Let's talk about one other mistake that often gets made before we get to how to do this, because this is such a common problem. So because there is such pressure on customer experience, leaders, too, define the business benefits that CX delivers. Oftentimes, organizations will skip over the customer altogether and simply focus on financial benefits. So what you need to do is you need to understand and react to customer interactions in order to meet and exceed their expectations and to lift, and I always pause dramatically and say This is the important part lift, customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.

Now the way to really understand the benefit of customer experience is to tie customer satisfaction to business results because what we want to do, again, is work through the customer. And it's actually relatively easy to do this as long as you have the data and we find many organizations already do.

Often our clients find that more satisfied customers will call us, they'll complain less, they'll have a lower cost to retain that will resell. And so all of these are ways that we can prove to our leaders that the more satisfaction we deliver, the lower our cost, the greater their attention and the greater the revenue and all of those three things together are the components of lifetime value. So as we satisfy our customers more, we raise their purchases. We decrease their costs and we retain them longer. And all of that improves lifetime value. And that's how we encourage people to work through the customer by understanding the value of customer satisfaction to the top and bottom line.

So this is one of the questions that will get right off the bat is where do we get the data and do I know who's satisfied and not. So It all starts with what we call customer perception data, and it's going to be things like Net promoter score, customer satisfaction questions, customer effort, scores, these are all attitudinal measures of customer loyalty. And what we want to do in this analysis is start with the attitudinal measures and understand their relationship to the behavioral measures. Because we don't take attitudes to the bank, we take behaviors to the bank.

So it starts with understanding whether you have the right survey data, and if not, how can we help you go get that? So one of the challenges our customers have is that even if they do all the things right that we just said they still can have trouble engaging their bosses without leading our bosses to understand what's changed, why it's meaningful and what we need to do about it. What can happen is that a, boss will notice, for instance, net promoter score ticking up or down, and they'll immediately want to know what's going on and we might not know, we might not even be worried about it yet. We're waiting for a trend to develop, and so we want to do is not wait for our bosses to notice what's happening and then ask questions and then try to explain it to them. We want to get in front of that and help our leaders to understand what's important and what they should be doing about it. And that's what really works successfully.

So the three takeaways for customer experience leaders is the first of all. You need a flow of data. Second of all, you need to absolutely prove the ROI. That's the way you get attention for your program. And the third thing is that doing all this analysis might be easier than they think. A lot of our clients already have the voc or voice of customer platforms that could do this analysis for them already.