Creating a Customer Experience Command Center

The concept of a using a dashboard of key performance indicators (KPI’s) to measure and manage a business is commonplace.  In boardrooms across the world executives are busy looking at detailed charts and graphs that outline their latest sales and operational metrics.  But in almost every case, those dashboards focus on business outcomes rather than the customer journey.  As business evolve to more customer-centric models, so too should their dashboards. 

As obvious as this may sound, I hadn’t put the 2 together in quite as powerful way until I had the great fortune to see Jeanne Bliss present at a recent company event.  Author and Customer officer for 5 major US corporations, Jean is an amazingly energetic and straightforward leader who has a long track record of blazing the customer trail and making change happen.  Out of the many riveting topics Jean shared, I was most inspired by the concept of a Customer Command Center.  Here’s 5 points why this is the next step for customer-centric companies and how to set up an effective pilot.

1.       Dedicate a Room for the Customer: Profits, risks, and operational details permeate every nook of the office.  That’s why it’s important for companies who are committed to driving customer experience improvements to dedicate a space that can be purely customer focused. 

a.       Customer Rules: Leave your margins and inventories at the door and step into the shoes, thoughts and emotions of your customer. 

b.      Make it fun: put up pictures of your customers and what inspires them.  If your target is teenage girls, consider a pink coat of paint straight from a Disney TV show set.      

          2. Walk the Customer Journey: Business is often organized by departments, functions, regions, and other logical structures that are opaque and irrelevant to a customer.  Corporate silos and department handoffs can often create experience gaps and grey areas of responsibility.  

a.       Map out the entire customer journey from lead generation through purchase, usage, service and repurchase using the full wall space allowed.  At each stage, you will display data explained in the next few points to deep dive into the customer experience.

b.      Outline customer intent at each stage and pay attention to the depth of the relationship based on the customer’s understanding of the product and brand, as well as the time and $ investment a customer has made into the product at each stage.

      3. Customer Experience KPI’s ≠ Business KPI’s: Focus on measurements that mean something to the customer, not the company.  Even NPS should only be used as one of many lenses.

a.       Effort: How many clicks, forms, calls, steps, days waiting,…  For each stage in the lifecycle try to capture 2-3 customer facing metrics like speed to answer, first call resolution, delivery time, and so on.   Learn more about  effortless service.

b.      Price & Benefit Parity: Like it or not, price is always a major determinant, so keep charts of how your product compares to stay in the mind of the shopper.

c.        Paper cuts: Product Defects, Repairs, system failures, marketing mistakes…don’t just show the averages, get into specifics on how many issues occurred, and capture the potential experience for an outlier who got the worst of your processes.

            4. Add Color with Context: Believe it or not, charts and graphs can only show so much, especially for executives who rarely leave the 39^th floor.  Make the best use of the customer room by adding anecdotal comments, advertising images, and other contextual data.

a.       Voice Of Customer: About 25% of the NPS respondents who score my current business a 4-6 (technically a detractor) are explicit in their comments that “I just don’t recommend life insurance.”   That’s a clear example why complaints and other comments are so important to get deeper into the customer’s minds and hearts.

b.      Actual Forms: A process box on a viseo chart that says “fill out return form” is fine conceptually.  But how much more real is that to a leadership team when they see the form is 15 pages and requires a notary and parents signature?  Adding the actual forms, applications, invoices, and packets helps executives walk the process from end to end from the customer view.

c.       Images: Sometimes one image can capture what a customer is thinking better than any chart or text.  Try to find product examples, examples of advertisements, or even aspirational images that mean something to your market.  

      5. Keep it Fresh: Just like the #s in each KPI, the customer journey is constantly changing and evolving by actions inside and external to the company.  Keeping the walls of measures, images, and content on your customer war room walls fresh will ensure it stays relevant and useful. 

So before you repurpose your traditional business dashboard by adding NPS and a Customer Centricity stamp on the top, think about how to best understand the real customer experience.  For the cost of a spare office and some collaboration of the entire organization, you can create an immersive walk in the customer’s shoes.