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Sí, has leído bien ese titular. El gasto en sistemas de experiencia del cliente está aumentando pero, en los últimos años, la satisfacción del cliente ha disminuido. Dash Research ha demostrado que el gasto en CX tiene una tasa de crecimiento anual compuesto (CAGR) de más del 6 %. Sin embargo, los datos de ACSI indican que los puntajes promedio de satisfacción del cliente han disminuido drásticamente desde 2018. Esta disminución precede a la pandemia, continuó durante la pandemia y parece continuar después de la pandemia.
This paradox does not imply that customer satisfaction is not important. Other data from ACSI show that companies with the best customer satisfaction scores have higher profits and better stock market returns. Similarly, Forbes regularly reports the commercial and financial benefits of superior customer satisfaction and experience.
The issue that this paradox (i.e. rising CX spend AND falling satisfaction) highlights is that increased CX spending has stopped generating better satisfaction scores. Before 2018, CX spending was going up and satisfaction was going up. However, spending is still going up, but satisfaction is falling. That paradox is the issue that this article addresses.
I will address the spending up, satisfaction down paradox in three parts:
- Why is CX spending increasing?
- Why is customer satisfaction falling?
- What can organizations do to get customer satisfaction moving in the right direction?
Why is CX spending increasing?
Business leaders know that better customer satisfaction is linked to higher profits. Some business leaders have always known this, but others are newer to the game. Over the last twenty years (and especially since the 2013 publication of Fred Reichheld’s article that led to the popular adoption of NPS), it has been generally accepted that higher levels of customer satisfaction tend to generate better business outcomes.
The knowledge that higher levels of satisfaction were likely to lead to higher profits caused more and more businesses to start taking customer experience seriously. Part of taking something seriously is measuring it. This growth in the interest in customer satisfaction was followed by the shift in nomenclature and emphasis from Customer Satisfaction to Customer Experience to CX. Over the last twenty years, most organizations have instigated some level of CX processes. This growth in the number of organizations employing CX systems is the first reason why spending on CX has grown.
Spending on CX has also been increasing because of the success of some of the larger platforms in creating and promoting larger CX installations. A growing number of installations have been subject to bloat, with additional dashboards, scopes, user licenses, and tools. For some of the platform providers, the third reason for increased spending is the result of higher prices, which are often a consequence of leveraged acquisitions and mergers.
Why is satisfaction falling?
In looking at the data to understand why average customer satisfaction is falling, it makes sense to disregard the years of the pandemic (at least for the time being). But the drop in the ACSI customer satisfaction index started falling well before the pandemic. The tipping point was in 2018, as we can see from the chart below.
The data shows that overall satisfaction increased from 1997 until 2018. Since 2018, the index has fallen back to levels comparable to 2002, i.e. we have lost twenty years of progress.
As with most phenomena, the causes of the decline in average customer satisfaction are multiple, and they don’t all point in the same direction. Here are the four key contenders.
1. Rising expectations
Rising expectations are a typical human response to services. Things that are new and delight us soon become the norm and we cease to be delighted by them. If competitors improve their offerings, then our offerings will fall behind the new expectations created by our competitors. The challenge for customer satisfaction is to keep improving the customer experience. There is no steady state for customer experience, it is either improving or (because of rising expectations) it is in decline. To put a figure to this phenomenon, Netomi found that 65% of customers reported that they have higher expectations for customer service today than they did 3-5 years ago.
2. Growth of omnichannel services
Over the last few years, there has been a massive increase in omnichannel services, especially in retailing. These changes include online, click-and-collect, mobile, in-app, and in-game. These changes were, of course, greatly accelerated by the pandemic. The customer experience for the newer channels has not always been thought through sufficiently, and it is often under-researched, so its impact on customer satisfaction can be negative. In many cases, newer channels rely on third parties, for example, online shopping relies on delivery services. In-app services rely on the phone, the carrier, the operating system, and potentially a delivery service. CX systems have not always helped the customer’s omnichannel experience, particularly when the CX program is not integrated across all the channels.
3. Automation and outsourcing
Automation and outsourcing can reduce costs and streamline internal processes, but they can negatively impact the customer experience. Not everybody wants to interact with a chatbot or seek advice from an overseas call center. In retail, automation has allowed stores to introduce self-scanning at checkouts, something that is liked by some but not by others. Where automation offers more choices, it can improve satisfaction. But if a shopper feels pushed towards a less preferred option, it can reduce satisfaction.
4. Perverse results of CX systems
CX programs are intended to improve the customer experience, but that is not always what happens. There are several ways that CX programs can be part of the problem instead of being part of the solution.
Compliance instead of experience
Too many CX systems are built around compliance. They measure whether a service is being delivered in a way that complies with the organization’s model for how the service should be delivered. This approach ignores the fact that different customers may want different experiences, it reduces the ability of the frontline staff to personalize service to match the customers, and the model of “best service” gets out of date. When that happens, the organization is using its CX program to deliver yesterday’s service to today’s customers.
Dashboards are great, they allow people to see the data quickly and in ways they can understand. However, too many CX dashboards share two key problems: 1) showing too much data, and 2) promoting the idea of the average customer.
When I look for a good example of what a dashboard should be like, I think of the one in your car. The largest display tends to be the speed you are traveling.
This is something that you need to know (to stay safe and legal) and which you can immediately regulate. Beyond the speed, there are things like the amount of fuel in your tank, the time of day, and the distance traveled.
All of these are something you want to know, but not as frequently. Then there are a series of indicators that only turn on when they are required. Your oil warning only lights up when you need to attend to the oil. Your left and right indicator signs only turn on when you have indicated you are turning left or right.
By comparison, a CX dashboard approach to a car might have a green light showing “Oil OK, no action needed” and a pair of messages saying “left indicator not engaged” and “right indicator not engaged.” We need dashboards to be better focused.
Another useful reminder that the car provides is that the dashboard does not tell us where to drive the car. Only when we add a satnav to the dashboard does the car tell us where to drive, but even the satnav needs us to choose a destination. CX dashboards can help you manage the customer experience, but they don’t help define what the customer experience should be.
The other dashboard problem is thinking about the average customer. If we have two service centers, each with an NPS of +20%, we might think they are providing a similar experience. However, one center might have 60% Promoters and 40% Detractors (a “love it or hate it” service), while the other might have 20% Promoters, 80% Neutral, and 0% Detractors (a safe but not special service). These two centers have the same NPS score, but they are very different in terms of the customer experience they are generating.
Fixing problems instead of removing them
Most CX programs generate “red alerts” — a message that a customer has had a bad experience and that the organization should seek to fix the problem. This is, of course, a good thing. However, it is only a good thing if this process feeds into strategic thinking about how to re-engineer the process to remove the problem. We know that only a small percentage of customers fill in a CX survey, so we are only fixing the problems for those who filled in the survey and who had a problem.
We need to fix the problem for everybody, and that means linking CX to business process re-engineering. By having red alerts and fixing problems when they occur and not having a thematic process, CX systems can allow a customer experience process with faults to stay in place.
Perverse incentives
The problem of perverse incentives in CX programs has been widely talked about. When staff knows their bonus or their future employment is linked to a CX score, for example, NPS, they will seek to improve the score. The most direct way to improve a CX score is often not by improving the service but by pressuring the customer to give a good score. This can increase the score but leads to a worse customer experience (since customers do not like being pressured to give a 9 or 10).
Data silos
Many CX programs operate in silos. These CX programs are not linked to the wider organization, they report to operational teams but not to those designing the future of the organization. Similarly, other data sets, such as insight communities and qual research, are often not integrated into the CX information, meaning that everybody has a partial picture and nobody has the whole picture.
What can organizations do to get customer satisfaction moving in the right direction?
The world has entered a period of high inflation for the first time in forty years. Increasing prices are likely to create more customer dissatisfaction. Because of inflation, we are going to see many people in financial difficulties in what is called a cost-of-living crisis. This cost-of-living crisis is likely to affect consumers in several ways that are likely to negatively impact customer experience. You can see a review of inflation and CX here.
Here are six things you can do to restore the link between CX and improved customer satisfaction:
- Move away from your CX program being compliance-based and towards it being an input into business process re-engineering.
- Avoid your CX program stagnating, don’t focus on yesterday’s problems and yesterday’s metrics. Review your program every 18 months to see what to add, what to change, and what to drop.
- Decouple your CX system from bonuses, especially for frontline staff, to reduce the perverse incentives.
- Rethink your dashboards to reduce the number of items displayed and to increase the ability of users to drill into details.
- Stop thinking about the average customer, start personalizing your offer, and match your CX program to personalization.
- Link the CX program to other data sets and to the insights process, in a two-way exchange of information.
- Think about how inflation is going to affect your customers and whether your current CX program is going to help you help your customers.
