Customer experience (CX) is a fickle thing. As organizations proliferate across physical and into digital space, understanding the myriad ways your customers are interacting with your business has become harder than ever. 

Not only that, but in a hyper-competitive economy, fall even a step behind your competitors in your offerings and it could spell disaster. So how do we provide our customers with the experiences that keep them coming back? 

By understanding their challenges and proactively addressing them before they even realize there’s a problem. Easier said than done. 

At our recent CX Innovation Summit, we were joined by Brett Kiley, Former Executive Director of Customer Experience, Client Success at a leading health solutions company. 

Even though the healthcare industry presents a range of CX challenges above and beyond the norm, Brett had been able to revolutionize his organization’s approach to CX, leading to an increase in customer satisfaction and profits among other benefits. 

How did he do it? Well, as one of our CX Innovation keynote speakers, he was kind enough to share. 

The customer knows best 

One of the core ideas behind Brett’s strategy was that your customers know more about their potential happiness than you do. CX leaders today are scrambling to boost customer satisfaction but are often framing their initiatives through their own ideas of customer success. 

You might be bending over backwards to reduce inbound complaints as a mark of increased satisfaction, but is that what is really being measured here? This metric of ‘success’ could also reflect customer detachment, something that might herald a soon to be lost customer. 

With that in mind, Brett set out to understand, with a high degree of confidence, the level of happiness of his customers and how it was represented in the data. 

Establish a ‘data menu’ 

Through surveys, polling, and directly reaching out to their customers, it was possible to create a menu of customer satisfaction data points. These data points were then weighted by importance, allowing Brett to point to his top five metrics of customer satisfaction. 

For example, being on the East Coast vs the West Coast might impact customer happiness, but in no way is that as important as how easily they can access their prescriptions. 

With this in place CX innovation leaders can still test and try new things, but now they’ll know they’re going after the right items. You’ll also quickly realize how much money and time you are wasting on the items that don’t matter. 

Align the business 

Once you can confidently point to the metrics that matter most to your customers, it’s time to get the wider business involved. 

Digital, operations, IT, marketing – arm them with the knowledge of what is most important to your customers. 

The more you develop this data-driven approach, the better you’ll understand your customers. 

As your confidence grows, you’ll be able to apply this knowledge to your entire customer base to the point where you could say “if this customer took a survey right now, this is how they would score us.” 

Using this strategy, Brett managed to achieve a 91% accuracy rate for predicting how customers would rate their satisfaction. 

Predictive modelling 

Now you know how happy all your customers are with reasonable accuracy, what are your next steps? 

The people who are scoring you tens, what do they need? Engage marketing and roll out benefits like loyalty programs or opportunities to be brand ambassadors. 

Those in the middle of the pack? They don’t have huge issues so look for ways to surprise and delight them and move them to become loyal promoters. 

And those people scoring their satisfaction as low? This is where you spend your money for the best ROI. 

How you choose to tailor your customer’s experience is up to you, but knowing with reasonable accuracy how happy they are, and how you can build on that, is a game changer. 

Dealing with pushback 

Many companies face challenges when advocating for resources to invest in big data-driven initiatives for customer experience. Leadership teams often express concerns about costs and data manageability, leading to significant pushback. However, organizations that persevere and secure the opportunity to implement such projects frequently find that the results speak for themselves. 

“The reality is that this strategy was profitable in 90 days after implementation, and it was one of the most profitable initiatives that we ran last year.” 

Brett Kiley 

Take the money you’re spending on initiatives for customer satisfaction metrics that don’t matter, siphon a few people from the data science and customer satisfaction teams, and run a pilot on your new data model. 

Once you share your successes with the board, you’ll start getting the resources you need to roll it out for more customers. 

The best way to predict the future is to create it 

Thanks to Brett’s efforts in driving predictive modelling and outreach, the parts of his organization utilizing this approach saw: 

• 37% reduction in inbound calls 

• 44% increase in digital satisfaction 

• 3 years of net promoter score (NPS) improvement 

• $104m increase in earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) 

This proactive, data-driven culture revolutionized their approach to CX and allowed them to start solving problems before they impacted their customers’ satisfaction. 

To hear more from industry leaders like Brett, make sure you check out our upcoming CX Innovation summits.