A VoC program paves the way to more strategic decision-making and a clearer idea of where to focus resources for better customer experiences.
Challenge: Systematically leverage customer insights to inform decision-making and actions
When this top online advertising platform was looking for a way to outperform multiple major competitors, they tapped McorpCX to help design, develop and operate an ongoing customer listening program that would tee up actionable insights to better serve their advertising customers. The end game was to increase advertiser loyalty and become the preferred advertising platform in their business-to-business (B2B) base by delivering a better experience.
The scope of the project was complex, as its success hung on the importance of hearing from a global audience across multiple segments, and capturing both external (customer) and (internal) employee perspectives about the advertising customer experience. Compounding this complexity was the fact that contacts were housed in multiple data sources with mixed degrees of data hygiene.
Finally, and perhaps most challenging, there was a lack of internal alignment on the best way to measure customer experience: what the metrics should be, and how they should be communicated and put into action across the organization.
Approach: Surveying advertisers across segments
McorpCX worked closely with the head of Customer Insights, and other internal staff on the Customer Insights team, to ensure that the project was set up—and built—for success from the outset.
The first step was to achieve internal alignment on the goals of the listening program: to establish key performance indicators (KPIs), to properly identify the audience segments and relevant listening posts, and to determine the best ways of gathering and analyzing this data as it flowed through the customer listening system.
McorpCX recommended that the business perform a survey of its advertisers measuring for a set of key KPIs:
Loyalty index: measuring advertisers’ overall satisfaction, their likelihood to recommend and their likelihood to continue advertising
Client experience index: measuring how well the company was meeting advertisers’ needs, the ease of doing business with them, and the company’s trustworthiness
Account team index: measuring the effectiveness of the sales and support teams, how much customers valued their strategic perspectives and guidance, if they helped resolve customers’ issues, and whether the teams presented innovative solutions
Additional KPIs: measuring product satisfaction, innovations in search, and whether the organization acted in the best interest of its advertisers
We designed and deployed a global listening system that gathered insights from major regions including North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, to track different experiences across regions and to capture ongoing data points for comparison. Multiple customer types and segments were surveyed, including both agencies and direct advertisers. They were surveyed in segments based on business size, and included both managed and unmanaged accounts.
We also developed a performance benchmarking system, gathering the same data on our client’s four most relevant competitors.
Recommendations spanned the end-to-end customer journey, driving changes and improvements to a number of different customer channels and touchpoints.
Recommendations: Tie improvements to segment input, and prioritize based on gap analysis
The ongoing listening program succeeded in surfacing clear opportunities to improve baseline scores against the category leader. McorpCX managed the program with an ongoing rhythm which generated focused improvement recommendations relative to the context of the client, with the goal of fostering loyalty by:
McorpCX’s analysis was data driven: investigating customer core wants and needs, linking them to key desired business results, and mapping the best route to serving both. Recommendations spanned the end-to-end customer journey, driving changes and improvements to a number of different customer channels and touchpoints:
Results: Across-the-board gains in topline performance indicators
After each wave of the annual listening program, the company enjoyed significant increases across most areas measured. The approach helped to improve strategic decision-making across the board, because the company better understood the needs of its advertisers. The effort also served to validate the delivery structure and determine where the organization would be best served to focus its resources going forward—up-leveling the things customers cared most about and eliminating things they cared least about. The outcome was a clear win for customers and the company, resulting in streamlined costs and an improved advertiser relationship.
McorpCX is independently recognized as a top customer experience services and solutions company, enabling and guiding leading organizations since 2002.
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