knowledge base
Our knowledge base is here to help you understand some of the terms we all come across within the world of Customer Experience.
It’s not exhaustive by any means but covers a lot of the tools and techniques we use everyday when we work with our customers. We hope you find it helpful.
If you need help with any part of a project or just need a chat to understand what can be done, email or call us and we’ll happily help.
Auditing is measuring the effectiveness and cost of processes, procedures, communications and customer touch-points. Combined with Benchmarking, it forms the building block upon which your transformation program has to be built
Traditionally benchmarking measured how your product and service proposition stands against competitor and disruptor brands.
We encourage you to look step out of your business and benchmark with the eyes of your customers who experience your service, good and bad, first hand. They are the ones who will tell you how you compare in your market. Using voice of the customer and competitor analysis we build up a picture of what good looks like and where you are in relation to it.
Customer Effort Score. A relatively new metric which in literal terms measures the amount of effort the customer has to spend to either buy or use your service. The lower the score the better their journey. It should be used in conjunction with Net Promoter Score (NPS) to determine the health of your customer experience
Content transformation is the arduous but essential task of measuring and scoring the effectiveness of your customer facing communication and transforming it into effective customer-centric language. Post sale communications often get forgotten or are written by non-specialists.
More often than not, it is the most important communication the customer receives from you and shapes the ultimate journey they have with you. Getting it right can often be the difference between positive or negative endorsement.
Customer experience is an integral part of customer relationship management (CRM), and it is important to businesses because customers who have a positive experience are more likely to become repeat customers and loyal customers of the business. It is determined by a range of factors including, employee engagement, effective processes, smooth journeys and effective customer communication.
Ethnography provides systematic methods that can help market researchers develop deeper consumer insights – using contextual interviewing and systematic observation. It is a relatively new methodology in guiding new product development and shaping the definition of good customer experience.
It recognises the fact that people act and react differently depending on where they are—for example, they may be more open to discussing personal issues at home than they are when interviewed in isolation or as part of a focus group.
It reveals issues with existing products and services, but it also facilitates understanding of customer attitudes, perceptions, and needs, both rational and
emotional.
Integrated marketing is a relatively new process which encourages businesses to pull all of their core digital marketing and customer management into a single coherent strategy driven through a CRM system such as Sales Force, Agile, Zen Desk or similar. It is particularly effective for SME’s with limited resource who want to manage marketing and customer service and business development through on platform.
A customer journey map charts your customer’s experience and helps you target improvements with the greatest return. By identifying those steps in the customer experience with the greatest impact, your journey map becomes core to your customer experience planning process. See Process Improvement.
Mapping allows you to show each customer interaction within a larger experience—whether a consumer or business customer. A primary focus is to understand which touch points are used, and how each assists or interferes with the process. Many experiences include touch points outside of a company’s direct control, such as friends and family, social media and third-party websites. Each has an impact on the journey and needs to be understood.
Every journey has an emotional impact on your customer, even in a business-to-business relationship. Whilst touch point mapping identifies which interactions exist in an experience, emotional impact mapping targets a specific phase and how each interaction builds or destroys value in your customers’ eyes.
NLP encompasses three influential components involved in producing human experience: neurology, language and programming. The mind regulates how our bodies function, language determines how we relate and communicate with people and our programming determines the kinds of models of the world we create.
Our training draws upon current best practice within NLP to help shape and understand behaviour outcomes.
In simple terms NPS determines the likelihood of a customer recommending your product or service to a friend or another organisation.
A simple question is asked:
“How likely is it that you would recommend our organisation to a friend or colleague?”
Using a 0-10 point scoring matrix the customer is classified into one of the three categories: “Detractor,” “Passive,” or “Promoter.”
Score breakdowns:
0 – 6: Detractors
7 – 8: Passives
9-10: Promoters
The first step in any transformation program looks at the particular processes that are within the scope of the project. Sometimes this is referred to as journey mapping.
We work with you to map an existing process in it’s entirety. We look at what is working, where the stress points are, what doesn’t work and the impacts this has. We talk to your customers to understand their perception of the process and calibrate this against your own perception.
We’ll then redesign and improve the process to make it simpler, efficient and transparent to everyone. We would beta test it to make sure the improved process doesn’t have any unforeseen impact points.
One of the first questions we’ll ask you is whether your company has a Tone of Voice. This could be formal document that was created with your Brand or perhaps something that has been been generated subsequently.
It’s a guide to everyone in your business from top to bottom about how you’re supposed to sound and feel to both your employees and your customers. Note the distinction, it’s not designed to be a gimmick to persuade customers that you’re soft and fluffy. It’s about how you communicate your values and your commitment to customers and the bigger society in way that generates resonance and empathy.
Transactional Analysis is a social psychology and a method to improve all types of human communication. The theory outlines how we have developed and treat ourselves, how we relate and communicate with others, and offers suggestions and interventions which will enable us to change and grow.
We use it extensively in our communication training courses.
The mid way point of your journey with Odyssey. Here we bring together all of our insights from your auditing and benchmarking to agree a program that by it’s scope and definition will change and redefine your Customer Experience. We work closely with cross functional teams within the business to reduce infrastructure impact and make the transition a seamless and mostly stressless journey.
Put at it’s simplest, VOC is where you seek feedback from your customers and stakeholders, listen to their feedback and act on it. It’s how you ensure you have ongoing Customer Experience benchmarking rather than just product led research.
The tools for doing this depend very much on the size of your business, the robustness of your existing CRM platform, the channels you use to communicate with your customers and your own desire to have an overarching strategy to listen, learn and improve.