This is part 3 in a 5-part series. Please download our CX Predictions for 2022 ebook for our full report.
CX Lags Behind
Many Customer Experience (CX) teams lack the data integration of their Sales and Marketing counterparts.
Sales departments tend to operate using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool like Salesforce (SFDC) and, by 2022, have likely already integrated with other data sets like Jira or Salesloft. Likewise, Marketing tends to run the marketing automation platform with data that syncs not only to Salesforce but other publishing or analytics tools.
Integrated data is how Sales and Marketing gets done. Less so for CX.
In 2022, expect the CX function to evolve in many organizations. CX has collected numerous potential data sets just waiting to be leveraged:
- Internal customer behaviors, transactions, and profiles.
- Third-party data on customer attitudes, purchase preferences and digital actions.
- Social media activity.
- IoT data collected in store or on location regarding customer health, usage, and sentiment.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
Alchemer predicts that this next year will see CX departments evolve from data consumers to data contributors, sharing critical customer interactions throughout their journey.
Learning How To Share Customer Data
Customer data needs to flow to frontline employees and tools, like a company CRM, via an application programming interface (API). The API can serve as a catalyst for automated actions based on metrics like lead score.
McKinsey tells the story of a credit card company that adopted an omnichannel strategy to boost digital performance. They used CX data to identify and track factors influencing customer satisfaction and business performance with good effect:
“This analytics-driven approach gave the company a quantified and systematic view into the problems, opportunity areas, and channel interactions across millions of customers, enabling the organization to support a systematic journey-improvement cycle.”
The credit card company focused investments and efforts on the specific moments that mattered to customers and reduced operational costs by 10-25% as a result of the CX transformation. These results were only possible by funneling CX data to the platforms and internal players who could impact success.
The Alchemer NPS Story
At Alchemer, we live the data integration story every day. Data integration is the essential component in how our teams coordinate for customer benefit.
We didn’t just use data integration to reduce costs — we reduced customer churn by 3% in our first year, potentially adding millions of dollars to our bottom line, and improved our Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 15%.
Data integration has directly led to data action at Alchemer. Like many companies, we collect NPS scores from customers. But NPS has a dirty secret — very few companies do anything with the data. They may look at the metric every quarter, but few act on it.
At Alchemer, we ensure that NPS is treated as the valuable piece of data it is. NPS is routed to:
- SFDC Service Cloud: Tickets are created for the customer service team who review each piece of feedback and respond to supportable questions.
- SFDC CRM: NPS and verbatim comments are added to accounts for full historical visibility by Sales/Success leaders.
- Slack: NPS feedback is shared across a company-wide channel for transparency and to individual customer success managers in charge of managing that account.
- Email: NPS feedback is routed to customer success managers via email so that action can be taken immediately.
- DOMO: NPS is correlated with financial data for better clarity for the executive team.
The key technical component was integration of the data so that it was routed directly into the systems and processes our teams use every day. But empowering customer facing employees to respond and take action upon the feedback as part of their day-to-day processes was how we improved our NPS score by 15%
In the recent Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper, commissioned by Alchemer, “Smoke and Mirrors: Why Customer Experience Programs Miss Their Mark,” only 29% of CX respondents say they can meaningfully act on the data they collect and only 17% say that feedback is communicated to the appropriate internal teams to act on it.
Companies have invested heavily in creating customer programs that do a pretty good job of listening and analyzing feedback, but are terrible at responding to the input from their customers.
Collecting and seeing data is the first step. But acting on data is a trend Alchemer expects to see much more in 2022.
