In 2019 the term customer experience was mentioned over 2,500 times on US earnings calls, x5 more than 2008. While this growth has been praised as positive by the industry, for the average shopper, the real question remains – what’s in it for me?
In May, The Wall Street Journal published an article called ‘The Dubious Management Fad Sweeping Corporate America’. The article explored the popularity of NPS and its impact on the modern board room. The article made for entertaining reading, but left another question open. Why are these tools so popular in the first place?
Before NPS
Before NPS, customer experience was not really measured. Retailers relied on sales figures and same-store growth to asses performance. What the customer felt about their experience, was low down the list of concerns.
The growth of tools like NPS and OSAT helped to bring customer experience to the attention of the C-Suite, because they provided a simple way to put a score to it. Improve that score and revenue would go up. Or at least that was the idea.
“Net Promoter Score at least made CX a real concern” Nate Brown, Chief Experience Officer for Officium Labs
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The Problem With Customer Experience Today
While NPS brought attention to CX, it did not bring an over night change in the way retailers approached it. Many retailers today continue to see CX as little more than a tick box. In part, this can be seen as a failure of modern programs.
In general customer experience programs suffer from four common issues:
- No clear link to revenue
- Do not support the rapid innovation needs of modern retail
- No actionable insight
- No link to store level experience
Many businesses who once scored highly for NPS, have since fallen into admission. The store experience is more important than ever. Yet the way many continue to measure this experience is not working. For the businesses, or their customers.
In my next post, I’ll introduce a new approach, which I believe provides a way forward for customer-level insights and analytics.
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Sam McKeveny is the Head of North American Sales at TruRating. Read part 2 of this blog here.
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