For years, customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores have served as a compass for service teams. But most measurement models still focus on human-assisted channels: calls, chats, or emails managed by agents. AI interactions often sit outside that framework — not out of neglect, but because traditional metrics haven’t kept pace with automation.

The challenge is clear: as AI becomes the voice of your brand, your satisfaction measurement must evolve, too.

Rethinking What “Good” Looks Like

Early AI success was defined by efficiency: shorter handle times, higher containment rates, and lower costs. Those remain valuable, but efficiency alone doesn’t equal satisfaction. A chatbot can resolve an issue quickly and still leave a customer feeling unheard or frustrated.

Today’s leaders are broadening their lens. Some are layering sentiment data and post-AI surveys into their analytics. Others use predictive tools like expected NPS (xNPS) or customer success scores to estimate satisfaction in real time. The goal isn’t more data; it’s better context.

Legacy metrics were built for a human-centric era. Measuring AI means expanding the definition of quality to include emotion, effort, and trust. You can’t optimize what you’re not measuring, and you can’t measure AI the same way you measure people.

Why It Matters More Than Ever

In 2023, customers were curious about AI. By 2025, they’re discerning. They know when they’re interacting with a bot, and they have expectations. The first impression your AI makes is the first impression your brand makes. When satisfaction isn’t tracked or understood, missteps can happen fast.

AI’s reputation depends on listening, learning, and iterating with the same rigor you apply to human teams. Our 2025 CX Leaders Trends & Insights: Consumer Edition report, created in partnership with Transcom, revealed that while 78% of consumers now use self-help tools, these rank lowest in satisfaction across all channels, a widening “Experience Gap” between what customers expect and what they receive.

Bridging the Gap

Measuring AI satisfaction isn’t just a tech initiative; it’s a leadership one. It demands collaboration across CX, operations, and technology teams to define success, build new metrics, and ensure back-office systems support the experience AI promises upfront.

Because at the end of the day, customer satisfaction isn’t about checking a box. It’s about proving you care. And that applies whether the “agent” is human or machine.

Want to explore how leading brands are redefining measurement for the AI era? Read the full article Are You Measuring CSAT for AI? in the latest issue of CX Insight magazine.

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The following is a guest blog post by Tara Wildt, Manager of Content Marketing at Interactions. To learn more about Interactions, visit their website. 

In today’s customer-obsessed marketplace, customer service interactions are now some of the most critical touch points an organization has with its customers. Which means measurements like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores are increasingly important — all while high scores are ever harder to come by.

Past research has shown that customers are frustrated with long hold times, confusing phone menu options, and difficulty reaching a live agent when needed. And in order to meet the needs of the always-connected consumer, companies are adding customer service channels.

Unfortunately, research shows that this fragmentation of customer service channels is only leading to decreased CSAT scores.

THIS IS WHY CUSTOMER EFFORT MATTERS

Customer effort is a fairly straightforward concept. It’s the amount of effort your customer has to put in to resolve a customer service issue. Companies take different approaches to how they measure customer effort, including:

– Analyzing post call or chat data

– Measuring emotions throughout the interaction

– Combining common customer service metrics such as CSAT and NPS

But regardless of how it’s measured, companies agree that reducing effort helps to improve the customer experience. Why? Interactions conducted a consumer study to uncover some of the reasons. Here’s a preview of what we found.

1. CUSTOMER FRUSTRATION LEVELS ARE INCREASING

It’s probably not a surprise that many customers reach out to your organization because they have a problem. But did you realize that as many 40% of them say they are frustrated before they even pick up a phone or open a chat window? What’s worse is that nearly half of the customers who were frustrated before the interaction remain that way even after the issue is resolved.

Why is this? Part of the reason may be that customers are increasingly well informed. In our research, 64% of respondents regularly use at least one method to research an issue before contacting a company (and the number rises to 80% for 18-34 year olds).  Which means they’ve already invested time trying to fix their problem — and are expecting you to provide a speedy resolution to what they couldn’t correct on their own.

2. AND THE TIME THEY ARE WILLING TO SPEND IS LESS THAN YOU THINK

Customer frustration with long hold times is nothing new. Their definition of what constitutes a ‘long wait’, however, may surprise you. The majority of consumers in our study were only willing to spend up to 10 minutes resolving an issue — including hold time. This included both simple (resetting a password) and moderate (making a return) issues. For more complex issues, an equal number of participants would also spend up to 20 minutes.

That being said, 10 minutes is not a lot of time if you have long hold queues or channels that don’t function efficiently.

3. BUT THERE ARE REAL BENEFITS TO DECREASING EFFORT

Understandably, consumers who felt they spent too much time or effort resolving a customer service issue were frustrated after the interaction was complete. More importantly, however, is the positive impact on customer satisfaction that occurs when customer effort is low. Nearly 90% of respondents who spent less time or effort than expected while resolving an issue were satisfied after the interaction.

For more on the topic, join us for our joint webinar with Interactions, “5 Things That Drive up Customer Effort (And How to Fix Them)”, on Thursday, June 22 at 1:00 P.M. ET. Learn more and register here. 

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To download the full CXMB Industry Insights: Retail report, click here.

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CXMB Industry Insights: Retail is aimed at providing insights into consumer opinions and behaviors, specific to the retail industry. Topics in this report include comparisons between online and in-store shoppers in the areas of pre-purchase research, shopping, customer care, drivers of mobile device shoppers, and the multi-channel experience.

Findings reveal differences and similarities between online and in-store shoppers when it comes to the customer journey. Among the most popular methods of issue resolution — in-person, phone and email — online shoppers prefer to resolve issues via email, while in-store shoppers strongly prefer to resolve issues in person. However, both groups had low preference for self-serve solutions, including self-help and automated tools.

Additionally, responses between online and in-store shoppers are strikingly consistent when respondents describe what is most important to them when interacting with a retailer to resolve an issue. Customers want agents who provide clear communication, listen patiently, understand the issue, express empathy, and are empowered to break away from the script to get issues resolved.

Survey Insights:

– In the event of a customer care issue, 68 percent of online shoppers and 75 percent of in-store shoppers would rather interact with a human versus a self-help system to resolve the issue.

– Among consumers who frequently shop from their mobile device, 44 percent would choose email as their preferred communication method with a brand compared to just six percent who would choose a phone call as their preferred communication method.

– Thirty-five percent of survey respondents think retail companies do a better job of providing a positive customer experience compared to other industries.

“We know retail brands have a huge opportunity to differentiate themselves by providing an exceptional customer experience. We conducted this survey to show real customer needs and to provide actionable data that all retailers should consider to improve customer satisfaction and increase loyalty,” said Kathleen Jezierski, chief operating officer, COPC Inc.

CXMB Industry Insights: Retail is the second in a series of industry-specific reports and is an extension of the Customer Experience Management Benchmark (CXMB) Series, also published in partnership between COPC Inc. and Execs In The Know. The first industry-specific report examined travel and hospitality and is available here.

“CXMB Industry Insights allows us to dive deeper into various industries and provide relevant insights that our community members in each vertical are seeking,” said Chad McDaniel, president, Execs In The Know. “Our retail survey offers information about consumer perceptions, expectations and behaviors so that our community can have a better understanding of the customer landscape in online and brick-and-mortar retail.”

For more information about the findings of this retail research or the CXMB Industry Insights survey series, contact Judi Brenstein, vice president, COPC Inc., at jbrenstein@copc.com.

 About COPC Inc.

COPC Inc. is an innovative global leader that empowers organizations to manage complex customer journeys.  The company created the COPC Customer Experience (CX) Standard and provides consulting, training and certification for operations that support the customer experience. Founded in 1996, COPC Inc. began by helping call centers improve their performance.  Today, the company works with leading brands worldwide to optimize key customer touchpoints and deliver a seamless experience across channels. COPC Inc. is privately held with headquarters in Winter Park, FL, U.S. and has operations in Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, Latin America, India and Japan.

COPC will also be giving an educational pre-conference seminar at CRS Denver in September, 2019.

To learn more about COPC Inc., visit www.copc.com.

About Execs In The Know

For over 15 years, Execs In The Know has built a reputation of excellence in the Customer Management Industry and a worldwide community of over 50,000 Customer Experience Professionals. Execs In The Know connects people to engaging industry content, thought leadership, current trends, peer-to-peer collaboration, networking and industry employment opportunities. Examples of this can be seen at their Customer Response Summit events, roadshows, webinars, workshops, Blog Talk Radio segments, Industry Benchmarking Series, blogs, thought papers and social communities. For more information, visit www.execsintheknow.com.

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The following is a guest blog post from Greg Sherry, Vice President Marketing at Verint. For more information about Verint, visit their website. 

Thank you for taking part in Verint’s interactive general session at Customer Response Summit Las Vegas called “Customer Engagement LIVE!”  where we broke into discussion groups for interactive discussions and summary read back presentations. Here are some of the recommendations we heard from the groups as part of the breakout group notes and read backs:

What’s Old Is New Again. When is the last time you received a handwritten note or personal email from a business you engage with? It was memorable, wasn’t it? Think of ways you can incorporate genuine, personalized touches with customers. The strategy can be scalable: one “wow” moment can generate genuine delight and powerful word-of-mouth amplification.

Think Mobile. Do you have a mobile strategy? The need is clear: provide information, customer support, “wow” moments via mobile channels. But be careful: consumers often have limited ability to “digest” content you are sharing with them (because they are at the airport, walking, at home, multi-tasking), so be sure your content and communications are as short and to-the-point as you can.

Establish a common knowledge base across all channels to ensure consistent response. One company recognized the need to consolidate contact center systems to a single agent desktop. Customer service agents had difficulty serving customers in a timely manner and providing accurate information because information resided in 13 disparate systems. By consolidating all the systems into one agent desktop view, the company quickly reduced agent average handle time (AHT) and saw increased customer engagement scores. The unified access to the applications and information also increased employee productivity and helped provide a personalized experience for customers.

Develop a Journey Map as Part of Your Customer Experience Strategy. Our group defined a journey map as a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through when they engage with your company, across different channels and touch points. The more touch points you have, the more complicated — but necessary — the journey map becomes. Creating a customer journey map is an investment but is well worth the cost. For some creative ideas on journey maps, check out this recent blog post by Verint’s Nancy Porte – Five Tips for Building a Customer Journey Map.

Millennials/Diverse learners. Move away from phone to proactive chat; offer chat if automated resolution doesn’t work. Find ways to be “proactive” with communications when you anticipate that a customer’s expectations won’t be met.

Develop a Comprehensive Work-From-Home Strategy. One great reason to offer work from home is that you have the ability to recruit some of your organization’s biggest “fans,” regardless of their location. If you offer part time or flex time, you could have highly enthusiastic providers of information – and raving fans – who support your solutions or services. The customer experience these fans deliver could be very meaningful.

Use analytics not just for customer projects, but also for agent performance and metrics. Many companies use in depth analysis for customers, but more straight forward measurements for agents (AHT, quality score, Adherence etc.) Look at ways you can analyze agent performance more to impact customer experience. Identify which associates have the best cross selling abilities? Use their recorded interactions to train others. Who are the agents with best overall cx abilities?  Have “gold” and “platinum” customers (highest value customers) routed to them since they are top in delivery of CX. Drive pilots of business changes based on analysis/date- and “go big” with winning ideas. Also explore further: how can you provide different levels of service based on the “value” of your clients to your business.

Drive customer experience excellence while also handling call-types that are more and more complex. One organization is leveraging contact recording and speech analytics to determine the reason for calls that fall into the highest 10th percentile of average handle time, which are the longest calls. We can’t solve everything, but we believe that if we can “fix” the issue(s) that cause the top three to four call types, we can free up resources and focus that will help us enhance the customer experience.

Build the Feeling of an In-Store Experience Online. Meet customers at the right moment when they are challenged. Know when they are about to defect. Provide the support they need when they need it. (How are you doing in this area? One idea is to implement a journey map project as mentioned above.)

Consider an Automation Pilot. Organizations are under pressure to increase processing efficiency and productivity, reduce errors, cut operational expenses, and maintain security and regulatory compliance. Key advancements in the areas of robots/bots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are creating opportunities to service and engage with customers like never before.

Organizations should consider automating repetitive and time-consuming processes, allowing employees to focus on more complex tasks, cross-selling and delivering a personalized experience. The net: position automation as beneficial—and not a threat to your employees’ jobs.

Do you have some creative or best practices ideas to add? We’d love to hear those, too! Help us continue the conversation and submit your idea on Twitter by using the hashtag #CustEngLive. You can also follow and tag us on Twitter @ExecsInTheKnow and @Verint.

The post CRS Vegas – Customer Engagement LIVE! Executive Summary appeared first on Execs In The Know.

The following is a guest blog from Coveo. 

The overwhelming majority of support leaders have recognized that their organizations’ self-service channels are their customers’ most preferred method for getting support (and that assisted service has become something they want to avoid). Customers want to find the answers to their questions independently and conveniently. As such, 97% of companies are investing in improving their customers’ self-service experience in 2017.

Self-service is dramatically more cost effective than other service channels, both in cost per resolution, and because it reduces the overall case load on contact centers. According to TSIA, phone and email support are each well over 100x more expensive per incident than web self-service, while chat costs over 30x more. Read more about that here.

New technologies are making it possible to create an intelligent self-service experience – one that is easy, relevant, and intuitive – that can generate results quickly.

For example, WatchGuard Technologies created an intelligent self-service experience, that improved its case deflection rate from three to 11 percent within only four months.

Customer satisfaction is of utmost importance to WatchGuard. The company provides several customer support options, including a 24/7 call center, and a wide range of online technical resources such as a knowledge base, technical documentation, video tutorials, product datasheets and user forums. However, before implementing an intelligent self-service solution – and despite all their available resources – the self-service capabilities were still falling short. Results from a TSIA Benchmark Review helped them realize that their self-service site was not intuitive to their customers and there was no easy way to search and filter through all the information.

Watch Joanne Miller, Managing Director of Product Training and Publications at WatchGuard Technologies, explain her journey to intelligent self-service in this video.

Making self-service easy.

Your customers expect to be able to find the answers they need with minimal effort. Unifying your content and making it searchable allows them to do so. A unified index consolidates all of your organization’s information from across your entire ecosystem and creates a single hub that puts relevant information at your customer’s’ fingertips. Intelligent search taps into that index to find exactly what is being searched and delivers the answers your customers need, when they need them.

Making self-service relevant.

Offering access to case-resolving content is an essential first step, but self-service is even more effective when the content is relevant and proactively recommended to each customer based upon their unique situation.

By analyzing each customer’s real-time site activity, product and service history, and other profile characteristics, your intelligent self-service site can automatically deliver contextually relevant information that has proved helpful to other similar customers in the past. The relevance of results self-tunes through techniques that weigh results based upon implicit and explicit contextual factors.

Making self-service intuitive.

With the use of machine learning, intelligent self-service solutions offer predictive insights that are characterized by the most relevant information and content being anticipated, suggested and recommended. Intuitive self-service continuously adapts and evolves based on the interactions of other users with the self-service site in real-time and provide valuable insights. These insights allow your organization to automatically make contextually relevant recommendations, that promote products and offers for add-on, upsells and cross-sells.

If your executive team has considered or committed to improving your organization’s customer service this year, you’ll want to make sure the company’s dollars are put where they can make the biggest impact. Intelligent self-service unquestionably offers the highest and most compelling return on investment. By enabling your people, processes and technology to work together, your intelligent self-service site can be rolled out and show improvements in as little as three months.

To learn more about intelligent self-service and how your executive team can build it into their 2017 plans, download our eBook, Case Deflection and Self-Service Success.

For more on this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Las Vegas – February 6-8, 2017 at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, NV.

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Traditionally, user-focused activities have been conducted by specialists who either move from research to design directly themselves, or who pass the baton to others. This is partly a factor of history, but with UX now in the business mainstream it’s increasingly important to bring others closer to customers and their lives. Collaboration with stakeholders is king, but how do you do this smartly when we all have too much to do and too little time to do it in?

Why is collaboration so important?

Often product managers and those responsible for success are primarily understanding their customers via metrics such as CSAT and NPS. These are deliberately simple, but create a challenge in understanding the why behind the what, which is crucial for identifying low-level change that makes a difference.

Involving users is the key to overcoming this, but techniques for doing so owe a huge debt to an academia and rigour in experimental design. Anything involving real users or customers is moderated by specialists, with stakeholders disconnected behind a one-way mirror or getting their understanding from an after-the-fact synthesis. There are very good reasons for this, as anyone who has seen stressed product managers observe their ideas being casually dismissed in a user session can testify.

However as UX moves out of labs and into mainstream business, UX activities can’t be solely conducted on this basis. There are too few UX professionals, who are in evermore demand as it becomes a mainstream concern. Also, an increasingly multi-touchpoint world means that knowledge needed to make products more effective for their users becomes increasingly diffuse.

So why doesn’t it happen more?

Most product owners I’ve met are smart and keen to understand their audiences as much as possible, but commitment is variable. Making time is the key challenge. But there are a number of ways to bring them close to users and it’s important to offer options that are easy to access and calibrated to the time available.

Some suggested activities

Smart observation of user sessions

User research is often conducted in viewing facilities designed to make observation simple and comfortable. However, stakeholders often don’t have the time to watch them all.

You can help those dropping in by using post-it notes to construct a running analysis on the walls so anyone dipping in and out of sessions can get a concise understanding of what’s been happening.

If stakeholders can’t attend, sessions can be securely video-streamed live, or made available online afterwards. Time is always a pressure, so we’ve found its very useful to provide a one-two sentence summary of each session, pointing users towards key moments.

Attending ethnographic research

It’s becoming ever-more useful to understand user needs by observing them in their own environment. We’ve seen some revelatory moments for clients when they come with us. For example, the moment one client saw users find a helpdesk number via web search, rather than the Help Centre that had been built for them. They’d previously been mystified by CSAT complaints that the number was hard to find (it was on the Help Centre home page), until they saw in real time the many steps needed to reach that content.

Inviting stakeholders can give them a deeper understanding of user needs, but there are practicalities as observers meet them face-to-face. An effective observer briefing is very important in helping observers to attend without unduly influencing whats happening. We’ve also found it’s helpful to give observers a role and reason for being there (from the user perspective). Photos and video are immensely useful artefacts to gather, so giving observers the role of capturing these can be very helpful for all concerned.

Involving stakeholders in user diaries

Online user diaries are an immensely helpful way of capturing relevant user behavior over time. Diaries can be shared with stakeholders, to help them build their understanding, ideally in daily chunks. User photos taken by smartphones can be a particularly interesting and easily digested dip into user lives in unexpected ways. For example, on one project users supplied screenshots from an app which answered a design question we weren’t aware of – should they optimize for landscape or portrait views?

Stakeholders can also be encouraged to join diary studies as participants. While care is required in handling their results, diary participation can help even the most knowledgeable product owners reflect more on use.

Involving stakeholders and users in workshops

User needs and design workshops, synthesizing user experiences and identifying next steps are typically conducted without users being present. This is a missed opportunity. For example, in journey mapping workshops, we’ve seen stakeholders often able to identify customer touchpoints and possible issues, but have a much harder time understanding customer impact and so make changes that will really make a difference.

If you are trying to understand a user challenge, prioritize these, or design solutions, it can be immensely helpful to have real users participating in the exercise. We’ve seen vague design ideas discarded for internal reasons which triumphantly re-emerge and develop after working with customers. It requires careful briefing and facilitation, but it’s rare for participants to come away from these and not be genuinely stimulated by the event, particularly around emotive issues such as complaints handling or anything involving health.

Create informal programmes to understand users

Product managers, IT, Marketing and Operations staff may all be true professionals, but working on products they’ve not directly experienced themselves. Encouraging product use and particularly informally observing real use before a project starts can build invaluable empathy and knowledge.

A great example of informal product observation is the Follow Me Home programme run by Intuit, which has helped them to create industry-leading software. Staff members are encouraged to periodically visit real customers using their products.

Encourage a user-centred culture

Even periodic customer visits require a commitment and desire to understand the customer experience first-hand, so those involved need to perceive a value and make the customer experience the responsibility of all staff.

Internal training, mentoring and skills building workshops can be an important activity for a UX team. It increases commitment and also equips product teams with some basic skills to do some of their own research. While their time and capability to do so may be more limited, the more customer research, the better the product or service will be.

For more on this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Las Vegas – February 6-8, 2017 at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, NV.

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The following is a guest blog by Simon Herd, Director of Design Research at Sutherland Labs. For more information on Sutherland Labs, visit http://www.sutherlandlabs.com/. 

Many organizations have set up customer experience (CX) programs in the last 5 years, and they’re to be congratulated as it’s an important step to becoming an experience-led business.

CX programs don’t realize ultimate impact immediately, they have to prove themselves and earn trust within the organization and become true masters of their domain. Furthermore, the massive demand for talented CX professionals means that it can be difficult to get the right capability up and running quickly.

But once you have your team in place, how do you make sure resources are being directed in the right areas? Here are a few pointers for executives to watch for to help prioritize where CX capabilities should be directed to increase impact.

1. NPS/CSat scores but don’t have a clear sense of the why

NPS, CSat and other metrics are great as a warning signal of troubled waters, but they are limited in terms of understanding the ‘why’ – what’s motivating a positive or negative score? Engaging directly with customers to get to this ‘why’ – how people use services, when and where – gives context not only to negative scores, but also allows organizations to understand and build on positive experiences. Complementary activities such as social media analysis can add weight, but closer collaboration between CX and analytics teams is key to realizing a holistic view of the entire customer experience.

2. Journey maps that have been created without direct user engagement

Customer journey maps are an invaluable tool for aligning vision and road mapping the ideal customer experience. However, maps created only involving internal stakeholders, or using desk research and analytics can miss key insights and opportunities. If your organization has created maps in this way, they may not be in line with customer needs or priorities and there’s a need to get up close and personal with your customers.

3. Organization has too many customer journeys

If you have a journey map for your web experience, a journey map for your mobile experience, and yet another for your in-store experience you may be missing the bigger picture. It’s a common problem with internally focused CX teams and can be a symptom of being product (inside-out) rather than customer (outside-in) focused. Joining up all your customer experiences will help you frame your customer experience strategy and prioritize for impact.

4. Customer journeys are outdated

Remember that journey maps have a limited life span. Just as people’s behavior changes, and new products and services disrupt the competitive landscape, so too will your customer journeys. Journey maps don’t need to be constantly updated but setting realistic evaluation points will help capture the true current experience, and allow you to reframe and rethink your CX strategy.

5. CX teams lack staff who have a background in human behavior

New teams may be formed of members from product manager and marketing-related roles. These are great skills to have represented, but it’s crucial to go beyond this. The skills and mindset to understand human needs, motivations and behaviors are critical to identifying and prioritizing which design changes will have the biggest impact. For example, understanding ‘Motivation’ may not sound like it has a big business benefit, but motivation actually dictates how far customers will persist with a sub optimal product.

6. CX activity is focused at a product or channel level

Many months spent dedicating a team to developing an amazing mobile app can be severely undermined if the wider experience, such as phoning the contact center, is poor. Successful CX strategies seek to understand and optimize the entire customer journey.

7. Customer view based on demographics not needs, motivations and behavior

Behavior based personas based on real research insights provide the best way to understand what matters to your customer, and how to design for them. Traditional demographics are certainly an important element but more secondary when designing to improve customer experience.

8. No time spent observing customers use your products and services

Even the shortest period of time spent watching real use by real customers can provide a valuable reality check to all levels of stakeholders, from developer to CTO.

9. You and your teams don’t use your own products

Question why? This can be a telling indication of something that could be improved, and help align support for change. Aspire to inspire your teams.

10. International organization, but services haven’t adapted to local cultures

Small things can make or break you internationally and what’s acceptable in your culture may not be in others. For example, we recently observed cultural differences regarding privacy in Japan. Japanese customers were horrified if the last 4 digits of their credit card were shown online, whereas European audiences find it helpful.

For more information on customer journey mapping and where to start, join us November 2, 2016 for our webinar “Customer Journey Maps: A Tool When you Want Real Change.” Register now! 

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There are only two ways to build a business: retain existing customers and acquire new ones. Great customer service and satisfaction are the key to both because most customers are acquired through positive word of mouth. So you would expect most companies to be fully focused on providing exceptional customer service and experiences, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Every two years, Dialog Direct partners with CCMC (customer care measurement & consulting), the W.P Carey School of Business at Arizona State University and the Center for Services Leadership to conduct the Customer Rage Study to gauge how customers view companies and how retailers and etailers can address areas of weakness that cause them to lose customers. The study identifies customer problems and addresses the nagging question:

Why are customer service and satisfaction still declining, despite their paramount importance and bottom line impact?

The study revealed that, in 2015, $202 billion were at risk due to customer problems with products/services. Key takeaways:

– 66% of customers with problems experienced rage

– 60% identified wasted time as the biggest damage

– Only 35% were satisfied with their first contact

– Only 14% got problem resolved upon first contact

– It takes an average of 4.2 contacts to satisfy the complainant

– Nearly one in four wants revenge

Fortunately…

– If they become satisfied, 48% of customers would still recommend the brand

– When providing both monetary and non-monetary remedies, satisfaction almost doubled from 37% to 73%

What are the implications?

There is nothing more damaging to a company or brand than negative word of mouth. And customers are far more likely to complain when unhappy than to express joy when happy. In fact, the 2015 study revealed that customers are twice as likely to express dissatisfaction than satisfaction. So it’s far easier to diminish a brand than it is to build one.

The study revealed that more than half of American households experienced a product/service problem during 2015. And 63% said they received nothing for their trouble. As a result, it is likely that companies are losing more customers than they are gaining, a prescription for declining sales and profits. Ironically, companies’ customer care programs appear to be actually doing the opposite of what they’re supposed to do.

Many companies aren’t meeting complaining customers’ expectations

 The following findings from the study help to explain why:

It isn’t that companies don’t have customer complaint solutions. The problem is that they’re not always effective. For example, the message that annoys consumers the most is all too common: “Your call is important to us; please continue to hold.” Other weak links:

– Complicated automated response menus

– Lack of customer care agent empowerment

– Understaffing so it takes longer to respond to customer

Want to know more about the study and how you can solve your customer care conundrum? To hear more about this topic and others like it, and for more information about Dialog Direct, join us at Customer Response Summit Austin (Sept. 18-20, 2016).

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The following is a guest blog written by Lorraine Schumacher, Customer Experience Evangelist at Clarabridge. Learn more about Clarabridge by visiting their website.

Starting a Customer Experience (CX) program is no small feat. For Justin MacDonald, Customer Experience Manager at Infusionsoft, he eats, breathes, and sleeps CX and is a passionate champion and change agent within his business. A Software-as-a Service (SaaS) company that serves small businesses, Infusionsoft needs to earn their customers’ loyalty each month. To keep pulse on the customer experience—whether it’s calling the support center, using the product, or any other interaction—the business relies on customer feedback from multiple sources.

MacDonald shared some key principles that he’s identified as critical to understand when building a CX program.

CX Impacts Everything

It’s critical for a CX team to work cross-functionally because CX impacts all areas of the business, and all areas of the business impact CX. A true omni-source program gathers customer feedback from all sources, on all areas of the customer experience, and then makes that information actionable.

“With entrepreneurs and small businesses, business is personal, and their experience with every element of their journeys with our company and product impacts their business, their customers, and ultimately their vote to continue business with us each month,” said MacDonald. “Customer retention, cost of acquisition, and monthly recurring revenue are all majorly impacted by customer experience. We believe we will hit our business goals because we deliver a great customer experience.”

A true believer that a strong CX program is worth its weight in gold, MacDonald adds, “You don’t make experiences better for customers so that your company benefits; your company benefits because you make customer experiences better.”

Don’t Just Serve Customers—Empower Them.

“Our top priorities around the customer experience are first to make sure they feel understood and valued,” continued MacDonald. “Because small businesses often feel unique and alone, we let them feel empowered and by their partnership with us – not just by our software, but by our services and relationship with them dedicated to their success.”

This principle also applies to B2C companies. Empowering customers to share their feedback on their preferred channel, and to truly impact the business is critical. And on an even more personal level, a process for engaging with customers and closing the loop goes a long way.

Make Data-driven Decisions.

“We implemented Clarabridge about a year ago to feed customer insights to key strategic recipients who have an appetite and an influence to affect positive change in the customer experience and product,” said MacDonald. “All the way from the C-suite to the support floor – we harness champions everywhere we identify them. We currently flow customer sentiment from our NPS surveys and our new customer kick-start transactional surveys.” But it doesn’t stop there. Infusionsoft also uploads its support call NPS surveys into the platform for analysis, so they have a better understanding of the call center experience. “This provides us valuable solicited customer feedback both holistically as well as at a specific touch point in their experience to give us context on that feedback.”

According to MacDonald, the insight that comes out of these listening posts allows the company to understand customer sentiment about their product and service experiences. “It’s eye-opening and game-changing for us to see our customer base in unique segments. It has confirmed our previous beliefs and data in some places and busted myths we once held to be true.”

Because a data-driven approach is so critical to Infusionsoft’s CX program, they’ve invested heavily in implementing more and more customer feedback data sources into their program. They’re growing and maturing their program by going from solicited (survey) feedback to unsolicited feedback that includes customers, end users, partners, and employees.

Tell Stories That Make an Impact

While data is essential, the key to impacting true change is making that data personal. Pulling out individual customer stories and telling those stories in a relatable language is immensely powerful when communicating customer pain points.

“Part of the art and science of CX and Voice of the Customer (VoC) is telling transformational stories tailored to a specific audience, and rooting those stories in the reality of your customers,” said MaDonald. “Our company is continuing to mature to embrace the need to truly put our customers at the center, and it is that shift that is the greatest accomplishment of our VOC program. We are playing the long game.”

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016.

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