The name says it all: we audit what your customers think of their experiences with your company. This way you can identify which experiences are excellent (repeat business as they enjoy dealing with you) and which are terrible (driving your customers away from you to your competitors).

Customer Experience Auditing is a web based application that automatically emails your customers asking them what they thought of a recent experience they have had with you. Based on their response you can gauge whether they liked the experience or whether it needs improving.

Our response rate is as high as 50%, which is an exceptionally high response rate where the industry average is usually around 3%. In fact our worst response rate is around 35%! Why is it so high? To get a high response rate the following are important:

• Immediacy - send the email as soon as possible after the customer has had the experience, ideally within 24 hours, so the experience is still fresh in your customers’ mind and is relevant to them making them willing to respond.
• Relevance - the wording of the email must relate to the experience so your customer thinks the email has been sent specifically to them. If the email is about the call centre, mention the call centre agent’s name and what the call was about – this degree of customisation is easy and as it is aimed at them they will be far more inclined to respond.
• Branding – put your logo on the email so your customer knows who it is from. If they have just had the experience with you they are more likely to open an email from you and reply to you compared to a third party asking the question on your behalf.

The emails we send to your customers are totally customisable so as far as your customers are concerned the email came from your company and they are relevant to the experience they had the day before. You create a different email template for each experience you wish to measure, so the ‘call centre’ template will be completely different to the ‘successful delivery’ template. You simply give us the information and we do all the work for you freeing you up to identifying and fixing weak areas, processes, departments, or teams in your company.

Customer experience management is the management of all the experiences your customers have using your company so they are positive enticing customers to buy from you again. Think about it; if you have a positive experience with a company you are more likely to use that company’s products and services again. But if the experience were negative, next time you would use a competitor instead as well as telling everyone about their bad experience with you.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is about managing how your customer experiences your organisation at all the touch points at which they interact with you (salespeople, call centre agents, advertising, events, debt collectors, brochures, reception, and websites for example) to build brand equity and improve your long-term profitability. You cannot avoid the customer having an experience with your company, so both the employees who ‘man’ these touch points and the environment are key determinants of the customer experience. As Jan Carlzon, former president of Scandinavian Airlines, pointed out in his 1986 book Moments of Truth: “Any time a customer comes into contact with any aspect of a business, however remote, it is an opportunity to form an impression.”

Getting a grasp on the customer’s experience at every touch point from marketing to after-sales support can be a slippery task. Yet without this understanding, how can organisations pursue customer experience management?

Experiences are individual, which is why complaints management, feedback, voice of the customer, satisfaction studies, and loyalty measures are so important. All of these are useful tools in trying to understand what the customer is experiencing and how favourable that experience might be for the organisation.

The ultimate goal of Customer Experience Management is to make people feel good about themselves and their supplier. If you do it often enough then trust, loyalty and advocacy are likely to build as customers increasingly feel it’s worth investing time, emotions, money and - in the case of word of mouth - their reputation in your organisation.

Today’s customers are becoming more demanding and often drive a hard bargain. They utilise multiple channels and touch points to interact with your organisation during their life cycle (customer journey). If you are serious about differentiating your organisation, you cannot ignore the negative impact that inconsistent and piecemeal customer experiences will have on your business.

Your perception of a supplier’s value is the sum of your experiences with that company. So the amount of money you are willing to spend with that supplier is influenced by the sum of all your experiences with that company. If your experiences are negative you will spend less with that supplier and more with its competitors (low wallet share). If your experiences are very positive you will spend more with that supplier than other suppliers (high wallet share).

The next logical step is to say the value of a company is the sum of all its customers’ experiences. In a competitive environment with lots of alternate suppliers, if a company gives poor service relative to its competitors, its revenue will be less than its competitors that give a good service. So if your customers’ experiences are positive your company will grow, and if your customers’ experiences are negative your company will decline.

Building on this, if you want your company to grow you have to make sure all your customers’ experiences are positive. If you want to grow faster than the competition, grow your market share or grow faster than the industry average, you have to ensure your customers’ experiences are better than your competitors or the industry average. The company with the best customer experiences will grow faster at the expense of its competitors.

Before you can manage the experiences your customers have with you, you need to measure them to identify the good and weak experiences within your company. You have to measure all your customers’ ‘moments of truth’ where they ‘touch’ your company so you can start focusing on improving the poor processes or departments or teams and emulating those that the customers love.

To really understand your business you should be able to measure customer experiences for all your divisions, departments, regions, etc. This way you can identify good stores and poorly performing ones so you can replicate the good performing store’s customer approach across all divisions. Likewise you can identify strong divisions and those that could be destroying value.

You need to be able to measure individuals or teams so you can identify strong people and reward them appropriately and identify weak people and teams so they can undergo additional training before they scare your customers away.

Also measure processes to see whether you have developed these processes for company efficiency reasons but not necessarily effectiveness reasons (customer satisfaction).

Customer Experience Auditing is the ideal web based tool to measure what your customer thinks about your company at those touch points.

Customer Experience Auditing allows you to send personalised emails to your customers who have interacted with you in the last 24 hours asking them on a scale from 0 to 10 what they thought of the experience. The email has your logo on it and a list of options your customers can click on indicating their perception of the service they received within the email so they don't have to follow a link to a website to answer. As soon as they click on the appropriate response, it is captured by our website allowing you to immediately view the results if you so wish.

The emails you send to the customers can be personalised depending on how much data you have about that experience. If you capture a lot of data for an experience you will be able to create a highly personalised email template to be sent to everyone who had that experience, so the person receiving the email can relate to it because it is about them and their experience. In the email template you insert fields within the text which we will populate using mail merge technology when we create the emails. For example, if the experience is about the call centre and you capture the name of the call centre agent, what the broad category was about and specific issues covered in the conversation, you will be able to craft an email asking them what they thought about that specific call centre agent (insert the agent’s name) when you phoned in about the specific problem (insert the problem) they had in (insert the name of the city) etc. This makes the customer far more willing to respond to the email compared to a generic email asking them what they thought of the call centre agent they talked to with no name mentioned.

You can also put your company logo or banner across the top of the email customising it even further and also increasing the response rate as it is an email from a company they dealt with recently.

From the data you receive, just by looking at the averages for each variable, like the call centre agents, or the stores or sales reps, you will be able to very quickly identify those that have an average score higher than others. And if you do this on a daily basis you will be able to pick up trends. Let’s face it, everyone is allowed to have a bad day, and daily averages will show people performing poorly for that day. But over time you will be able to pick out your key consistent performers and reward them appropriately.

Customer Experience Auditing is a web based tool operating on a monthly subscription thus freeing you of any IT purchases, hardware and software installations and potential compatibility issues with your current IT infrastructure, effectively an outsourced service. The website is easy to use:

1. You, the user, log onto our website and upload a spreadsheet of all your customer experiences to our website
2. The website sends personalised emails to your customers asking them only one question, what did they think of the experience they had with you on a scale from 0 to 10.
3. The customer replies in the email by clicking on the appropriate response within the email (they don't have to click on a link to another website or hit the reply button)
4. You, the user download the results at your convenience in an Excel or .cvs or .txt format to be analysed to identify strong and weak customer experiences.

This simplicity belies the power of the application, which has been specifically designed to overcome spam and junk mail issues ensuring the customer receives the email in their inbox so you can measure their response.

At its simplest level looking at only one experience you wish to measure, in our website you would create a category template. In that template you would write the email out indicating where you want certain fields of data inserted, for example, if you wish to measure your call centre agents’ customer friendliness, the name of the customer you are sending the email to must go after “Dear” and the name of your call centre agent go in the appropriate place. You simply insert the field name between two hyphens in the text. When the email is sent out the website will insert the appropriate names and fields from the database you upload to the website making the email personalised for that customer. You can also upload your company logo or banner for branding and to make the email more relevant to your customer as they have just been dealing with you.

You can also create a rule stating how often you wish emails to be sent to your customers for that category template. This way if customers contact you on a daily or weekly basis you can stipulate no emails get sent to a customer for the next, say, 3 months, after an email has been sent to him or her.

Once the email template has been created (less than 3 minutes work), you are now ready to upload the data to the spreadsheet. The data is created by your CRM system or your call centre management application and can be an Excel file, a comma separated file .csv. or a text file .txt. Make sure the column names are the same as the field inserts in your category template and upload the spreadsheet.

When you upload the spreadsheet you can dictate when you wish the email to be sent – date and time – which allows you to pre plan certain events if you wish.

The website will now go into operation sending the emails out at the appropriate time. The technology used ensures it is not perceived as spam and that it doesn't go to your customer’s junk mail folder.

When the customer opens the email, the email will show your logo at the top followed by your wording and below that the numbers from 0 to 10 in boxes. The customer simply clicks on the appropriate number in the box reflecting their perception of the experience and this response is registered by our website. This ease of use from your customers’ perspective increases the response rate.

To get the results, you, the user, simply log onto our website and download the data in one of three formats; Excel spreadsheet or .csv or .txt. the data is exactly like the data you uploaded except there is an additional column with the customers result. We only show those customers who have responded.

This data format allows you to identify which customers gave you excellent scores and which gave you poor ones. We strongly recommend you to call those who gave you a poor score to find out what the problem was. This way you can find out the problem and possibly fix it there and then, winning your customer over and stopping them giving you bad word of mouth advertising. Also call those who gave you a very high score to find out why they did so you can replicate that experience across your company if possible.

Net Promoter Score is sweeping the corporate world, companies are implementing this simple survey methodology. Much has been said about the power of Fred Reichheld’s book “The Ultimate Question” where he states only one question needs be asked: “Would you recommend our company to a colleague or friend?” Its appeal is its simplicity. Only one question so only one answer, not multiple questions and answers, and it can be done in-house without expensive consultants to create the questionnaire and analyse the results. The creation of Customer Experience Auditing was inspired by Net Promoter Score, mainly for its simplicity and ease of use. The biggest problem we had was you cannot ask customers every time they use your company whether they would recommend you as they would get very tired of the same question which has no relevance or tie back to the experience they had with you. Customer Experience Auditing takes this to the next level, ask one simple question and ask it about a specific experience making it relevant to that customer. If you wish you can even use the Net Promoter Score concept giving departments, divisions, teams, individuals a Net Promoter Score as our numbering is the same, from 0 to 10.

The biggest benefits of Customer Experience Auditing:

• The email is relevant to a specific experience so you can understand what the customer’s score relates to.
• The emails can be sent on a daily basis rather than once a quarter or year. This way you can keep you finger on the pulse of your business day in and day out.