This and many other issues surrounding CX were discussed during Digital Cream 2015, an exclusive invitation-only roundtable event, that provides an opportunity for senior client-side marketers to learn from each other about the latest best practice, what’s working and what’s not. 

Here we will be sharing with you some of the key insight from the day, however for the full report please download the Customer Experience Excellence Trends Briefing in association with Adobe, which is FREE to download for all registered Econsultancy users.

Measurement: using Net Promoter Score (NPS)

One of the most dominant themes at the roundtable was that of measurement, and how to make customer experience quantifiable. What tools can be used to measure CX, and who owns this measurement?

A handful of delegates regularly use Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is essentially a company loyalty metric based on how likely a customer is to recommend a company, product or service to a friend or colleague. 

Using this technique, customers can be split into ‘promoters’, ‘passive’ or ‘detractors’, based on the score they give on a scale of zero to ten. The final NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are detractors from the percentage of promoters.

Use of this technique tends to be mainly in the retail sector, using NPS after the purchase of a product rather than the interaction with a company in general. The use of NPS was advocated by those who were using it, pointing to it as a good way of valuing the customer experience at the point of sale.

Although the point was made that despite NPS providing a general score, granularity is needed to make actionable changes based on it.

Ownership of the customer experience

The customer experience involves the entire end-to-end journey of a customer’s interaction with a company; from when they first heard of the company, through to making first and repeat purchases. 

As a result, almost every team within a company will have an impact on CX – tech, marketing, product, social, customer service – all have a voice to be heard when it comes to the customer’s journey to purchase. 

Indeed, one delegate said that in their company, ‘everyone’ owned the customer experience. In essence, no one person or team is responsible for CX, but who should own the monitoring and optimisation of it?

One delegate’s answer was defiantly ‘marketing’, explaining that if the latter is the voice of the customer in the business then it should be marketing who own the customer experience.

Others split the ownership of CX into the different purchase stages, typically pre-purchase (sales, marketing, product and tech teams) and post-purchase (customer service teams).

Consistency across devices

Cross-device consistency is an ongoing problem for marketers as the number of, and variation in, different devices increases.

Responsive websites have been advocated for several years, and a recent Econsultancy/Adobe report shows that companies are on their way there, with 58% stating that they have employed responsive design across their digital properties.

However, the drivers for using different devices for consumers are different, and the journeys taken on desktop and mobile can vary dramatically.

As a result, CX consistency doesn’t necessarily mean exactly the same journey, but one where the experience feels the same and the customer’s expectations are met in the same way.

For the full report please download the Customer Experience Excellence Trends Briefing, which is FREE to download for all registered Econsultancy users.