July 7, 2015

Driving CX Success

Paige O’Neill, CMO at SDL, discusses SDL’s recent survey into customer experience and explains why even ‘massive’ failures can cost less than the price of lunch to fix

Organisations are now challenged with customers’ expectations of delivering impeccably integrated customer experiences on a global scale, through every touch-point. Unfortunately, not every customer will have a positive experience with your product, service or brand. But does a disgruntled customer have to remain that way? Can you win back ex-customers?

At SDL we recently explored these questions by asking nearly 3,000 people about their biggest CX success or failure in the last decade. Interestingly, the vast majority (76 per cent) of those surveyed recalled a failure, and only 55 per cent could remember a success. Specifically, 64 per cent will stop recommending the organisation, start looking for alternative brands or actively disparage the company via word of mouth, social media, etc. What’s more, 25 per cent of the ‘massive’ failures took less than an hour to occur and less than the cost of lunch to fix.

Avoid engineering the customer journey and the experience around your internal organisational structure. From the customer’s perspective, the scale of effort needed for a solution may have little to no relation to the perceived severity of the CX failure: little things may be huge issues to the customer. Focus on delivering one face to the customer and one consistent experience so that your decisive customers receive engaging, compelling and consistent experiences at every touch-point along the buying cycle. Aligning the organisation by unifying content, people, processes and technology will enable consistent communication and experience to customers across channels, markets and languages.

The research found that the top three steps brands can take to bring a customer back after a failure include offering a genuine and personal apology, admitting the failure and offering discounts or credits related to the failure.

Check out SDL’s global CX study here.