There was a time that businesses relied on anonymous, aggregated customer feedback as the sole input for their customer strategies. And that time is quickly fading away, along with once-common practices like writing checks to pay monthly bills and physically signing mortgage application documents.
Technology has created a new age. It has driven innovation in banking, and it has tranformed how businesses can ask for, and act on, customer feedback. Online surveys can capture feedback from customers in real-time and tie it to a specific event. Companies can act on that feedback to forge stronger connections with their customers—based upon individual customer reactions to elements of the customer experience.
Taking individual action on customer feedback is the final discipline growth banks are adopting ahead of non-growth banks. In fact, it's the discipline with the greatest adoption gap between growth and non-growth banks. (42 points worth!)
For this reason, we're going to dig deeply into the various aspects of continuous, non-anonymous customer feedback programs. We'll also go over customer experience management solutions, including Voice of the Customer programs.
Let's begin with a discussion on the various outcome measures available for you to track.
What’s an Outcome Measure?
An outcome measure is a question, or set of questions, that serves as an indicator of the strength of your experience. Simply put, if more customers are agreeing with your outcome measure, you'll know that your experience is improving—and your institution is also getting stronger.
The highest performing banks set clear goals for improvement around their outcome measures, as discussed in our previous section on goal setting.
What Makes a Good Outcome Measure?
Good question. There are a few characteristics of a good customer experience performance measure:
- The measure correlates positively with business results. In choosing your outcome measure, you want to choose one that, if managed effectively, will lead to achievement of your stated goals. Does an increase in CSAT (i.e., customer satisfaction) lead to more referrals? Does a positive movement in your CLI (i.e., Customer Loyalty Index) lead to increased revenue?
- The measure is used by others in your industry. It's easier to sell a metric to leadership if other high-performing institutions are using it. Adopting an industry standard means you can get agreement quickly, and it also makes it easy to benchmark your own bank against others.
- The measure is easily understood internally. If your choice of metrics requires a 100-page manual or a three-credit course at a local university, then it's likely you've chosen the wrong one. A metric that everyone understands is a metric that everyone can act on.
- The measure connects to your customer Wows and Woes. In developing customer understanding, you should gain a strong sense of what customers like and dislike about your customer experience. You can use that information to help you improve customer experience within your bank. By choosing a metric that not only correlates with bank performance, but also the foundation of your customer experience strategy, you can drive performance and improve customer experience.
What Are Options for Outcome Measures?
You have a few. Check out this table, which summarizes four common metrics and provides a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each:
Want More Information About Customer Feedback Measurement?
If you want to learn more about Voice of the Customer (VOC) and what to look for when considering launching your own VOC program, download our free eBook by clicking the image below.
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