How to Argue Customer Experience Data is Worth the Expense

I've Got Customer Experience Data. What Now?

So you are getting ready to update the C-Suite on your customer experience metrics. You’ve collected lots of customer experience data, you have a bunch of insights, perhaps you have a deck of beautiful slides, filled with graphs and tables and statistically significant differences. But your biggest challenge is in being able to influence this team of execs to take action on what you tell them. You need your CEO to walk out of your presentation remembering the key facts on the customer experience and be motivated to do something with them. How do you ensure you are successful? The easy answer is also the hardest to execute: make it simple, make it easy to understand, and make it personal. In short, tell your audience a story.

How We Share Our Customer Experience Data

A well-designed Voice of the Customer feedback system will generate innumerable stories of service successes and failures – customer delight and frustration. To make your presentation powerful and long-remembered, find an individual customer’s story that exemplifies the point you wish to make. Doing so turns data into understanding – it becomes about real people and their real experiences with your business. Show their face. Show their words.

Bring the data to life with a human connection that will leave the audience with a lasting memory. By doing this, your executives will move from your presentation into a discussion about helping customers. The ideal scenario is to finish your storytelling and listen to a dialogue that shows awareness, understanding and commitment to act. The CEO doesn’t end your presentation with a cursory ‘thank you for your time’ but rather launches into a discussion along the lines of: “Our client Tom with the tire business in Ithaca is struggling with this issue and we heard that 14% of all of our clients are facing the same challenge. What are we going to do to help them?”

–Kate Feather