Implementing an impactful CX initiative

CX Network, one of the global leaders in premium content for customer experience professionals, recently announced the winners of the 2021 CX Elite Awards at InMoment’s Experience Forum.

The CX Elite Awards 2021 is a celebration of outstanding CX achievements over the past year.

In this exclusive interview, CX Network talks with Fern Roberts, customer experience insight manager at Tesco, in reaction to the award win.

CX Network: What do you think is the most important thing to consider when implementing an impactful CX initiative?

Fern Roberts: It is twofold. One, getting the foundation right; the foundation being the research. So, know your customer set: what they want, why they need it, and their pain points. Additionally, know your EX program, and understand your colleagues experiences along with their pain points.

Then, pair both your customer and colleague experiences together to identify commonality between them. Often the pain points stem from the same issue, just from a different perspective.

The second is making that change. Communicating why we are changing and what it means for our colleagues who are customer facing. For the size of our operation we wanted to engage our leaders first then cascade to our store colleagues. For credibility, it is important to know our audience and build momentum by using the operational language that is familiar to our store teams. Using the customer perception data to give an understanding of why it is important to our customers and what it means for each individual

CX: How did you decide which areas to target with your CX initiative?

FR: We identified five key areas of a shopping trip that make up customer experience, and have the biggest contribution toward our customer recommends net promoter score. Through our InMoment platform, we are able to drill down to store level to measure the shopping trip. With regular analysis, we are able to highlight the two main measures that would contribute towards the customer experience the most if we were to improve across our stores. We took those measures and deep dived into the structured and unstructed data to tell us the meaning behind each customer score.

Bringing to the forefront what are the makers and breakers of our customer experience. Understanding the basics we need to get right to move our critics to fans and what we need to do to keep them there.

CX: As part of your CX initiative, you introduced individual insight packs to identify specific pain points across each shopping trip measure, within each region. What tips would you give to others looking to implement something similar?

FR:

• Understand the customer segment. You need to understand who they are, their wants and needs and how interpret and relate that to your operational colleagues in a way that makes sense to them.
• Get a good technology platform. Having a large customer perception data set is key to execute this type of progromme. A good technology platform will enable you to get the customer voice into the hands of the operation. In Tesco case its enables our office, regional and store teams to self serve the customer sentiment trends.   
• Get the survey questions right. It is always a challenge balancing survey fatigue with being data rich. Continuously reviewing our customer surveys, asking ourselves to consider what are we using the data for and what is it feeding?
• Create a buzz with your operation. Make sure the people who are going to make a difference are engaged and recognised. Working with them to design and create a plan to improve the customer experience.

CX: When using data-driven CX programs, one of the pitfalls companies come across are data silos. How did you overcome data silos when implementing your CX initiative?

FR: InMoment has been invaluable as we are able to provide thousands of employees access to CX data, personalising the access that relevant for individual store view laddering up to store groups and country region. It is a great tool for getting data into the hands of the people that need it.

Empowering store managers with the relevant information to put routines in place to improve their customer satisfaction (that may differ among stores) making sure what they see is simple, easy and intuitive.

CX: As part of your customer-centric initiative, you created a precise picture of your customers. Our readers have admitted they struggle to understand customers’ digital behavior. Can you provide any tips for decoding consumers’ digital behavior to improve customer retention?

FR: We run separate online and in-store CX surveys, knowing that the experience differs for the customer. However, both journeys contribute to our overall brand perception.

Knowing your customers persona and their drivers for each channel will help understand what behaviours need to be measured. We find it helpful to use similar questions in our online survey to our in-store survey, allowing us to compare and contrast the experiences between in-store and online customer. For example an easy shopping trip experience will be as important for each channel but what the detail.

Using analytics and UX tools will compliment your CX survey. Building up multiple sources of data including call centre/ complaint line data alongside qualitative techniques will help build out digital customer personas/segments. Contributing towards an understanding of online/digital behaviour and building new propositions.

Read more about the CX Elite Awards at InMoment's Experience Forum here.