Customer Experience Glossary

Business Drivers

These have a major impact on the performance of your business. These can be a resource, process or condition that is vital for the continued success and growth of a business. Business drivers vary from business to business and can be influenced by both internal and external factors.

Some examples include:

  • The number of leads that come into the business
  • Machine down time
  • Number of cash registers open per hour

There can be many key business drivers, so it is important to focus on drivers that are important to your businesses in terms of influencing:

  • Growth
  • Costs
  • Cash-flow
  • Customer satisfaction

Big Data

Big data has become a buzzword for a number of years now. This term is referring to enormous data sets that can be analysed through technology to reveal trends, patterns and associations.

Using Big Data in customer experience, it is looking at customers’ behavioural and transactional data in order to understand their motivations.

A common way is to marry up transactional data with customer feedback data to understand how different variables impact upon a customer’s experience. This can in turn uncover trends around purchasing behaviour and motivation.

Closed Loop Feedback

Closing the Loop on Feedback is the process in which you follow up with customers after they complete a survey or feedback form. This process enables companies to continue the dialogue with a customer. An essential part of closed-loop feedback is the ability and commitment to act on the feedback.

Organisations that utilise closed-loop feedback programs are able to attain better ROI from their customer experience management programs than their competitors through improved customer advocacy and loyalty which leads to strong financial returns.

Customer Centric (also customer centricity)

Customer Centrics refers to being customer focused. Specifically, if a business says that its goal is around customer centricity, what they are saying is that they are dedicated or pursuing the focus of customers at the centre of their operations, philosophy or ideas.

Customer Driven

Often you may hear terms such as “customer-driven change” or “customer-driven marketing”, this is all about offerings, strategies, and plans that are driven by customer demand, or expectation.

Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is how a company engages with customers and vice versa. It can be an initiative led by either the customer or company and can happen online or offline and can happen simultaneously.

Customer Experience (CX)

Customer experience is the term used to describe the experience between a customer and a brand/business over the lifetime of the relationship. The experience is broken down into Transactions, Episodes and Overall Relationships with the brand.

Customer Experience is a very broad term that now encompasses all aspects between an organisation and their customer.

Customer Experience Management (CEM)

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is a process or concept that involves improving an organisation’s relationship with its customers through the management and measurement of customer transactions, episodes and the overall relationship with the brand. Companies who manage customer experience well utilise technology, strategies and resources to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, which ultimately leads to an increase in revenue. Happy customers equal returning customers.

Customer Experience Program

A Customer Experience Program is a project aimed at improving the customer experience. A customer experience program utilises a combination of technology, strategies, and processes to positively contribute to customer experience.

A good customer experience program should enable you to measure and analyse customer feedback and experiences. An even better program will allow you to take immediate action on that feedback in order to improve the customer experience in real-time.

Customer Journey

The customer journey is the culmination of all the experiences that your customers go through when interacting with your company or brand. It covers the entire process from the initial need/awareness, to contact with your company, all the way through purchasing and the after sales service leading all the way up to repurchase. It is the entire experience of being a customer.

Customer Journey Mapping

The process in documenting or mapping out the customer journey. There are several different models and approaches to customer journey mapping, however in all approaches it is about understanding how a customer interacts with your company or brand, and then identifying the gaps or pain points in order to improve the customer journey.

Data Visualisation

Data visualisation is the presentation of data in a pictorial or graphical way. It enables large data sets to be presented in a way that is easy to visually digest. It enables decision makers to see analytics presented visually so that they can grasp new ideas and identify trends and patterns.

Employee NPS (eNPS)

Employee NPS is an approach to employee engagement that is based on the Net Promoter System. This approach was developed based on the idea that happy, engaged employees ultimately leads to loyal customers, and that the annual employee surveys didn’t meet the needs of most companies. As a result, Net Promoter® practitioners have developed an approach to employee engagement based on the Net Promoter System® itself. They systematically identify and strive to improve forms of employee engagement and workplace characteristics that have the biggest potential impact on customer loyalty.

Net Promoter Score® (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score was developed by Bain & Company, Satmetrix Systems and Fred Reichheld, and is based on the following question:

“How likely are you to recommend [insert brand] to your friend/colleagues?”

What the respondent sees is a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being highly unlikely and 10 being highly likely.

Depending on the score that people select, they are then categorised, or grouped into “buckets”.

The people that select:

  • 0-6 are Detractors
  • 7-8 are Passives or Neutral
  • 9-10 are Promoters

The Net Promoter Score is calculated as the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of Detractors and is expressed as a percentage score. The higher the final score the better it is.

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NPS Program

NPS Program is the process of establishing a way to measure and track Net Promoter Score over time. It also incorporates the fluctuation over time to understand the reasons behind the movement of the score.

The success of a NPS program is often defined by the upward trend of the score over time. With a number of unknown conditions and external factors, it may be hard to control but having an NPS program in place means tracking and understanding these issues are easy.

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Omnichannel

Omnichannel in customer experience refers to having a presence at every channel your customers can engage with you. As shoppers today are savvy and opt for convenience, most retailers have adopted some form of omnichannel strategy to cater to this.

Omnichannel experience is also a hot topic as more retailers are aware of making the experience from one channel to another seamless.

Relationship NPS

Relationship NPS is specific to the overall relationship to the brand. The score measured is used to determine loyalty to the brand. Whereas transactional and episodic NPS is measuring specifically to the transaction or the job to be done.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is the ability of a machine to determine based on the verbatim if the customer is happy or not. This is often tied back into their NPS program or customer experience program to automatically segment and alert the right people if an issue arises.

Speech Analytics

A rather new technology designed to analyse calls to gather customer information and improve communication. This is mostly adopted by call centres to extract information and understand the nature of the interaction between a customer and the organisation.

Social Engagement

Social engagement is the participation within a community or society. In today’s terms, it can also refer to social media communities. As more channels become available, we are seeing new ways of communities forming. For those voicing their opinion on your product or service has become significantly easier.

Social Listening

As mentioned above, with more channels available, social listening tools are becoming a popular commodity. Often by listening to the social channels, it can be a way to discover new opportunities to improve customer experience.

Text Analytics

A tool utilised by NPS and CEM technologies. Text Analytics can mine through large quantities of data and identify trends and insights without human intervention. This allows the data that is presented to be filtered, segmented, and categorised.

Touch point

A touch point is any interaction between you and the customer. This could be a phone call to your shop, a visit, a call to the call centre, technician onsite for an installation. A touch point can be a single point of contact within an episode or the overall relationship to be brand. Every touch point counts as a bad experience and could lead to a low NPS score for the episode or even for the whole brand.

Attended Touchpoint – having a person-to-person connection where the experience can be monitored and guided.

Unattended Touchpoint – where there is no control between the customer and their interaction with the business. I.e. researching about the product on sale.

Voice of the Customer (VoC)

Voice of the Customer is the commonly used term referring to the feedback your customers are giving to you. It allows you to contextualise the scores given, understand the pain and areas where your product or service can be improved.

Voice of Customer Program

The ultimate goal of a VoC program is to improve customer experience. It can be as simple as a few steps. One is listening to your customers and two is acting on their feedback. Collating and analysing the feedback can help discover common themes that influence customer experience. It allows organisations the ability to systematically improve customer experience.

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