CX Solution: Our 3-Steps Approach

• CX

The term CX (customer experience) has been flying around in our businesses every day, today. However, there are many companies that are still simply puzzled by its definitions/scope or struggling to implement the “CX” aspect effectively into their business.

According to the survey Nikkei Research conducted in January 2021, whether belonging to a BtoB company or a BtoC company, the top important issue in business among 1,000 businesspersons in the metropolitan areas of Tokyo/Kansai/Chukyo in Japan was “responding to the changing customer needs” (64%). It nearly doubled the second place; “proceed further digitalization for increasing productivity” (33%). Although over half were aware of the importance of CX, those who already are executing CX related measures were below 20%.

We must understand about our customers much deeper to increase profits -- by making more loyal customers, prevent churns, and outshine from competitors to attract potential non-customers. In order to do so, CX is an efficient perspective to install.

Why is CX important?

Many companies encounter the situation that their market is mature and is hard to differentiate from one another. From a CX viewpoint, other than the functionality of the products/services, the value made in each step of the customer experience process, from awareness to usage, will be focused.

While another issue is the effect of COVID-19. The pandemic accelerated digitalization, and our lifestyles, the way of consumption, has changed drastically. So, looking at customer behavior once again is important.

Some companies have run many customer satisfaction surveys over the years and may not have gotten the desired outcome from it. Legacy customer satisfaction surveys are often designed in a company-centric mind, and in many cases, it captures only limited fragments of the whole customer behavior. By focusing on CX, you would be able to understand your customer deeper, and most likely to figure out how to differentiate/out-shine from other competitors.

What is the value of CX?

There are two aspects.

#1. Understand your customers’ actions.
#2. Understand your customers’ emotions.

Through #1, you might get a further question as “Is the contact-point enough?”, or from #2, “Where and what should we provide?” This is truly the process of understanding the entire customer experience, and fixing the point of pain ahead of time.

When you do so, you can strengthen the relationship by improving what you provide based on the customer’s value, resulting in a reduction of churns or enhancement of loyalty.

The key story is that the ultimate goal of the CX program is to increase profits -- not a vague or fuzzy outcome.

Differentiating your business by the customer’s perspective

Our CX solution has 3 steps.

1. Customer Journey Mapping

• Overlook the customer journey from the customer’s perspective.
• Visualize the risks of customer’s point of pain by discovering pain points.

2. CX Survey

• Analyze the pain points and extract the priority areas.
• Quantify the impact on sales gains/losses.

3. Action Planning

• Focusing on the top priority of the point of pain

　・What value should we provide to customers?
　・What preventive measures can we take?
　・How can we stop customer churns and protect revenue?
　・What change do we need in the business processes/organization system?

Why do we focus on the point of pain?

Points of pain are -- “betraying your customers"

No matter how great you think your business is, customers will feel uneasiness and the point of pain, elsewhere. The complaints you are receiving are only the tip of the iceberg. You will not be able to hear most of the “points of pain” that actually occurred from just inbound complaints. While it is easy to imagine that those “points of pain” are negative emotions and can be a trigger to customer churn.

So then, would creating “remarkable experiences” be better? Short answer, NO. It is important but putting effort in building such experiences eventually leads to high expectations of customers and would significantly increase operational costs.

Firstly, you should set the goal to make your customers feel that your product/service is provided as they’ve expected. The “happy experiences” will be fostered afterwards by transparency and trust, not betraying.

If you would like to know more about our service, please read the following resources, or simply contact us.

Nikkei Research CX Solution whitepaper download

FAQ over CX

What are the differences between customer satisfaction surveys and CX surveys?

Customer satisfaction surveys are effective to see the service quality level or identify major complaints and problems.
CX surveys are effective when you want to improve the customer experience including the product/service, strengthen the relationships, and plan actionable measures to be competitive and increase profits.
Customer satisfaction surveys collect responses of respondents’ evaluations reflecting their subjective expectations, while CX surveys measure the experiences of the points of pain in an objective perspective, resulting the outcome to be simpler and more understandable.

Can we stick to our current customer satisfaction survey and add questions over the points of pain?

YES! Many customer satisfaction surveys measure overall satisfaction and NPS (Net Promoter Score) and set those as KPI, exploring the cause by drilling down with granular satisfaction elements. The point of pain factor can be used as that alternative.

We feel confident in reducing the negative factors (complaints) by resolving the points of pain, but can we improve loyalty or create fans?

Yes. Although, if you only whack-a-mole those points of pain, you can’t. By overlooking the customer journey map, you will be able to find why that point of pain occurred and take appropriate measures to resolve it ahead, as a company. Customer-centric strategies and actions would lead to enhancing corporate brand equity. In that context, improving loyalty and making fans can be achieved.

We want to attract new customer segments. Can we use the survey results targeted to our current customers for that purpose?

In many cases, customer satisfaction surveys that target current customers are aimed to retain those current customers. However, in the CX perspective, reviewing the current customer’s customer journey, it is possible to derive hints for approaching new customer segments. Furthermore, understanding the “point of pain” causing potential customers to leave, may lead to new customer acquisition activities.

Can BtoB companies use this CX framework?

YES! Both BtoB companies and BtoC companies can use the CX framework.
In business-to-business transactions, the players change by each stage in the process, from the person who chooses, decision-makers, to end-users. We need to consider this when doing customer journey mapping, organizing the customer contact points, and survey design/analysis.
Also, a qualitative method such as interviewing is recommended to BtoB companies that have a limited number of customers.

How can we run a CX survey when we have dedicated account managers?

In order to collect responses in a neutral way, reflecting the current situation fairly, we need to be cautious about the bias of dedicated account managers. For example, precautions should be taken such as -- request of participation from the headquarters (and not from the account managers), explain the objectives (how the results are going to be used) clearly, send to a wide distribution of customers (don’t skew to only loyal customers).

We don’t have the customer list. We have to go through an agent/distributor (trading company) to run a survey. How can we proceed?

If your product/service is not much specialized and has certain shares in the market, we can run online surveys (using panels), screening and targeting only the users of your product/service. When the incident rate is too low, as an alternative to a quantitative customer survey, we can ask the agents/distributors (trading companies) to evaluate or interview few customers and explore in a qualitative way.

There are no VOCs (voice of customers) in our company. Is it possible for us to do customer journey mapping or CX surveys?

VOC includes inquiries to call centers and websites, responses in surveys, internal interviews from teams that have customer contacts, notes from the sales department, etc. We can give you advice on efficient ways of gathering VOC.
Please contact us!