Author: Libby Dale

Customer happiness and customer retention are closely intertwined. NPS and CSAT are two of the most important CX metrics we use to assess what customers think about our organisations. Unfortunately, neither, on their own, allows brands to be truly objective in their understanding about customer happiness. The difference between happiness and satisfaction A dissatisfied customer is likely to feel frustrated or annoyed about an aspect of your service. Service delivery may have been a bit slow. Or a minor mistake was made. The incident may be quickly resolved and soon forgotten. They have no real emotional connection with the experience.…

When was the last time you were really impressed by a brand’s customer service team? Was it because they resolved a problem quickly or was it because they do something above and beyond what you expected? For most companies, customer service tends to be a reactive and passive response to enquiries and complaints. Reacting to customer needs in a quick and efficient manner is an essential element of providing good customer service. Yet it only goes so far. Proactive customer experience is about identifying and resolving customer issues and needs before the customer becomes aware of them. Buyers are more…

Only 5% of customers with a problem will contact your organisation. The rest will just leave. Customer churn prediction based purely on analysing data from the contact centre or from customer satisfaction and NPS surveys, will provide a very limited view of what’s going on. Your analysis and churn prevention strategies will be skewed to a very small segment of your customers. The impact of customer churn is having a devastating impact on the bottom line for many organisations. Taking the Australian health Insurance sector as an example, the industry experiences around 10 percent of policy holders switching providers each…

In terms of customer service, most companies tend to be reactive. This tendency stems from fear. Many executives I’ve met have demonstrated fear when it comes to proactively contacting customers. They are afraid that if they poke the bear, they will encourage the customer to re-think the entire relationship and ultimately leave. This fear can permeate throughout the entire organisation. Slowly but surely a brand that is unwilling to face its fears and become proactive with its customer service, will fail to compete and risk its very survival. Research demonstrates that for every customer who complains, there are 26 other unhappy…

Happy customers are cheaper to service, less price sensitive and less likely to churn. Customer happiness goes beyond customer satisfaction by creating an emotional connection with a brand’s products and services. The challenge lies in understanding what makes customers happy and how much value this brings to the business. Most organisations have developed extensive surveys and tools to analyse and assess customer satisfaction. CSAT and NPS provide time tested metrics for assessing satisfaction from customers willing to participate in a survey. CSAT surveys typically ask customers to rate experiences by the following criteria: Very satisfiedSomewhat satisfiedNeutralSomewhat dissatisfiedVery dissatisfied But customer…

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is currently reshaping the customer experience. It is being used in a range of contexts to provide intelligent, convenient and informed customer service. AI’s biggest opportunity, however, is in terms of customer data and analytics. It can make you a lot smarter about what’s happening with your business and customers AI enabled analytics can sift through and analyse much larger and more complex amounts of data more quickly, compared to traditional methods. More importantly, AI and machine learning allow reliable predictions to be made about the future of the business and its customers. Traditional analytics vs AI…

It seems common sense that if you let someone down or fail to deliver what you have promised, you need to apologise.

Customer churn is costing business billions per year. In Australia, businesses lose on average between 6-8 percent of their customers each year. Utilities and telecommunications sectors take the biggest beating with losses of between 20-25 percent. Unfortunately most business leaders believe there is little they can do to rectify the problem. How much does customer churn cost? The Australian energy retail market boasts one of the highest rates of market churn in the world. Much of this churn has been attributed to the liberalisation of energy retailing which has seen a succession of new entrants streaming into the market. While…