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Drivers: the Secrets to Creating a Great Customer Experience

Jim Tincher Jim Tincher 02/02/2012

The Heart of the Matter

Typical Customer Experience Measurement Programs treat all customers as one homogenous group, rather than as unique segments. These programs need to analyze customers based on their value to the organization and analyze what drives the behavior of each segment. This white paper lays out a process for developing and analyzing these Customer Experience Drivers.

Introduction

Do you understand what motivates your best customers and sets them apart from the rest? For example, why do some customers:

  • Come to your restaurant every week, whereas others only when they have a coupon?
  • Call you first for consulting help, while others make you bid for the lowest price?
  • Require constant hand-holding, compared to others who are very inexpensive to maintain?

And how do you find more customers like the first group?

Simply said, some customers are engaged with your company, love your products and services, and trust you. These customers tend to be your most loyal and profitable. Others buy from you because you are convenient or have a good price. These are often expensive to serve and contribute less to your business’ bottom line. You need to learn what drives the former, to find more like them.

This is true for both B2B and B2C companies. In fact, because the order sizes are typically much larger, this is even more critical for B2B companies.

Without this understanding, product development and marketing become a best-guess effort. Driver Analysis is the process used to determine what motivates your best customers.  It extends your current NPS, Satisfaction, or Engagement studies to discover and measure these underlying motivations.

Driver Analysis is the practice of including motivations in your Customer Experience Measurement Program, then correlating these motivations with your customers’ Lifetime Value. This process separates those who purchase based on convenience or price from those truly profitable customers who view you differently, and then shows the motivations of each group.

For example, quick service restaurant customers selected the chain they visited the most. Within a restaurant’s most-frequent visitors, those who were “engaged” spent $8 a month more here than the average. What drove this engagement was not “the Quality of Food,” or “Speed of Service.” Instead, it was “the Warmth of the Greeting.” Similarly, Gallup found that B2B customers who rated their partners high on “Impacts my business” are stickier – they remain customers longer, and are more profitable. The specific drivers vary by company – even within an industry – but are critical to understand how to motivate customers to spend more with you.

Another reason to use drivers is to target efforts in your different delivery segments. Using the restaurant example above, imagine the situation where a general manager is told her store NPS or satisfaction score is low. While this is important to know, it does not tell her how to improve these scores. Drivers provide insight on where action is needed.

Similarly, drivers help B2B account teams know where to focus. Satisfaction or NPS helps evaluate the state of the relationship – drivers identify how to improve it.

So, how do you discover these drivers? See Figure 1 for an overview. The process starts with your staff, and then expands to your customers.

White Paper

This post continues in: Drivers – the Secret to a Great Customer Experience White Paper. Please download it to learn the entire end-to-end process!

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