Customer Experience (CX) benchmarking gives you the power to fix failing existing experiences and create new solutions that answer unmet customer needs. With the right tools, you’ll be able to swiftly identify major issues and prioritise quick wins. Crucially, CX benchmarking equips you with traceable, actionable insights that can be used to boost business, build loyalty and get an edge over the competition.

How to spot CX opportunities through benchmarking

1. Decide what you’re evaluating

First, you need to establish what you’re measuring. Companies measure the state of their customer experience using lots of different things – Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), call waiting times, etc. From our experience, we’ve found individual customer needs the most practical and effective thing to evaluate.

Why benchmark with customer needs?

• Results are centred around the customer
• Evaluations are free from channel specific silos and ignore departmental barriers
• Customer needs stand the test of time, even if the ways to meet them change. This means you can continue to use them to benchmark regularly
• Customer needs are simple to score and can be tied directly to organisational KPIs
• A customer needs approach drives immediate ideas for improvement. Compare this to other common metrics.g. NPS or CSAT. These often give very high level results, which do not drive immediate valid practical improvements and can sometimes be misleading

How to evaluate customer needs

Make the customer needs specific to your business/sector

To identify viable business opportunities, you need to look at your current end-to-end journey and focus on your customers’ interactions and expectations. For example, a customer need could be: “I expect to be kept up-to-date with the status of my order, every step of the way.”

At Newt, we have something called the CX Framework. This unique tool is tailored to your business and paints a rich picture of your customers’ true behaviours. It gets results, fast – as proven by Tesco, N Brown, ACCA and more. In the tool, each customer need sits within a structured framework based around the customer journey. This way we know every need is valid and has the potential to drive ideas for improvement.

2. Set the evaluation criteria and the scores you want to use

Next, you need to determine how you’re going to evaluate each customer need. This means creating a scoring system that lets you prioritise and assess results. Scores must be simple and easy to assign.

In our CX framework, we score each customer need on two equally important levels:

1. How important is this need to the customer?
2. How well are we performing against meeting this need for the customer?

We use a scoring system that avoids a ‘neutral’ answer. This is important because a neutral score doesn’t help you move forward. A clear positive or negative score is actionable.

3. Pick the worst performing clusters of customer needs and generate opportunities

As you move through the benchmarking process, you’ll start to see clusters of poorly performing needs appear at specific points in the journey. For example, retail clients often struggle with post sales communication or driving long term loyalty.

These clusters of poorly performing needs should be seen as opportunities. They help you gauge where the biggest problem areas lie right now so you can set about fixing them. Tackling the biggest problem areas first is the quickest way to show positive results across the business. However, if lots of basic things are broken and customer satisfaction is poor overall, it’s best to concentrate on fixing these first. You need to get the basics right in order to build trust and move forward.

The great thing about benchmarking in this way is it gives you traceability. You will be able to clearly link each item on your roadmap back to a specific score assigned to a specific customer need.

Discover your hidden opportunities

Book an introductory session and unleash the power of CX benchmarking

We’ll show you how to set up for success and identify top opportunities for your customers and business. Using the innovative Newt CX Framework, you’ll get rapid results and actionable plans. You’ll leave with your own set of benchmark scores and a clear indication of how the Framework can help you next.

Book an introductory benchmarking session

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