The majority of customer experience problems arise in one of the four following areas: personnel, processes and technology, customers, and financials. For this reason, the following questions that pertain to your customers' experiences can be categorized accordingly.
5 questions about personnel
Have you clearly articulated the experience you want your customers to receive, in a way that all employees can understand?
Are you hiring for the best basic customer service traits, such as warmth, empathy, optimism, detail-orientation, and teamwork?
Are you recruiting new customer-facing employees with the skills and abilities to deliver the customer experience you want?
Have you profiled your existing successful customer-facing employees to identify traits that work in your organization?
If given the choice to steal something from your organization, would your competitors choose your people?
5 questions about processes and technology
Do your processes give employees enough time to listen to, diagnose, and solve individual customer problems?
Can a customer press 0 at any time within your interactive voice response (IVR) system to talk to a customer service representative?
Do your customer-facing systems pass the necessary customer information and data from touchpoint to touchpoint so that an ongoing customer dialogue can be maintained throughout the customer journey?
Do you have a good selection of leading and lagging customer-performance metrics regarding the use of your process and technology?
Are all your key customer-facing processes mobile enabled?
5 questions about your customers
Do you know what your customers’ expectations are of your service, product, and brand?
Do you proactively solicit customer feedback at your key customer touchpoints?
Do you immediately respond to customer complaints and concerns, no matter what channel is used to communicate with you?
Have you mapped all your customer touchpoints?
Do you know who “owns” each customer touchpoint within your organization — who is accountable and responsible for improving it?
5 questions about financials
Have you created a list of “perfect” customer behaviors?
Have you worked with your CFO or financial team to identify elements of your return on customer experience (ROCE) model?
Do you know all the costs associated with poor service in your organization — for example, customer defection, churn, buy-backs, cancellations, and non-renewals?
Have you calculated the cost to acquire a new customer versus the cost to retain an existing one?
Have you determined what percentage of customer defection is for price-related issues versus service-related issues?