Linking Customer Experience to ROI Case Study: Seton Hall
My Role
As an Advisory Council Member for the Customer Experience Certificate Program at Seton Hall University, Stillman School of Business, I make a number of contributions to the program, including:
1. Preserving and enhancing the reputation and quality of the program through strategic review of our credit and noncredit courses.
2. Offering expert guidance to our faculty and students through occasional classroom visits, forums and conferences.
3. Promoting the program’s goal of linking industry with academia to help ensure the work is relevant and beneficial.
You can connect with me via Seton Hall’s CX program here.
In my recent participation from 2023 as a speaker/mentor, I was honored to initiate a case study into the customer journey how we could directly link CX to ROI.
Case Study and Current State
• Where our customer experience currently sits: All the information that we need to begin with we can gather from several sources, including CSAT surveys, customer conversations, market research, feature requests and enhancements.
• We then need to determine what actions and results are most directly impactful related to our overall CX.
Areas of Opportunity
From CSAT, I gleaned several surveys that identified that the customer support team could be more thorough in responses, including ETAs as necessary and having a sense of urgency in the responses.
Through customer conversations. it was pointed out that certain customers felt like their concerns would sometimes disappear into a “black hole” where they didn’t have any insight into or any sort of idea what was going on.
My market research also reflected a desire to have a more regular dialogue between customers and the product team they were working directly with; be it a regular touch point or a person with whom they could discuss issues with on a regular basis.
Feature requests and enhancements did not shed as much light on anything new, so much as it reinforced the idea that customers would like a regular pipeline of communication into issues.
Assumptions
My initial assumption is that clear and concise communication is going to receive the most feedback as it is linked directly to surveys and an easy, low-hanging fruit that would reap the most benefits if properly addressed. Knowing this, one critical issue we could immediately address is our responsiveness to issues.
Questions
1. Are customers receiving contact with a human on a regular basis?
2. Are customers receiving a thorough explanations of issues?
3. Are we providing a timeline to the best of our ability, along with informing them the next time they can expect to hear from us?
4. Have we provided resources if the impacted issue lies outside of scope of support team?
As our CSAT surveys are weighted heavily on areas related to responsiveness and understanding of issues, I then had an idea of where to start.
Research
• I’ve compiled a data set of surveys from the customer level to rate their experiences and provide feedback. Customers were rating our responsiveness to issues at 58% confidence overall, and understanding of the issue they were having at 64% confidence overall.
Hypothesis
I would need to address these customer pain points compiled from our survey and other sources in order to note marked improvements.
Solutions
I would organize stakeholders for input on a consistent communication experience. This would include gathering more details on the front end from customers, SLAs specific to times based on the criticality of issues, a template that covers what they need and what we are doing to address their issue, as well as a review daily of critical tickets in stand-up meetings to ensure that the new process was being followed by our team internally.
Roadmapping and Implementing Solutions
Now that we have actionable improvements based off of customer feedback that we can put into place immediately, we will ensure that we have addressed our key areas of opportunity:
- Thoroughness in responses and ETA will be addressed by adding a template to our responses.
- Insight into issues given to our team would be addressed by adding a time-specific SLA onto the customer’s business hours as an informal touchpoint.
- Obtaining a regular dialogue via the above, encouraging the customer to utilize our chat feature, and as an alternative the ability to utilize an assigned account manager through a tiered paid engagement
We know throughout this process that we can keep our internal operational costs for implementing these changes low by working with an already existing project team
Defining Success Metrics
This is where we can finally begin to link CX to ROI!
– Customer loyalty is critical – for every satisfied customer that we retained, we found that nearly 70% were more likely to renew a contract, purchase additional features and addons, or both.
– Satisfied customers will in turn promote their own product success to other customers.
– Referrals to new customers joining from existing customers made up 15% of sales in 2023
This is easily quantifiable data that compounds over time.
A new CSAT survey was administered after a 90 day timeframe that would look at responsiveness and understanding of issues. Over a 90 day time period, we found that responsiveness rating rose to 85% confidence, a marked improvement from 58% prior, and understanding of issue rose to 78% confidence, which was a good step up from 64% months prior.
Conclusion
This process required low initial cost, as the analysis and work completed was done via already existing surveys, research and product teams. The overall return was exceptional given the situation.
Jared Ewert 