Measuring success through the Customer Experience
In broad terms private sector companies measure their success through customer loyalty which is driven by the customer experience.
When working with customer focus groups, CDW often ask the question ‘Which company represents good customer service in your mind?”’ The answers typically vary from large multinationals to small local businesses but the reasons are always much the same: ‘Because they treat me as an individual, make it easy to get in touch and deal with my request promptly and efficiently.’
Understanding customer loyalty
The concept that ‘loyalty’ can be an intrinsic success factor for statutory service provision may initially be difficult but is something that EIP members have always aspired to. The challenge is to find true measures that allow us to understand the total and true customer experience from first contact to service delivery and follow up: ‘focus on improving the customer’s total experience with the organization across the entire enterprise, all touch points and all experiential elements’ (John Calhoun, McKenna Group, from ‘Driving Loyalty by Managing the Customer Experience’).
Measurements that matter
The problem with existing quantitative measures is that they only tell us how we are doing against targets we set, not what is important to improving the customer experience.
In the private sector, approaches like Six Sigma demonstrate the value in taking what is important to customers as the criteria against which to measure development and, therefore, success.
Scott Fuson, CMO at Dow Corning: ‘In Six Sigma, we found a more structured way to let the voice of the customer (VOC) drive the marketing, as well as other internal processes like supply chain. We translated those VOC needs into critical customer requirements. These become the measures, the tangible things that we have to deliver on. We continuously take those CCRs (Critical Customer Requirements) back out to the marketplace and validate them, then we rigorously measure our performance against those.’
Translating this into a public sector context
In public sector terms this means translating customer requirements into real measures that will support and evidence continuous improvement towards customer focussed service provision.
The EIP Customer Focus Framework is built around five Customer Values (or Critical Customer Requirements in Six Sigma terms). We now need to concentrate efforts on turning those values into actual measures, testing a variety of approaches and implementations with service managers. The Group’s meetings will develop learning in common areas, invite outside experts to contribute their thinking and keep abreast of developments in central government.
By the end of the year we aim to have:
- developed, delivered and shared measurement actions between all Continuous Improvement Clusters and to have shared experiences of implementation
- delivered an upgrade to the Framework, based on experience gained through the year, as the main output from work in 2008.
- found ten measures that are strong enough to be implemented across services and organisations in all improvement actions.
Elaine Cash, CDW & Associates