Survey Shows Strong Customer Experience Ambitions
May 24, 2010 9 Comments
Temkin Group recently ran its first research survey looking at the state of customer experience within companies. The response was great, more than 400 people took the survey. Here are some of the high-level results:
- 13.8% think that their company is the best in their industry in customer experience, while 60.2% want to be the best in their industry within 3 years
- When it comes to online interactions, only a few respondents think that their company always or almost always delights their customers:
- 22.8% when customer researches a product
- 22.4% when customer purchases or applies for a product
- 25.4% when customers get customer service help
- Here’s who’s most often running the company’s customer experience efforts:
- Dedicated customer experience group (28.9%)
- Marketing (21.9%)
- Customer service (17.1%)
- 62.7% have a senior executive in charge of their customer experience efforts
- 51.4% have a formalized voice of the customer (VoC) program, and 80.7% of those people think that it has had a positive impact on the company
- 42.9% are using Net Promoter Score (NPS), and 65% of those people think that it has had a positive impact on the company
- Companies identified these as the top obstacles to improving customer experience:
- Other competing priorities (61.7%)
- Lack of a clear customer experience e strategy (48%)
- Limited funding (42.7%)
- Conflict across internal organizations (38.5%)
As a courtesy to the respondents, they were sent a detailed report on these findings. We will make that report available more widely within the next couple of weeks and will be discussing more of the data in upcoming posts. In particular, I will be analyzing the responses from 150+ large North American companies.
The bottom line: Customer experience remains a hot topic
About Bruce Temkin
We just completed another round of NPS surveying at my organization.
While I sometimes find it a challenge to get my clients to respond to the survey, I know that being able to constructively acknowledge and adapt their feedback into our processes is invaluable to moving forward with delivering the best experience possible for them — and my organization. It’s the right attitude of achievement for client retention as well as being able to identify opportunities for potential growth.
Interesting findings, thank you! I would certainly like to see the detailed report when it becomes available. I found 2 things interesting….almost 2/3′s of the companies indicated a senior level person responsible for customer experience (which I’d like to see defined) and yet when we look at the reasons they list as challenges we see “other conflicting priorities”, “lack of clear strategy”, “budgeting”, etc. The challenge I see is how do we elevate or evangalize the role (and therefore success) of these executives to affect greater impact on removing / minimizing some of those “challenges” or barriers?
Good comment @buono! The big challenge is between revenue growth and customer experience… most still don’t accept that the 2 support one another. As long as this perception of mutual exclusivity exists, it will be an uphill battle all the way.
Companies still think of customer experience in a vacuum. Think of it this way. If a salesperson hits their revenue number and has poor customer satisfaction scores, will they lose their job? What about if they miss their number but have very satisfied customers? Same answer?
Until we reconcile this key tension and adopt a longer-term strategy, we’re doomed to keep chasing the “top” line.
Bruce,
Thanks for sharing the results. It would be helpful to know more about Company profiles of those who participated.
Best regards,
Brian
Thanks for sharing the results, it would be interesting to see a breakdown across industries.
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Thanks for the post – very interesting and looking forward to the results of the detailed report.