Healing the Pain

The importance of customer experience as a driver of business performance is widely acknowledged and most companies make significant investments in strategic action planning tools to design and deliver experiences that truly meet customers’ needs. More and more companies deploy Voice of the Customer programs (VOC) or Enterprise Feedback Management Programs (EFM) to monitor the customer experience in real-time and enable timely interventions when customers face what we call “critical incidents”. Critical Incidents are moments of truth in the customer experience that have the potential to make or break a relationship. Most VOC / EFM programs have case management systems that enable companies to manage critical incidents on a customer by customer basis and to intervene in order to “close the loop” on each piece of customer feedback. But too often organisations do not think strategically enough about the way they manage and respond to critical incidents. This can lead to interventions that are not targeted enough and therefore ineffective at mitigating negative customer outcomes such as bad mouthing or customer churn. In addition ineffective

case management systems lead to wasted efforts and resources, extra load on service staff and increased costs.