Introduction
Challenge 1
Challenge 2
Challenge 3
Challenge 4
Conclusion
Practical plans for managing CX and EX in challenging times
Following up conversations, observations and input from our expert panel of speakers and combined studio and virtual audience, this paper offers up a set of five suggestions that will help strengthen your responsiveness to the major issues raised in the session. We hope you find the following document useful and please do not hesitate to contact us for more information and help.
Challenge 5
Analyse discretionary spend to identify activities delivering least value.
Find opportunities for smarter budgeting across customer facing teams. Such as:
Tough times impact customers and colleagues in equal measure.
common approaches to data, shared systems, workflow, team structure, aligned aims, strategies. operational management and metrics
i.
ii.
The planning, execution and ongoing adaption of customer and employee experience management should be jointly managed between these respective teams to ensure alignment and greater diversity of expertise in their collaborative design.
Reset customer experience priorities during recession
Revenues typically decline during a recession, so organisations need to focus on protecting cashflow.
Focus on non-discretionary spend by looking for opportunities to reduce costs in current resolution pathways.
Aim to make journeys easier and faster, so they are less reliant on human support. Reap benefits quicker (time to value) by using proactive consumer education, sign-posting and behavioural nudges, so that new contact habits are adopted more rapidly Use cross functional teamwork operating under agile principles to embed a continuous improvement process for service delivery. Simplify and automate where it makes sense. Empower and organise customer-facing teams to fix significant time/resource/goodwill leakages they witness daily
Plan for rapid growth by ensuring the starting blocks are in place once the economy recovers.
Identify any investments critical to long term success that must be protected during the recession. For instance, nurture programmes for certain high value customer groups.
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Revenues typically decline during a recession
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Focus on non- discretionary spend
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Plan for rapid growth
Is there an example of how another organisation is behaving towards its customers during the current cost-of-living crisis you would like us to adopt? Is there anything you expect from us that would brighten up your day and is something you believe we really should be doing?
Encourage verbatim instead of multiple choice-based feedback. Offer both text and voice options to record feedback. Extensively signpost these options and elevate them to become easily recognisable, persistent features at all key touchpoints: website, app, in person, contact channels, and during final steps of sales and service journeys.
Improve the volume and diversity of insight
Keep pace with employee expectations
Improve the quality of employee feedback by asking more relevant, empathetic questions. For example:
Improve the volume and diversity of insight by reducing effort to contribute spontaneous feedback.
How can organisations benefit?
How can we improve customer feedback?
Enhance the volume and diversity of insight
Improve the quality of customer feedback by asking more relevant, empathetic questions. For example:
Organisations can benefit from closer collaboration with front line organisations such as charities and advocacy groups. They offer early warning of emerging customer behaviour and new personas to enrich voice of customer/employee insights and actions.
Research, engage and partner the most relevant organisations.
Enhance the volume and diversity of insight by reducing effort to contribute spontaneous feedback.
Stay current with changing customer needs
Ongoing research
The journey to meet the duty of care obligations
References for insight and advice
Ongoing research from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) and Financial Service Authority (FCA) shows the speed at which customer needs are changing in reaction to disruptive trends, such as the pandemic, cost of living and recession.
Organisations need to step up their ability to apply this national perspective to their own customers. This will help identify new vulnerability segments that intersect around income, age, ethnicity, geography, disability etc.
Some organisations are already on the journey to meet the duty of care obligations defined by the FCA. Their framework, standards and practical suggestions on vulnerability provide an excellent route map for any type of organisation – regulated or not. Key elements are incorporated into the following action list.
Use the following references for insight and advice:
Insights on vulnerability and financial resilience relevant to the rising cost of living Source: Financial Lives 2022 survey from Financial Conduct Authority. Impact of increased cost of living on adults across Great Britain: June to September 2022 Source: Opinions and Lifestyle Survey from Office of National Statistics. Facts and stats about digital inclusion and exclusion in the UK Source: Good Things Foundation.
Improve responsiveness to customer vulnerability
4.
Embed vulnerability characteristics into your existing segmentation framework
Evolve your understanding of vulnerability in terms of working definition and its impact on customers. Build detailed understanding of common characteristics, such as the causes of vulnerability and the personal consequences of vulnerability, which include the ability to understand, make decisions and engage with your organisation.
Use the output from the previous action point to embed vulnerability characteristics into your existing segmentation framework.
Translate these segment definitions into customer personas to bring to life the distinct challenges, behaviours and priorities of each customer cohort. Generate compelling internal campaigns to create organisational awareness and empathy for these new customer personas. The benefits increase if you also aim to standardise and promote a single version of segmentation across teams, especially marketing, product development, service design and customer service. This helps promote common understanding and collaboration, more consistent brand behaviour and therefore more positive customer experience. As part of your brand commitment to supporting those in need, review the following to compliment any existing outreach you offer:
Reduce digital exclusion by donating to the National Device Bank and National Data Bank Reduce hygiene poverty by donating or volunteering at the Hygiene Bank Fund food banks. Choose your preferred engagement option offered by the Trussell Trust.
Be alert to when and how existing policies, processes and contact options fall short for certain customer cohorts, given how vulnerability impacts them. Use these FCA examples of ‘good’ and ‘poor’ responsiveness to craft flexible alternative pathways to customer outcomes. Improve your tracking and reporting on vulnerability. Use FCA latest review on organisational progress to self-assess.
Focus on understanding current and future expectations and needs during the recession cycle and assess your ability to meet them. Identify critical gaps, the cost of failing to meet them and the investment/ROI of fixing them. Explore your end-to-end talent management lifecycle: from recruitment to exit and the key moments of truth that influence motivation and brand loyalty. Reprofile the type of person and baseline skills needed to effectively engage modern day customers. Reimagine the type of culture, daily rituals and leadership needed to attract and nurture this new generation service workforce. Explore how the characteristics and solutions for in-work poverty might apply to low-income teams such as contact centre staff and how it might contribute to improved recruitment, resilience, absenteeism and attrition.
Protect employee resilience and wellbeing
Increased stress and anxiety for individuals
Upgrade financial support for employees
Tap innovation and best practice
Review your customer service teams
Ongoing uncertainty increases individuals’ stress and anxiety. Organisations have clear reasons for helping employees build and maintain resilience as they face the consequences of tougher times.
Review and upgrade the ways you offer financial support for employees.
Tap into other source of innovation and best practice. Use contact centre association networks to learn from member initiatives around employee resilience.
Review and upgrade your resilience strategy. What you established clear aims and outcomes and identified priority audiences for the programme you are offering? Do you know what is and is not working?
What are employees saying? How do views vary across cohorts? Can you correlate resilience against motivation and productivity? What additional insights would enable better decision making in the future?
Is the programme of services, education and support effective in delivering your aims? Is it still relevant and comprehensive given the speed of change? Does it reach the attention and gain the trust of those most needing it?
Are managers trained to recognise mindset and behavioural symptoms of declining resilience? Do they know how to respond?
Do the right people know about the programme, use it and benefit from it?
Is awareness and use of this programme effectively embedded into daily people management?
Partner with Step Change for debt support or the Money Charity for financial wellbeing education. Explore the benefits of on demand pay to improve cashflow management for employees. Explore how to make employee income go further by covering typical costs, without attracting tax and NIC or impacting on universal credit and other benefits. Review examples here. Use digital exclusion insights to identify employee cohorts who are most impacted (e.g. age, location, income) and create a targeted campaign that aims to reduce household bills (an average of £220 a year) using online comparison shopping techniques. Collaborate with Good Things Foundation to source digital literacy programmes, access to digital tools and budgets.
Getting through the recession is going to be tough for many organisations. Its final impact on people remains unknown since the broader context of geo-political factors will continue to surprise. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes not.
One thing is for sure. Loyalty and goodwill are built on trusted relationships that embody empathy and authenticity. Organisations will not be able to deliver everything asked of them, but they can remain honest. They might not get everything right, but they can be quick to learn. The clue to effective experience management is all the title. Thoughts and feelings matter as much as outcomes. Get that right (along with the outcomes) and people will stay close.
Final Thoughts
Restart