Last week, we had the honour of hosting an interview with Bill Staikos, Senior Vice President, Evangelist & Head of Community Engagement at Medallia. He has more than 25 years’ experience driving customer and employee experience excellence, and proven expertise in envisioning and executing holistic customer-centric strategies.
He is also the host of the award-winning podcast, Be Customer Led, and co-founder of Monday Mentor Meetup, a LinkedIn group dedicated to helping Customer and Employee Experience practitioners accelerate their careers.
In this conversation overview, we’ll break down a few key points about:
- Three key elements of value creation in CX
- The insignificance of quantitative surveys as a research method
- Leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to get actionable customer insights
Value creation in CX
When we say value creation in CX, what comes to your mind? This is a question anyone working in CX should answer before starting their 2023 CX programme.
It goes without saying that we have to begin with understanding who our customers are. We must understand what problems they are trying to solve, and what frictions along their journey prevent them from achieving their goals.
Here are the three elements of value creation in CX Bill emphasised as crucial from his point of view:
- Incising revenue
- Improving efficiency
- Creating a culture that is customer-led
To increase efficiency, leaders must understand their service’s blueprint across multiple departments. Gathering customer feedback is just one side of the story. Business metrics related to people and culture need to come in place for a sustainable transformation. One that will increase revenue and create an environment for a customer-led culture.
Focusing too much on surveys that don’t tell us why certain problems occur or what exactly needs to be improved is often a waste of time and resources.
‘Many organisations publish their scores without identifying the underlying drivers in taking a business-centric view back into that metric. Leaders have lost confidence in CX metrics because of the significant reliance on a survey as a measure of success and performance,’ explained Bill.
Additionally, as Bill explained, most companies still need to implement technology to understand signals from customers beyond the survey. Here are the three research approaches we should see more of in 2023:
- Quantitative surveys having a valuable, meaningful place in CX
- Ethnographic and observational research becoming more present among researchers
- Utilisation of technology such as machine learning in observing someone’s behaviour online is to be explored and better integrated into research practices
Influence as the single most important skill of any CX leader
To implement ethnographic research, we will need aware leaders who can provide their reams with necessary training and tools. We asked Bill how can we ensure more observational research in CX.
‘If you have a good influence in a team, they can engage with the business in the right way; they can gain that buy-in and secure that investment to do the type of work necessary to be truly great from the experiential perspective,’ he shared.
To hear more insights from the conversation with Bill, go to our Spotify page. This conversation will surely make you think twice the next time you design a customer survey.