Research Tools to Monitor Planned Interactions Through the Customer Life Cycle
As we explored in an earlier post, 3 Types of Customer Interactions Every Customer Experience Manager Must Understand, there are three types of customer interactions: Stabilizing, Critical, and Planned.
The third of these, “planned” interactions, are intended to increase customer profitability through up-selling and cross-selling.
These interactions are frequently triggered by changes in the customer’s purchasing patterns, account usage, financial situation, family profile, etc. CRM analytics combined with Big Data are becoming quite effective at recognizing such opportunities and prompting action from service and sales personnel. Customer experience managers should have a process to record and analyze the quality of execution of planned interactions with the objective of evaluating the performance of the brand at the customer brand interface – regardless of the channel.
The key to an effective strategy for planned interactions is appropriateness. Triggered requests for increased spending must be made in the context of the customer’s needs and permission; otherwise, the requests will come off as clumsy and annoying. By aligning information about execution quality (cause) and customer impressions (effect), customer experience managers can build a more effective and appropriate approach to planned interactions.
Research Plan for Planned Interactions
The first step in designing a research plan to test the efficacy of these planned interactions is to define the campaign. Ask yourself, what customer interactions are planned based on customer behavior? Mapping the process will define your research objectives, allowing an informed judgment of what to measure and how to measure it.
For example, after acquisition and onboarding, assume a brand has a campaign to trigger planned interactions based on triggers from tenure, recency, frequency, share of wallet, and monetary value of transactions. These planned interactions are segmented into the following phases of the customer lifecycle: engagement, growth, and retention.
Engagement Phase
Often it is instructive to think of customer experience research in terms of the brand-customer interface, employing different research tools to study the customer experience from both sides of this interface.
In our example above, management may measure the effectiveness of planned experiences in the engagement phase with the following research tools:
| Customer Side | Brand Side |
| Post-Transaction Surveys
Post-transaction surveys are event-driven, where a transaction or service interaction determines if the customer is selected for a survey, targeting specific customers shortly after a service interaction. As the name implies, the purpose of this type of survey is to measure satisfaction with a specific transaction. |
Transactional Mystery Shopping
Mystery shopping is about alignment. It is an excellent tool to align sales and service behaviors to the brand. Mystery shopping focuses on the behavioral side of the equation, answering the question: are our employees exhibiting the sales and service behaviors that will engage customers to the brand? |
| Overall Satisfaction Surveys
Overall satisfaction surveys measure customer satisfaction among the general population of customers, regardless of whether or not they recently conducted a transaction. These surveys give managers a feel for satisfaction, engagement, image and positioning across the entire customer base, not just active customers. |
Alternative Delivery Channel Shopping
Website mystery shopping allows managers of these channels to test ease of use, navigation and the overall customer experience of these additional channels. |
| Employee Surveys
Employee surveys often measure employee satisfaction and engagement. However, they can also be employed to understand what is going on at the customer-employee interface by leveraging employees as a valuable and inexpensive resource of customer experience information.They not only provide intelligence into the customer experience, but also evaluate the level of support within the organization, and identifies perceptual gaps between management and frontline personnel. |
Growth Phase
In the growth phase, one may measure the effectiveness of planned experiences on both sides of the customer interface with the following research tools:
| Customer Side | Brand Side |
| Awareness Surveys
Awareness of the brand, its products and services, is central planned service interactions. Managers need to know how awareness and attitudes change as a result of these planned experiences. |
Cross-Sell Mystery Shopping
In these unique mystery shops, mystery shoppers are seeded into the lead/referral process. The sales behaviors and their effectiveness are then evaluated in an outbound sales interaction. |
| Wallet Share Surveys
These surveys are used to evaluate customer engagement with and loyalty to the brand. Specifically, to determine if customers consider the brand their primary provider, and identify potential road blocks to wallet share growth. |
Retention Phase
Finally, planned experiences within the retention phase of the customer lifecycle may be monitored with the following tools:
| Customer Side | Brand Side |
| Lost Customer Surveys
Lost customer surveys identify sources of run-off or churn to provide insight into improving customer retention. |
Life Cycle Mystery Shopping
Shoppers interact with the company over a period of time, across multiple touch points, providing broad and deep observations about sales and service alignment to the brand and performance throughout the customer lifecycle across multiple channels. |
| Comment Listening
Comment tools are not new, but with modern Internet-based technology they can be used as a valuable feedback tool to identify at risk customers and mitigate the causes of their dissatisfaction. |
Call to Action – Make the Most of the Research
Research without call to action may be interesting, but not very useful. Regardless of the research choices you make, be sure to build call to action elements into research design.
For mystery shopping, we find linking observations to a dependent variable, such as purchase intent, identifies which sales and service behaviors drive purchase intent – informing decisions with respect to training and incentives to reinforce the sales activities which drive purchase intent.
For surveys of customers, we recommend testing the effectiveness of the onboarding process by benchmarking three loyalty attitudes:
- Would Recommend: The likelihood of the customer recommending the brand to a friend relative or colleague.
- Customer Advocacy: The extent to which the customer agrees with the statement, “you care about me, not just the bottom line?”
- Primary Provider: Does the customer consider the brand their primary provider for similar services?
As you contemplate campaigns to build planned experiences into your customer experience, it doesn’t matter what specific model you use. The above model is simply for illustrative purposes. As you build your own model, be sure to design customer experience research into the planned experiences to monitor both the presence and effectiveness of these planned experiences.
Kinesis CEM 
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