Customer Experience Measurement in the Coronavirus Age
Perhaps the most important way brands can respond to the moment of truth presented by this crisis is showing true care for: customers, employees, and the community.
Additionally, it is imperative that customers feel safe. Based on current science, in-person interactions can be relatively safe if followed within CDC and public health guidance including risk mitigation efforts such as: physical distancing, masks, ventilation, length of exposure, and hand washing & sanitizer.
Using these previous posts as a foundation, we can now address the implications of the pandemic on customer experience measurement.
So…. what does all this mean in terms of customer experience measurement?
First, I like to think of the customer experience measurement in terms of the brand-customer interface where customers interact with the brand. At the center of the customer experience are the various channels which form the interface between the customer and institution. Together, these channels define the brand more than any external messaging. Best-in-class customer experience research programs monitor this interface from multiple directions across all channels to form a comprehensive view of the customer experience.
Customers and front-line employees are the two stakeholders who interact most commonly with each other in the customer-institution interface. As a result, a best practice in understanding this interface is to monitor it directly from each direction: surveying customers from one side, gathering observations from employees on the brand side, and testing for the presence and timing of customer experience attributes through observational research such as mystery shopping.
Measure Customer Comfort and Confidence
First, fundamentally, the American economy is a consumer confidence driven economy. Consumers need to feel confident in public spaces to participate in public commerce. Customer experience researchers would be well served by testing for consumer confidence with respect to safety and mitigation strategies. These mitigation strategies are quickly becoming consumer requirements in terms of confidence in public commerce.
Along the same lines, given the centrality of consumer confidence in our economy, measuring how customers feel about the mitigation strategies put in place by the brand is extremely important. Such measurements would include measures of appropriateness, effectiveness, and confidence in the mitigation strategies employed. We recommend two measurements: how customers feel about the safety of the brand’s in-person channel in general, and how they feel about the safety relative to other brands they interact with during the pandemic. The first is an absolute measure of comfort, the other attempts to isolate the variable of the pandemic, just measuring the brand’s response.
The pandemic is changing consumer behavior. This much is clear. As such customer experience researchers should endeavor to identify and understand how consumer behavior is changing so they can adjust the customer experience delivery mix to align with these changes.
Testing Mitigation Strategies
Drilling down from broader research issues to mystery shopping specifically, there are several research design issues that should be continued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Measure Customer Confidence in Post-Transaction Surveys with Alerts to Failures: First, as economic activity waxes and wanes through this coronavirus mitigation effort, consumer confidence will drive economic activity both on a macro and micro-economic level. Broadly, consumers as a whole will not participate in the in-person economy until they are confident the risk of infection is contained. Pointedly, at the individual business level, customers will not return to a business if they feel unsafe. Therefore, market researchers should build measures of comfort or confidence into the post-transaction surveys to measure how the customer felt as a result of the experience. This will alert managers to potential unsafe practices which must be addressed. It will also serve as a means of directly measuring the return on investment (ROI) of customer confidence and safety initiatives in terms of the customer experience.
Measure Customer Perception of Mitigation Strategies: Coronavirus mitigation strategies will become typical attributes of the customer experience. Beyond simply testing for the presence of these mitigation strategies, customer experience managers should determine customer perceptions of their appropriateness, efficacy, and perhaps most importantly, their confidence in these mitigation strategies.
Gather Employee Observations of Mitigation Strategies: Frontline employees spend nearly all their time in the brand customer interface. As such, they have always been a wealth of information about the customer experience, and can be surveyed very efficiently. The post-pandemic customer experience is no exception.
First, as we discussed previously, employees have the same personal safety concerns as customers. Surveys of employees should endeavor to evaluate employees’ confidence in and comfort with coronavirus mitigation strategies.
Secondly, frontline employees being placed in the middle of the brand-customer interface are in perfect position to give feedback regarding the efficacy of mitigation strategies and the extent to which it fits into the desired customer experience – providing managers with valuable insight into adjustments which may make mitigation strategies fit more precisely into overall the customer experience objectives.
Independently Test for the Presence of Mitigation Strategies: All in-person channels across all industries will require the adoption of coronavirus mitigation strategies. Mystery shopping is the perfect tool to test for the presence of mitigation strategies – evaluating such strategies as: designed physical distancing, physical barriers between POS personnel and customers, mask compliance, sanitization, and duration of contact.
Alternative Research Sources for Behavioral Observations: Some customer experience managers may not want unnecessary people within their in-person channel. So the question arises, how can employee behaviors be measured without the use of mystery shoppers? One solution is to solicit behavioral observations directly from actual customers shortly after the in-person service interaction. Customers can be recruited onsite to provide their observations through the use of QR codes, or in certain industries after the event via e-mail. The purpose of these surveys is behavioral – asking the customers to recall if a specific behavior or service attribute was present during the encounter. From a research design standpoint, this practice is a little suspect, as asking people to recall the specifics about an event after the fact, without prior knowledge, is problematic. Customers are not prepared or prompted to look for and recall specific events. However, given the unique nature of the circumstances we are under, in some cases there is an argument that the benefits of this approach outweigh the research limitations.
Test Channel Performance and Alignment
The instantaneous need for alternative delivery channels has significantly raised the stakes in cross-channel alignment. As sales volume shifts to these alternative channels, customer experience researchers need to monitor the customer experience within all channels to measure the efficacy of the experience, as well as alignment of each channel to both each other and the overall brand objectives.
Finally, as more customers migrate to less in-person channels, customer experience researchers should endeavor to measure the customer experience within each channel. As more late adopters are forced by the pandemic to migrate to these channels, they may bring with them a completely different set of expectations relative to early adopters, therefore managers would be well served to understand the expectations of these newcomers to the alternative channels so they can adjust the customer experience to meet these new customers’ expectations.
As commerce migrates away from conventional in-person channels to alternative delivery channels, the importance of these channels will increase. As a result, the quality and consistency of delivery in these channels will need to be measured through the use of mystery shoppers. Some industries are going to be problematic, as their current economics do not currently support alternative delivery. With time however, economic models will evolve to support alternative channels.
Conclusion
This is a difficult time. It will be the defining event of our generation.
The pandemic, and our reaction to it, is dramatically changing how humans interact with each other, and the customer experience is no exception. There is reason to suggests this difficult time could become a new normal. Managers of the customer experience need to understand the implications of the customer experience in the post-Covid environment, as the implications of the pandemic may never fully subside. Customer experience managers must consider the implications of this new normal, not only on the customer experience, but on customer experience measurement.
Kinesis CEM 