CX Optimizations Are the Rx for Customer Understanding
“How do you use customer experience analytics? How do you differentiate noise from signal, and bypass arguments to get to insights?”
This question was posed by Geeta Wilson, award-winning VP of Consumer Experience—Enterprise Transformation at Humana, to kick off her presentation at Forrester’s recent CXNYC 2017 event, “Illuminating the Customer Journey Through Analytics.”
According to her colleague, Strategic Consultant Ian Carlson, “trying to get to a single source of truth was a challenge; one VP said he felt like we were flying blind.”
“We were only measuring things we could measure, and not the things we should measure,” he added.
To optimize the customer experience, Humana first adopted an IVR optimization solution, to map the comprehensive IVR process and identify opportunities for improvement.
“IVR optimization was the first step,” said Wilson. “We can now understand
what drives customers to call again, and improve first call resolution.”
For Humana, this newfound visibility pointed the way towards a broader omnichannel customer experience strategy, with the stated goal of bridging assisted and unassisted customer engagement channels for consistency. “We started using IVR optimization, but knew we had to branch out to other aspects of the customer journey,” said Wilson.
Omnichannel customer visibility enables organizations to analyze customer behavior,
and use those insights to optimize the customer experience.
According to Wilson and Carlson, the best approach to capturing, analyzing, and improving the customer journey is to optimize engagement channels in pieces, so they are manageable. Perhaps most importantly, listen to what the data is telling you; if newly-available customer data is inconsistent with previous assumptions, you may want to adjust protocols accordingly. Ultimately, it comes down to understanding customer behaviors, and designing services to account for that understanding.
“There’s a difference between reporters and analysts,” said Carlson. “Reporters tell you what happened, but analysts tell you why, and what to do. Tools aren’t going to solve problems. People are going to solve problems—with the right tools.”
For healthcare providers such as Humana, the customer experience can be a deeply personal one.
That experience can win their loyalty—or turn them off forever.
Attendees learned that Humana was now among the top healthcare performers, according to Forrester’s proprietary CX Index methodology.
Wilson and Carlson shared some terrific insights to a packed room that day, and it would seem the virtues of these technologies for mapping, analyzing, and enhancing the customer experience are being heard by more and more healthcare brands.
Mapping, analyzing, and acting upon customer journey data produces continuous opportunity, in terms of both revenue and process improvement. When customers seek comfort in dealing with their most private matters, and providers are tasked with delivering on those expectations in an increasingly chaotic regulatory environment, harnessing all available data is key to long-term satisfaction and success.