A CAT Scan For Your Customer Experience

Quick Summary

• Traditional customer experience assessment tools (such as CX Audits and customer journey maps) frequently fail to meaningfully advance CX improvement efforts.

• The problem with these tools is that they operate at too high a level and don’t delve into the most granular details of an organization’s customer experience.

• Those tools are like a routine physical, but what’s often really needed to drive major (and more nuanced) improvements is a ‘CAT scan’ for the customer experience — which is precisely what Watermark’s CX Reality Check offers.

Many companies believe they understand their customer experience.  Most don’t.

Companies that strive to be customer-centric invest considerable time and resources to answer questions like:  What does it really feel like to be our customer?  And what would it take to meaningfully elevate that experience?

They plod through customer experience (CX) diagnostic questionnaires, develop customer journey maps, conduct CX audits, and deploy customer surveys.  Those evaluation tools are the equivalent of a routine physical, which is useful – but, sometimes, what you really need is a more thorough workup.

This is why many organizations are disappointed with the results from these traditional CX tools.  For example, a striking 83% of CX professionals say they’ve struggled to use customer journey maps to advance their CX improvement efforts.

The problem is that these tools operate at too high a level.  Answering a few dozen questions as part of a CX audit, or developing a journey map that fits on a piece of posterboard – these are not exercises that reveal the most granular details of an organization’s customer experience.

And it’s the details that matter, because that’s where your customers’ biggest frustrations often hide, lurking in the language of an account statement, or the nuances of a sales interaction, or the minutiae of product packaging.  Similarly, it’s in those details where the greatest CX differentiation opportunities also lie – needing to be teased out from the customers and frontline staff who are most familiar with how the current CX unfolds.

To help companies go beyond the high-level insights delivered by these traditional CX evaluation tools, Watermark developed our proprietary “Customer Experience Reality Check.”

Unlike many CX assessments, the Reality Check prioritizes depth over speed.  It’s not a self-evaluation comprised of a battery of questions, nor a journey mapping exercise that can be completed over a few days in a conference room.  Rather, it is a comprehensive and in-depth customer experience evaluation designed to uncover what conventional CX tools routinely miss (which is why we affectionately refer to it as a ‘CAT scan’ for your customer experience).

More importantly, the Reality Check doesn’t stop with diagnosis.  It produces a detailed, touchpoint-by-touchpoint roadmap that often guides clients’ CX improvement efforts for years to come.

Watermark’s Reality Check follows a “3-D” methodology:

• Dissect.  A CAT scan captures the body in cross-sectional slices rather than a single flat image.  In similar fashion, this first phase of a Reality Check captures and catalogues every touchpoint that comprises your customer experience.  This isn’t accomplished just across high-level customer lifecycle categories (such as Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Delivery, etc.) – rather, it identifies every live, print, and digital interaction point that people could possibly stumble across when engaging with your company.

• Diagnose.  This second phase pinpoints exactly where the customer experience is strong and where it’s weak.  These determinations are made by synthesizing data and perspectives collected from a wide variety of sources (described more fully below).  Just as a CAT scan reveals what is invisible to the naked eye, the Reality Check brings forth insights that often aren’t readily apparent to company leaders.

• Differentiate.  In the third and final phase, we help you differentiate the experience by creating a detailed and platitude-free future state blueprint (informed by Watermark’s 12 Principles of CX design) — it explains precisely how to elevate the CX, both by enhancing existing touchpoints as well as introducing entirely new ones.

Fueling the Reality Check’s insights are a broad array of information-gathering techniques that help drive both the Dissection and Diagnosis of the current customer experience.  They include activities such as:

• In-depth customer and employee interviews that uncover how people experience the current CX, and the improvements they most want to see.

• Mystery shopping and business simulations that reveal what customers actually experience – not what company insiders assume they experience.

• Customer and employee shadow sessions that observe the experience as it unfolds, uncovering insights that surveys and interviews often miss.

• Customer communication assessments to evaluate the print and digital “artifacts” that accompany the CX (e.g., websites, billing statements, sales proposals, contracts, product instructions, etc.).

• Operational data reviews that analyze complaint themes, call reasons, abandoned carts, and other behavioral data to uncover hidden CX problems.

Physicians rely on CAT scans when they need a detailed view beneath the surface – one that leads to an accurate diagnosis and an effective treatment plan.  The same approach can be used to great effect within the business arena, albeit with a different type of instrument.

If you’re struggling to gauge the health of your company’s customer experience, if you’re unsure what conditions are contributing to customer defections, and if you need a prescription for how to get better, then it might be time for a CAT scan of your customer experience – and a clear roadmap for what comes next.

Contact us to learn more about Watermark’s Customer Experience Reality Check.

Jon Picoult is founder of Watermark Consulting, a customer experience advisory firm that helps companies impress customers and inspire employees, creating raving fans that drive business growth.  Author of the Wall Street Journal featured book “From Impressed To Obsessed,” Picoult is a widely respected keynote speaker, as well as an advisor to some of the world’s foremost brands.  Follow Jon on LinkedIn or Instagram, or subscribe to his monthly eNewsletter.