Aaron Cheris, Partner, Bain & Company
Troy Stevenson, Vice President, Client Loyalty, Charles Schwab
Many of us can appreciate the challenges of ensuring the customer experience at each touchpoint is building positive relationships. Treating those interactions as just ‘transactions’ erodes our ability to retain customers over time. Aaron & Troy demonstrated that “while relationship strength / loyalty is connected to touchpoint performance, it is rarely the sum of the touchpoints.”
It’s most effective to measure day-to-day interactions with satisfaction type questions to understand improvement opportunities in these areas. The longer-term effect on customer relationships is best measured using the ‘likelihood to recommend’ question. Sometimes we see much higher-level transactional scores in comparison, which creates confusion and too much focus on the numbers.
Aaron and Troy shared reasons why differences in interaction vs. relationship performance may arise and identified potential opportunities to close the gap. These include:
| Potential reasons for gaps | Potential opportunities to close the gaps |
|---|---|
| Not surveying the most critical touchpoints | Ensure you are truly measuring at the ‘moments of truth’ |
| Front-line staff do a great job delighting customers | Shift focus to identifying the other broken parts of the value proposition |
| Not enough substantive, wow-creating interactions are happening | Find more opportunities for substantive interactions; get creative |
Don’t try to directly compare the score levels of the transactional and relationship measurements. Instead, understand how day-to-day interactions influence the relationship and apply resources to making those interactions promoter experiences.
