Introduction
Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining. We’re gonna be talking about small changes, big impact today. So at a really high level, we’ll be talking about a 120-day plan for digital experience success, and what that means when it comes to setting up your digital experience program.
Speakers’ Introduction
I’m joined here today with Jess. I’ll let her introduce herself in just a second, but my name’s Chris Rey. I’m a senior digital experience strategist with Medallia. I’ve been with the company for about five years working on delivery roles, sales roles, and a few other things, but I’m looking forward to talking with you all today.
Thanks, Chris. Best part about this webinar is that Chris and I used to work together for almost all of those five years. So we’ve seen the inside look from our customers working with some of the biggest brands in the world.
Introducing myself: I’m Jess Gangemi. I’m the head of digital solutions here at Medallia, globally, and my team works with thousands of brands around the globe, helping them use our products to improve their digital channels.
Transforming Insights into Actions
A lot of the questions that we get from customers are something as simple as this: I’ve launched a program, now how do I start seeing wins? A lot of our customers get a little hung up on scores. They start to think about their NPS. They start to think about benchmarking. But what we want to talk about today is how do you transform real insights, verbatim feedback, the signals you’re getting from the behaviors of your customers, into actions that add value for your program.
The 120-Day Plan
So let’s look at what a 120-day plan may look like when setting up a program. And again, keep in mind, these are guidelines, not hard and fast timelines. If you don’t meet these timelines, you’re not in a better or worse place. But we just want to clarify again that these are just general timelines that we see a lot of clients and recommend clients shoot for.
First 30 to 60 Days: Aligning on Business Goals and Building Your Program
So the first 30 to 60 days, you typically want to start by aligning on your business goals. Now, you’ll have done this with your commercial teams when you started becoming a Medallia client, and we’ll translate that to the professional services situation as well. But aligning on business goals: this means what do you want to get out of your program? What are the outcomes that you’re looking for? What’s important to the business? The second part of that is building your program, it’s kind of the tactical part of question design. Where are you putting your surveys? Who is responsible for reading the data and actioning it?
Second Step at the 90-Day Mark: Uncovering and Acting on Low-Hanging Fruit
Now, the second step here is at the 90-day mark. Once you’ve got your program set up, you know what you’re marching towards, what your goals are, and you’ve got your surveys designed and launched. What you want to start looking at is uncovering and acting on low-hanging fruit. I think there’s this notion with a lot of these CX programs that there’s gonna be this big light bulb moment and we’ll find something that is gonna save us millions of dollars in the snap of the finger. And that is possible, but it is not the most common way that programs find success. When we say low-hanging fruit, it could be something as simple as updating a button, or changing some text, or a page layout that could really help do something like increase conversions or even increase certain metrics and scores. So we don’t want you to always think that it has to be these big picture goals that help you achieve your business outcomes. It could be small things that add up over time.
120 Days Mark: Telling Your Story Across the Org and Showcasing Your ROI
Now, finally, at the 120 days mark. What we’re gonna talk about is telling your story across the org and showcasing your return on investment. Now, this part is really, really critical on an ongoing basis, but at 120 days is typically when you have, I would say, enough data to tell your story and really formulate a narrative. At a high level, what telling your story means is sharing this data across the organization and with key stakeholders, so they understand what your customers are seeing so they can really empathize and potentially act with you as partners in your organization.
Detailed Discussion: 30 to 60 Days – Aligning on Business Goals and Building Your Program
What we’ll do next is talk a little bit about the specific timeline of 30 to 60 days here and we’ll key in on the business goals and building your program. But just to talk more detail about aligning on business goals. Aligning on business goals and connecting them to your outcomes is eventually what’s gonna help you tell your story at the 120-day mark, right? So you want to set your foundation early and you want to understand what you’re doing with your program as soon as possible and what you’re hoping to get out of it. This is what we mean by align on business goals. So when you buy any type of software, you always want to make sure it aligns with where you’re going as an organization or as a team. And again, that it’s gonna help you get return on investment, right? So it could be as simple as something as increasing customer loyalty or just building the foundation, and we’ll talk about that in just a minute.
Designing a Program Around Your Metric
The second part is designing a program around your metric. So this is really understanding the type of not only surveys but also questions you want to ask that align with your business goals and help you answer those questions.
Common Business Goals for Digital Programs
All right. So the common business goals for digital programs — these are just examples, it’s not everything — but you want to ask yourself what is the business goal that matters to my brand, to my business, to my vertical, and how does my digital channel play into that? So building the digital foundation, maybe this is a goal for you because you want to understand more about the digital experience. You want to know what you don’t know, you don’t know what you don’t know. So you want to understand what are the areas that you can improve your customer-centricity from your digital presence?
A very common business goal is increasing sales and revenue. So whether this is a lead generation funnel that maybe doesn’t have an exact sale metric to it, but you are valuing that lead in some way. Maybe this is a conversion funnel like Chris had shared. If you’re a retail customer, checkout is a big bottom line for you. Maybe this is revenue that you’re losing, think about it that way as well. If your customers online are not finishing a task or they’re not completing a conversion funnel, that’s revenue lost. So
Even though we have increased sales and revenue here, you want to think the inverse way of where are we not making revenue that we want to bubble some of these issues up to the surface? Reducing operational costs: this is really big, whether you have a multichannel program or if you don’t have a multichannel program. I personally was working at an airline a long time ago and I was in the digital department. I really wanted to understand what from our digital experience is causing calls to the call center because when I connect the dots, the call center is spending a lot of money to fix digital issues that the digital team needs to be aware of. So that’s an operational aspect, a way to reduce your operational costs and increase productivity and just improve experiences overall. Increase customer loyalty is another common business goal. So whether you have a membership program, maybe an authenticated portal in your digital experience, or maybe you just have a credit card program. What is it about customer loyalty that you want to do right on by the customer to improve that digital experience?
Taking these common business goals, you then want to think about how you use our framework today to tell that story. So we’re gonna dig into an example right now of increasing sales and revenue.
Example: Mortgage Application Process
Chris, we’re going to talk about a mortgage application today, and this is a very hot topic and we thought it’d be a good example because the housing market is ridiculous right now. Chris, you just bought a house. Shout out to Chris. So Chris went through this process as well. I’m gonna pass it over to him, but I want you all to think about when you’re in this space, the mortgage application space, any customer can just jump to your competitor. So, you are not the only one that is providing that experience to the customer. You need to really optimize that because as Chris just went through, he can just skip over to another broker, another mortgage company and try and get a better rate. So Chris tell us how we can use this framework to start with the 30 60 90 day framework.
Using the 30 60 90 Day Framework
Yeah, absolutely. And so I think this is a great example to your point, Jess, because it — well the market speaks for itself. But I think it’s a really good stepped process to look at in your first 30 to 60 days here. And you could sub this out for any sort of funnel based process or approach where the signup is the ultimate kind of goal that you’re looking for — the conversion point. So generally, the application of conversion still sticks here, right? Increasing sales and revenue.
Establishing Your Desired Metric
But if we’re to put a mortgage application process lens over these steps, let’s talk about the first thing here that we see is establishing your desired metric. And I know we briefly touched on this, but I want to be clear that the metric, while it is important, it is not the end all be all for why you have this program, for why you’re using these tools.
Choosing the Right Metric
The metrics are more your guidelines to understand how you’re pacing and how you’re tracking along your path to success, right? They’re indicators. It’s kind of like a flag blowing in the wind that tells you if you’re going the right direction or not. So one thing that I want to just really make clear is while the metric is important, it’s not gonna make or break the 30 60 days or even all the way into 120. But choosing your metric is important so that you can align it with the rest of your company’s goals.
Considerations for Metrics
So there’s a couple of things you want to consider with this metric. If your company uses, let’s say your core metric is OSAT. You want to make sure that you’re sticking with a similar overall metric so that you can have an apples to apples comparison as much as possible. But we also know that there’s certain metrics you want to use for your specific use case.
Key Metrics for Mortgage Application
Now with a mortgage application process and any sort of funnel based approach, task completion is critical, right? Completing that funnel. Getting to the next page. Task completion is absolutely critical. And that’s a metric that you can use within your survey just by asking the simple question, “Were you able to complete your purpose?” Another one that I really like for this specific point is customer effort score.
Customer Effort Score
Customer effort is absolutely critical in any sort of application process or funnel based approach. If you make it difficult on your customers, you’re gonna see bounce, you’re gonna see abandonment, you’re not gonna see a high rate of completions. So those are the two metrics that we’ll use today in this specific example for the mortgage application process.
Understanding Successful vs. Unsuccessful Signups
Now, the second part here is your journey, right? We wanna understand successful versus unsuccessful signups. Why would we want to understand that? Well, for those who have completed the journey, what did they like? What went right? Was it easy? What could be improved? And then for those who didn’t successfully sign up, maybe they abandoned or maybe they ran into an issue, I think it’s really good to understand their perspective as well.
Program Elements and Surveys
And this is where the program elements then come in, right? So we understand our metric. We now have our journey that we want to understand, which again is this mortgage application process. But let’s talk about the program elements, and this is also very critical. So we can actually place surveys at critical abandonment points. So using, let’s say the mouse movement, we can understand if someone’s about to abandon and trigger a survey to ask them a couple of quick questions of why they’re abandoning that mortgage application journey. Not only that, but we could potentially connect the feedback around this abandonment with session replay data to understand not only what they said and told you, but what were they doing? What behaviors did they exhibit leading up to that? Did they run into errors?
Importance of Customer Effort
So just taking a quick step back: the metric, then the journey, then the program element will really help you understand, not only what’s going on, but also put this in the right place at the right time for your customers to give you the necessary feedback.
Real-Life Example and Discussion
Chris, how many mortgage application processes did you go through before you found your business? I’ll probably say over 8. And tell me why you chose the one that you did, besides the interest rate. Honestly, they were just easy to work with, right? And going back to the customer as — Bingo! Is it, right? I wanted to feel like a) I wasn’t being taken advantage of but, b) that I could find the information that I wanted and like get through their processes. That was critical for us and I know that’s critical for everyone because we’re dealing with such large sums of money and our futures, right? We don’t want our futures, building our vision of our future to be hard. Not to get too philosophical here.
Customer Effort Score and Application Process
No, it’s true. Customer effort score, we’re going to go into the next example in a minute, but the customer effort score is often a metric that’s actually overlooked. And you want to think about the bigger picture of is your customer promoting you because you gave them an easy process? When it’s easy to do something with your digital channel, you better believe people are talking about that. I know that I bank with my bank because the mobile app is an incredible experience. I never have to call them. I never have to walk into a bank. And so that works for me if it’s my lifestyle, and I end up becoming a promoter just because the effort on the experiences is easy. So don’t overlook the customer effort score and know that that’s a metric that’s telling you a bigger story. It’s telling you, like this application process, where are you having unsuccessful signups and why? Where is it not easy to complete?
The Concept of Effort
Yeah. And this concept of effort, actually Jess, is a really good one to keep in mind kind of throughout this entire process because, there’s a book I’ve been reading called “The Effortless Customer Experience.” If you all haven’t read it, I highly, highly recommend it. It was actually done by the company that is now Forrester before they became Forrester. I mean, it was a huge study that talked about how customer effort, especially in digital experiences and things like contact center, is one of the biggest factors and keys to things like loyalty, even conversion rates, return customers. So, just shameless plug for that book because I’ve really been enjoying it.
Conclusion and Actionable Insights
I think you should get some affiliate revenue if people watching, if they go buy that book. Maybe they should. And it’s really, the core concept that I’ve learned from this is about improving and reducing effort to serve and effort to do business with a business. Right? No one wants to make it hard. And if you make it hard on me to do business, I’ll just take my money elsewhere instead of like the net of that book. And there’s a lot of good strategies that talk about getting there.
