Importance of CX in Today’s World
Today, customer experience is the key differentiator for successful organisations and brands. There is a vast amount of literature written on this topic and is a focus for many organisations’ leadership teams. Managing and delivering a positive experience with a brand throughout the customer’s life cycle helps in driving revenue, improves employee satisfaction and reduces churn.
Instead of delivering a good experience on one particular touchpoint (example, resolving a customer issue at the call center for the connection at a phone service company), the context and complete journey of a customer’s experience with the brand needs to be understood (Example, the experience of the customer at the point of billing or the point of recharge or purchasing other services). More importantly, the company must ensure that the customer receives a good experience at all touchpoints consistently.
For CX initiatives to be successful, many components have to be worked on– like evaluating the functions in the organisation that might be affected by this drive, processes that must be redefined for delivering a superior customer experience, training employees to deliver exceptional CX through these changed process and continuous tracking of these processes/journeys to ensure improvement in satisfaction.
Consistency and Accuracy to Ensure Exceptional CX
A key step in driving CX is to continuously track it across channels and functions– front-facing or otherwise – to ensure whether the new processes are able to consistently deliver delight and reduce customer effort.
While the leadership may strongly agree to the importance of customer experience in principle, driving this change at all levels of the organisation can be an enormous task and one that many organisations fail at.
There is a great deal of literature written on the application of behavioural psychology to customer experience. Another area where behaviourism can have its application is at the stage of training teams to deliver a great experience. In many organisations, training with respect to CX is critical but is also the hardest to implement, replicate and deliver consistently.
Application of Applied Behaviour Analysis in CX
Given my experience of using Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) with children on the Autism spectrum in India, using principles of learning can have a huge contribution to delivering customer experience. The advantage of using these principles is that this therapy focuses on training using reinforcements (to reward any positive behaviour) and focuses on eliciting accurate and consistent behaviours that ensure teams deliver exceptional CX.
ABA, is an empirical approach, which emphasises that all behaviour is learned and is a reaction to stimuli. The interventions involve defining behaviour that is to be changed, replacing it with the desired behaviour or teaching a new skill altogether using principles of reinforcement. Although it sounds quite clinical, it has huge potential to drive business growth due to its data-driven method of training.
ABA’s basic tenet is all behaviours are external, observable and hence, measurable. Applied behaviour analysis has been proven to be the most successful in managing Autism and other developmental disorders due to the clarity it provides regarding the clear consequence of each behaviour.
Designing ABA Interventions: Basic Principles That Can be Used for CX
Appropriate/targeted behaviour is rewarded and inappropriate behaviours are ignored (not punished). One of the key aspects of achieving mastery of th desired behaviour is consistency.
Initially, when teaching a new skill, the therapist ensures the individual receives the same consequence (verbal praise, token, desired items) for displaying a certain response. Once the individual has learnt this behaviour, the reinforcement schedule may be changed depending on the objective. For example, a variable schedule of reinforcement may be introduced, where the individual does not receive reinforcement for every trial but randomly across sessions, which increases the probability of the desired behaviour occurring every time
In the context of CX, employees might display behaviours with customers that they have observed. However, this does not ensure all executives display the same desired CX behaviour.
Once the desired behaviour is defined, it can be broken down into a chain of observable steps. For example, an ideal experience at the call center of that phone service company can be divided into multiple micro-steps.
CX behaviours can be defined in these micro-steps across customer journeys/experiences and employees can be trained on them using principles of learning.
Use of Reinforcements and Understanding Functions of Behaviour
The concept of reinforcements is heavily used in ABA. Positive reinforcements increase the likelihood of a behaviour occurring. There are four main functions of behaviour that can help define the type of reinforcements that would be effective in training. These are social attention, access to tangible items or preferred activities, escape or avoidance of demands and activities, and sensory sensitivities (this could be seeking or avoiding sensory input). These functions can be used to understand the employee motivations for current behaviours and plan training programs accordingly. Some of the relevant functions have been explained below:
- The first function attention. An individual may engage in behaviour to get access to an item or activity. For example, an employee is recognised as the ‘employee who delivered best CX in a month’ in front of his peers is an example of social attention
- Access to tangible items or preferred activities: An individual may engage in behaviour to get access to an item or activity. For example, a service executive may consistently deliver delight to his/her customers to get the monthly incentive
- Escape or avoidance of activities or people: An individual may behave in a way to get something removed from their environment. For example, A CC executive might make a customer wait on call for a long time in order to end the call with him/her. The reinforcing consequence here is getting rid of the customer call/task.Reinforcements can be planned around desired items/behaviours which are delivered once positive behaviour is demonstrated.
Possible Approach to Create CX Training Interventions and Measurement
Success criteria can be established based on the goal that is being taught to the team, which can form the internal metrics of success. This ensures standardized behaviours being displayed across employees and for every instance. A shadow can be used to ensure employees are able to learn new skills/behaviours.
Once the behavioural training is completed, data can be collected to form a baseline and after training to track progress at an employee level. This data can also be mapped along with customer satisfaction scores across journey points and other internal data points that can be visible on dashboards to see how employee behaviour modification training contributes to customer satisfaction and positive sentiment.
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