5. Data categories for CX

We know the interaction the customer has with your company is what determines which memory they will build about your brand.

That’s where the CX work comes in, to interpret how the company can offer the best experience during these interactions. Making more customers remember your brand in a more profound and positive fashion.

The final result is that when more customers think of your brand in such a way, more of them will shop again and higher the chance that they will recommend it, after all, they want to repeat that good feeling and they want to give access to that sentiment to more people.

To achieve this goal we must understand what can happen between an interaction of the customer with the brand that makes them build a positive or negative memory.

That is what I want to talk about today. I want to introduce the questions which we must know how to answer and how to get to the answers.

As always, the first step is looking at the customer’s journey.

In the journey we should have mapped every interaction between a client and your brand because, after all, those are the interactions the customer will form memories from.

However, we must understand that there are interactions of varying degrees of importance.

The first question we must answer is: what are the interactions that most affect the final perception of our customer?

In order to show how to answer that question, first I must talk about data categories.

There are 4 Data Categories which are relevant to the correct analysis of the customer’s experience.

Context data

These are the data which tell us about what was going on in the environment around the customer while they interacted with our brand.

For example, if we are talking about an interaction that takes place in a brick and mortar store during which the customer makes a purchase we can look at data as:

• Store that was visited
• Attendant
• Product or products acquired
• Payment method
• Day of the week

Customer data

These data don’t alter themselves frequently, they differ from context data because your company has no power to influence them.

They are about who that customer is and will follow your customer during every interaction they have with your brand.

Still following the last example, customer that are:

• Name
• Age
• Gender
• City of residence
• Address
• Product/Service Preferences
• Acquisition channel
• Customer since

Organizational success data

The data which shows whether or not your company is doing a good job. You must always be looking to improve these data in order to stay in the game. These are very similar for most companies, but you must investigate and discover which of them is paramount. Examples are:

• Average ticket
• Rebuy rate
• LTV
• Churn rate
• CAC

Experience data

These are the only data which come from satisfaction and experience surveys. These data originate on the customer, in their answers to the surveying you are performing. It is paramount that you collecting them with deliberation, hence my examples here will be of moment rather than metric:

• Post purchase survey
• Post delivery survey
• Post support service survey

Now that we’ve explained the 4 data categories, let us return to the question:

“Which are the interactions which most affect the final perception of our customer?”

The path to answering this question is through looking at the experience data we’ve gathered and tracing which of them has the highest correlation with the organizational success data — both filtered for the same customer profile (customer data).

For instance, if all else remains constant, which survey correctly predicts a decrease in my average ticket when the customer gives me a low grade?

It will be easy to trace this correlation once you are monitoring every step of the customer’s journey with precision.

Probably, if a survey is made after the delivery, it is quite probable that the wait interactions, the package receiving and the unboxing of the product are those that will most interfere with the customer’s final grande.

Once the correlation is identified it suffices to look at the survey which originated that experience datum: which interaction most influences the result of that survey? Probably, if a survey is performed right after delivery it is quite probable that the interactions of waiting for the product, receiving the product and unboxing are those which most interfere in the customer’s final grade.

Having these interactions mapped you now must look to the context data of the customers who have come through them. Once again, the way is to find the correlation.

Which context mostly impacts the customer’s negative grade?

Does it matter who performed the service? Does the product that was purchase matter? Does the payment method matter? Or even the weekday?

Finding which context factors that most influence the grade you will have found where to first focus your efforts of improvement. It is that context detail which is getting in the way of your organizational success.

There are two questions you must answer:

1. Which interaction has the highest correlation with the success of your company?
2. Which characteristic of this interaction might be stopping the customer from having a positive perception of that moment?

To answer you must trace a correlation between grades from the surveys and organizational results. Identified the survey which most affects your success, locate the context within which you have the most or least success, from a CX perspective.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.