Enterprise Wide Customer Satisfaction is Mediocre for Most

SQM data shows that 54% of organizations have an enterprise-wide customer experience strategy, and 33% of organizations have their customer experience strategy in progress. The overall ownership of the customer experience strategy is predominantly a C-level responsibility.

Historically, for most organizations, the C-level has been directly responsible for leading the customer experience strategy. Interestingly, our study is that only 19% of respondents indicated the CEO was leading the customer experience strategy. At SQM, we think this number is very low and one of the reasons why only 4% of our clients perform at a world class organizational Csat of 80% or higher (top box rating).

It has been SQM’s experience that when the CEO is leading the customer experience strategy and implementation effort, it is more likely to be successful.

SQM data reveals that 71% of contact center senior executives strongly agree that improving a contact center’s customer experience is just as important to the organization as revenue and profitability. Clearly, organizations are placing increased importance on customer experience.

Customer experience is defined as either a single interaction or the sum of all interactions for resolving a customer’s inquiry or problem. Most SQM clients stated that they have significantly increased their customer experience investment over the last two years. In addition, most contact center senior executives feel that the customer experience investment will continue to increase.

Customer experience investment money is being used on improving existing contact channel FCR performance, providing a seamless omni-channel experience, and contact channel expansion with increased functionality.

Currently, 37% of customers use multiple contact channels simultaneously to resolve the same inquiry, which is considered significant. So offering an omni-channel customer experience can be a source of differentiation for those customers who use multiple channels. However, the real opportunity for a source of differentiation is with the individual contact channels.

Again, only 5% of SQM’s clients provide world class FCR performance for their contact centers. Remember, customers, want their inquiry or problem to be resolved on the first contact using only one channel.