Is your leadership strategy guided by data or simply a shot in the dark?
Internal insights and customer feedback are essential to building an effective customer-focused leadership strategy. But it requires continually listening to customers, measuring what matters, and ensuring data is passed to the right teams to make changes and improvements.
Diana Brown, SVP of Sales Operations and Customer Experience at XPO, involves leaders with the data through feedback loops. Leaders know the importance of data and see it first-hand by talking to employees about what is and isn’t working and the tools they need to deliver a great customer experience.
Technology plays a large role in expanding insights. As a logistics company, XPO has access to massive amounts of data. Every package is scanned to gather data on how long it takes packages to get to customers, where there are roadblocks, and if a customer is waiting longer than expected. As e-commerce grows and shipments expand, XPO uses that data to adjust its routing strategy.
But it’s not just internal feedback that matters–Brown says customer feedback has to be infused regularly at the leadership level. She provides weekly operational metric updates weekly to the executive staff.
But with so much data available, tracking every metric can pull companies away from the insights that matter most. XPO narrowed metrics down to four areas critical to delighting customers:
- Timeliness. Are pickups and deliveries happening on time?
- Damage. Is XPO limiting damage to customers’ products?
- Invoice. Do customers receive an invoice they can pay?
- Customer service quality. How well are customers treated?
These four areas strongly indicate the overall customer experience and give leaders updated insights into the four biggest factors of customer satisfaction.
Complementing the raw numbers is survey feedback that also comes in weekly. Hearing directly from customers about the company’s performance is a staple at executive meetings. But feedback doesn’t stop there–it is disseminated throughout the company to the teams that can put those insights into action.
XPO has a team that pushes data to the service centers and applicable departments to get insights right in front of people who need it most: frontline and regional employees. From there, teams can adjust based on constructive feedback and celebrate positive feedback. That happens through various channels, including an app, workplace site, and others, to ensure everyone has the most real-time data.
Companies can’t succeed without prioritizing data and feedback. Those insights are essential to forming a leadership strategy and involving the entire company in improving the customer experience.
This episode is sponsored by Thinkific.
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Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist and the bestselling author of The Customer of the Future. For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here.