The 5 reasons why the Customer Satisfaction Index is collapsing despite all the data you hold and manage:
"There is no education like adversity" (Benjamin Disraeli)
We start this article with a quote because quotes, much like our history, remind us that we are never the first to face an entirely new situation or circumstance of events. Before us, sometimes, long before us, many have walked down similar paths and faced similar challenges, if not worse.
According to the ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index), most US companies have not been so deserving of their customer's love, with a severe shift beginning in 2019. With the steepest decline registered since 2000, for over a period of 4 years, beginning in mid-2018, the ACSI has been systematically plummeting.
Why has this Index plummeted despite all the time, attention, and investment companies have put into their Customer Experience programs?
It could be the case of "it's not you, it's your customer," but it most likely isn't.
So what is this impressive chart trying to tell us?!?
It's telling us that all the companies' hearts might be in the right place and that they most likely hold their customer's interests and preferences above anything else; however, their execution is failing miserably.
Millions of Petabytes of customer data are stored, and millions of Dashboards flicker on screens across organizations; thousands of "Data Alchemists" and "Data Scientists" will shout aloud promises of a golden goblet, but… In the end, the outcome seems elusive.
This is obviously in some way a hyperbole, but in the end, the evidence is unquestionable; the customer isn't feeling the "magic."
Let's try to put our finger on the potential cause of this:
The data points collected don't add truly tangible data that is capable of changing an outcome.
The data you harness is so vast that you can't see the forest for the trees.
You don't have a viable way of communicating with your customers during their decision lifecycle.
Your brand isn't genuinely relevant to particular customers you try to engage.
Despite your best efforts, you're failing to provide appropriate customer support or forcing your customers to direct their issues to less desired channels.
One of these 5 points might be why your strategies are failing, or it might even be a combination of these points. The blunt truth is that unless you are constantly measuring the direct outcome of your strategies and diving into your customers' signals across your brand's multiple divisions, you will most likely not be able to impact a significant change.
But we have to share a tad more bad news. As you may already be aware, we are looking towards a rather somber 2023 and possibly 2024. These next years will reshape and realign our economic perspectives, challenge many previously sketched-out presumptions, and place us under growing pressure to provide measurable results.
I won't bore you on a subject that I am very passionate about, but the consumer's buying power will be pulverised and kept at a much lower rate for the next 2 to 5 years. It will become harder to sell non-essential goods and products and force the consumer to be more demanding when choosing between brand A and brand B.
Is this a terrible thing?… No! No, it isn't!
It's something really great!
But just as good ol' Jerome Powell kept us on our toes with interest rate hike uncertainty, so will I by revealing why it's actually not so terrible in Part 2.
Have a great week!
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