According to a recent Forrester report (“The State of Customer Experience, 2012” published April, 2012), more than 90% of companies are making customer experience a top strategic priority, with 75% aiming to differentiate from their competitors (and industry) on the basis of customer experience. In this day and age, new technologies and services are popping up at remarkable speeds. Everyone is racing to bring in new customers and meet sales targets but more often than not, existing customers are kind of left to their own devices. BIG mistake, as many companies fail to appreciate that existing customers is where more than 80% of their revenue comes from.Most companies don’t have a centralised customer experience team or their initiatives are scattered across various departments, so it’s difficult to measure their customer's experience. If you can't measure something, you can't reliably manage it, and if you can't manage it, then you can't easily improve it. ”The current state of customer experience management in most companies is ad hoc at best,” describes the report. Sometimes it’s a company's support team that has the most contact with its customers, other times it could be the community manager hearing feedback from various social channels; but how often does information about your customers' experience get siloed - so there's no overall clear picture of what customers value about doing business with you for you to make an informed decision.According to the report, customer experience management (CEM) professionals are planning to spend their 2012 funding tackling three goals:1. Spread word about customer experience to employees2. Solidify measurement and voice of customer capabilities.3. Strengthen customer experience expertise.It’s high time that organisations view customer experience as a revenue branch of their business and not just as a support role. All the telltale signs of a healthy customer or one that’s at risk of leaving are readily there at their fingertips. Smart phone survey technology now makes it very easy to ask existing customers and customer-facing employees to identify the level of experience needed to prevent customer churn. From there you can calculate how much “wow” it would take to turn existing customers into truly loyal brand advocates.How does your organization view the role of customer success managers? Is customer success one of your top strategies for 2012? Try the SurveyMe app for free to create surveys and get honest feedback

A business is only as good as its people. Recent research by Kenexa shows that: 69% of employers believe employees are engaged, whilst only 35% of employees claim to be 81% of HR professionals think employees would recommend the organization to a friend. Only 38% actually would 71% of HR professionals think the organization has fair benefits while only 48% of employees agree with this statement 53% of HR professionals think they provide fair compensation compared to only 30% of employees 83% of HR professionals think their employees plan to stay for the next year. 41% of employees agree with this statement HR departments clearly need to start engaging and listening to their employees to stem the flow of high staff turnover which will ultimately result is bad customer experiences for all.  All it would take is an annual employee engagement study or survey if you like, but it needs to be read and the results of which are cared about and acted upon.

What To Measure? Measure those activities or factors, which are important to you successfully achieving your organisational or departmental goals. Key performance indicators also known as KPIs or Key Success Indicators (KSI), help an organisation or a department define and measure its progress toward its goals. Some online and App survey software like SurveyMe will actually allow you to preset KPIs and performance targets when you create your questions so measuring actual versus desired becomes even easier. KPIs will differ depending on an organisation and its objectives. A business may have as one of its Key Performance Indicators the percentage of its income that comes from return customers. A Customer Service department may have as one of its KPIs the percentage of customer calls answered in the first minute.  A KPI for a hotel might be the level of client satisfaction at check-in. You may need to measure several things to be able to calculate the metrics in your KPIs and so this is where it is often important when selecting software to choose something that gives you unlimited wiggle room to practice your surveys and develop KPIs at no additional cost. To measure progress toward its client check-in KPI, the particular department will need to measure (count) how many guests stayed and get a consistent number of customer feedback replies (e.g. 25 as a minimum) each period. It must also measure how things have improved over a period. Then the department Manager can manage staff, training, resources toward improving or maintaining that KPI.