In-life customer experience

Populus is skilled at getting under the skin of day-to-day customer service and understanding what makes a great customer experience. We work closely with our clients to design the appropriate approach to get at the heart of the matter.

Moreover there is no one best way to understand the in-life customer experience and what may work well for one business could be wholly inappropriate for another. Populus is not wedded to any particular approach and can therefore offer impartial advice to our clients as to what would work best for them.

The four approaches used most commonly by Populus are:

• Customer satisfaction
• Customer loyalty
• Advocacy – net recommendation
• Customer commitment

The measurement of customer satisfaction, customer loyalty or advocacy all have one strength in common – simplicity. Regardless of the attribute they rely on only one question (How satisfied are you?; How likely are you to churn?; How likely are you to recommend?). Nevertheless, this is also a weakness because it is impossible to understand the totality of the customer experience from one question.

A customer commitment approach addresses this problem by creating a combined variable which includes: satisfaction, loyalty, trust, advocacy and brand proximity. The downside is of course by definition it does not have the simplicity which comes from asking just one question.

However, regardless of the customer framework chosen, simply measuring performance will not lead to success. Companies need a plan of action to make improvements and they must have leadership commitment to make improvements happen.