The Tic-Tac-Toe of Experiential and Operational Data

When evaluating  customer experience you need to Integrate and assess both operational data (O-data) and experiential data (X-data). While many organizations are rich in operational data, few have sufficiently acquired and utilized experiential data, yet this X-data is critical to enabling today’s companies to be disproportionately rewarded for delivering great customer service. To get a true understanding of customer service and customer satisfaction, you need to insure the organization is careful collecting and report both operational and experiential data findings to see whether your operation has happy customers and you are truly competitive.

Nowhere in the organization is the need for operational and experiential data to converge than in the call center operations. Within the call center you have a plethora of operational information – number of consumer calls, wait time, abandoned calls, call resolution, length of the call, etc. However, access to experiential data is non-existent or extremely limited and often difficult to analyze. Experiential data tradition is collected through post-call surveys utilizing both open-end and closed-end data. Additionally many call centers record agent conversations, however this qualitative data asset has been extremely underutilized for CX purposes.  

X + O = More Complete Customer Picture

In most organizations, the operational and experiential data are silo’d. Call center operational data is typically used for agent training and to assess call center efficiency to improve performance. This operational data is giving insight on the past operational performance, looking backwards. Experiential data is used to assess customer experience as a means to better understand the interaction with agents and the company’s policies and products and their impact on customer loyalty and sentiment. Experiential data is the best indicator or future brand performance, thus its a forward performance indicator.  If you don’t integrate operational and experiential data in your CX assessment you are only getting part of the customer picture. As Ryan Smith, CEO of Qualtrics, explains it, the operational data tells you what happened but the experiential data tells you why it happened.

Customers have come to expect real-time response from brand interaction, and integration of operational and experiential data has to be delivered in real time to keep pace. Operational data represents the past, what transpired, but experiential data represents the behavior and sentiment of the consumer which is an indicator of future behavior. In short, how to provide the service and product experience that motivates the customers to love your brand.

Shorten Time to Customer Action

With real-time CX surveys and analytics you can bring together operational and experiential data to shorten time to customer insight and action. We are finding that voice-driven IVRs and real-time speech-to-text transcription are essential components of customer experience solutions that combine real time data collection and integration delivering immediate insight into customer experience. For example, conversations captured and analyzed in real time during call center interactions can be quickly transcribed and analyzed to gather immediate experiential data. When you add in voice-driven surveys delivered immediately following a call center transaction, you gather a complete picture of CX with actionable insight that lets you respond to issues in near real time.

As brands continue to look for ways to differentiate themselves by enhancing their customers brand experience, the marriage of operational and experiential data is going to become essential to get a true portrait of customer experience. Those brands that can integrate that data in real-time will be the winners in the race for better CX. As customer expectation grow, winning brands will have integrated data and analysis not only to understand what has happened, but to predict what their customers attitudes and needs will be to insure continued customer delight.