Building lasting customer relationships takes more than award-winning products and services. Understanding and addressing customer needs – especially when the business environment is challenging, changing and unpredictable – are fundamental. Data is the key. We recently spoke with Gretchen Gasser-Ellis, Vice President, Enterprise Operations, about CCC’s Customer Experience First program, or “CX1” as it’s known here.
Before we dig in, can you explain what CX1 is and what it means to CCC?
GGE: CX1 means “Customer Experience First.” It’s a company-wide program that challenges each and every employee to put themselves in the shoes of our customers and to prioritize the things that are most important to them. This program has been an incredible vehicle to ensure the “voice of the customer” stays at the forefront of everything we do; it means we look critically at how we operate, how we deliver our products and services, and how we service our customers.
How has the CX1 program impacted the way CCC does business?
GGE: Creating the CX1 program has challenged us to look across products and departments to see the bigger picture from the perspective of our customers. It’s enabled us to find common threads and bring seemingly disparate aspects of service under one roof. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s enabled us to pool resources and muster impactful improvements in a way that wouldn’t be possible if our efforts were siloed.
Can you give specific examples of CX1 at work?
GGE: We’re tracking our internal processes, mapping our customers’ journeys, logging resolution times, and compiling all of the data into a dashboard that can be easily analyzed. This not only helps to ensure we’re prioritizing the right improvements and making the most impactful changes first, but it also gives us a clear data-driven picture of the impact we’re having.
One important area of focus is analyzing our business models — with the help of our own expert Business Analysis team. They’ve uncovered inefficiencies and suggested improvements to benefit our customers. It’s been an eye-opening experience that helps us look across departments and through the lens of the customer.
We’re using data in new ways to analyze opportunities for improvement. For example, our data engineers have partnered with our Customer Service team to use a knowledge graph to gain new insight into how calls are managed, with the goal of reducing, and if possible, ultimately eliminating unnecessary calls into our Customer Service agents. With better data about why customers are calling and how we are managing those calls, we can improve the experience for everyone.
Another area we’re looking at is product enhancements. We discovered that some order information was not editable by customers. Instead of leaning on our Customer Service reps to manually make changes, we committed to fixing this at the product level, enabling our customers to make their own changes and saving them time in the long run. Sometimes the smallest modification can have the biggest impact.
If you could speak directly to your customer, what would you say CX1 means for them?
It means that CCC is focused on you. We’re committed to providing a world-class experience to each and every one of our customers, and the only way we can achieve this is through continuous improvement. We’ll keep listening to our customers, focusing on the data and making enhancements — both big and small — to make our clients’ experience more intuitive, streamlined and pleasant.