Kantar CX exec says ExperienceEvaluator offers a fast track to insights
Speed, convenience and affordability are usually considered the pillars of a strong customer experience (CX). Evaluating CX within a company, however, is often a long, onerous and expensive process. The irony is not lost on Nithi Kumar, and he believes he and his team have found a solution.
Earlier this month London-based market research firm Kantar, where Kumar serves as global head of experience solutions, released ExperienceEvaluator, a self-service tool that will allow brands to conduct surveys using its consumer panels and receive insights about their CX performance in a four-day period.
Kantar is known for its Meaningfully Different Experiences (MDX) framework and already offers several services and solutions based on it through an online marketplace to help define customer journeys and improve Voice of the Customer programs. ExperienceEvaluator is being positioned as a lower-cost offering to benchmark CX and pursue goals such as increased market share and reduced customer churn.
Kantar
“We took the courage to disrupt ourselves as a research agency,” Kumar told 360 Magazine. “Why not make (the process of evaluating CX) cheaper and accurate when we can do it using automation?”
Brand in the auto sector, for example, could use ExperienceEvaluator to see how their CX at the transactional level influences consumer preferences vs. competitors. The tool could also provide an early read customer reactions to digital transformation, such as a brand that launches an AI-powered chatbot on its web site to field questions and complaints.
After launching a survey within the tool (which can include two custom questions), brands will receive a data file with insights they can explore in a dashboard-style view. Kantar can also supplement ExperienceEvaluator’s findings with a deeper analysis and workshops with brands that want to learn more, Kumar said.
Though it draws upon the MDX framework, Kantar recognizes that many brands focus on metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS). Kumar said ExperienceEvaluator will get at why that kind of key performance indicator (KPI) might not be moving in the right direction.
“(MDX) helps makes better sense of NPS,” he explained.
ExperienceEvaluator can work across 20 different brand categories. Kumar said that the company expects to see some takeup within verticals that are already focused on CX, such as telecom, retail and banking, but also digital service providers and companies offering e-wallets. The hope is to incentivize companies to give CX the same weight and urgency they put into measuring areas such as revenue, market share and operational expense.
Ongoing geopolitical and economic headwinds are also forcing brands to think in shorter-term cycles, Kumar adds, which means they can’t afford their CX to decline.
“Things can change within one month in a particular category, especially if you’re talking about service industries,” he said. “Very practically, people don’t have the time to wait.”
