CX1 Conference: A review for those interested in attending
Have you ever wondered, how to gain more insights about your customers, their experience on your site, AND how to get their feedback in your hands? If your answer to that question is yes (as it should be), you should make sure to attend next year’s CX conference.
Hosted this year for the first time by zenloop in Berlin, it offered much more than I expected, especially when it comes to the speakers. But let me start from the beginning.
What’s the goal of CX1?
CX1’s self-proclaimed goal is to “discuss the latest trends, best practices and developments in the areas of customer experience and customer retention” and they certainly lived up to that promise. While, in my experience, many of these conferences often end up feeling like an entire sales event, CX1 distinguished itself from these kinds of conferences by inviting top-class speakers. Let me do some name-dropping here: Mister Spex, Jochen Schweitzer, Zalando, Ex-ABOUT YOU, Junique, idealo, Metro, Facebook, Bain: they all shared valuable insights of their approach to customer experience.
Now, customer experience can be a fuzzy term. Let me quote Ryte Wiki here to get us all on the same page:
“Customer Experience encompasses the sum of experiences that a customer or buyer has with a company that offers services or products. This “experience” counts as the length of the contract that has been made between the two parties, and it can include a purchase, a use, or a new discovery.“
While customer experience was the main focus of the conference, it didn’t stop there. It touched on many aspects surrounding the topic, such as customer journeys, targeting and its limits, personalization and of course, NPS. As the conference was hosted by NPS-pioneer zenloop, it is no surprise that the Net Promoter Score was quite prominent on this conference, and most if not all of the speaking companies use the score.
How CX1 factors in the ever-important topic of NPS
For those of you who have never heard of NPS before: The Net Promoter Score is a way of categorizing the customers by the degree of their loyalty to a company. It’s setup is fairly simple, as it only consists of one question How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?
The customer can rate the likeliness on a scale of 0 to 10. Customers who selected a score of 0–6 are labeled Detractors and are less likely to show desired actions in the future, 7–8 are labeled Passives, which pretty much explains itself and 9 and 10 are Promoters. The actual Net Promoter Score is then calculated by the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of Detractors.
This concept which was originally introduced by Bain&Company, a consulting firm (who were also present and speaking at the conference) and was since implemented by almost any major company you can think of.
How Zenloop is utilizing NPS
Zenloop is the first and to my knowledge only company that specializes in NPS. They offer a wide range of options where and when you can ask your customer the holy question and also offer management of the free text field that usually follows the customer’s scoring (e.g. „What can we improve” sent to detractors) . In their advanced analytics tool, you can see which area of your website in which country satisfied the customer and where you may need to improve.
NPS may seem simple, considering it only consists of 1 or 1 and a half questions. But applied professionally, it can offer insights on many levels of your organization and give you a better picture of how customers react to different areas of your business.
Apart from NPS, the speaker of Zalando mentioned CSAT as an additional way of measuring customer experience. CSAT stands for Customer Satisfaction and is usually measured in quantitative research. The difference between the two factors is that NPS is an indicator of loyalty, so the long-term relationship between the customer and the company, while CSAT gives an insight into the customer’s satisfaction with the company in the “here and now“.
Key highlights at CX1 and summing it up
If I had to name a highlight of the conference, I’d name the keynote given by Mirko Caspar (Mister Spex) on identifying customer needs, defining customer experiences and manage customer satisfaction. He gave a good overview on many different levels starting with the customer journey. He explained the importance of the brand image with its attributes, benefits, tonality and appearance in conjunction with the 5 stages of the customer journey: baseline, know, visit, buy, loyal. He also emphasized the importance of building customer segments and addressing each segment appropriately.
In summary, I can only recommend for any company looking for ways to implement a customer-centric and data-driven customer experience management to check out this conference. An off-topic plus is the beautiful location of Spreespeicher, located directly at the Spree with a view of Oberbaumbrücke and known for it’s fantastic catering.
