- 67% of customers who had a great experience with an employee said they would buy again from that organisation, compared to 11% who had a bad experience.
- 63% of customers who had a great experience with an employee said they would recommend that organisation, compared to 10% who had a bad experience.
ROI Toolkit
Investing in service strategies through A/B testing enhances retention rates, increasing revenue.
The methodology
The following outlines the recommended steps to implement this methodology:
- Identify and deploy a Service Improvement Strategy ā This can be any targeted service enhancement (such as reducing call response times to under one minute) that is expected to impact customer experience positively.
- Define and isolate your test segment ā Choose a representative customer segment (e.g., 10% of the customer base) to apply this new service strategy, ensuring a control group remains unaffected for comparison.
- Implement and monitor your service strategy ā Execute the strategy for the test group, ensuring consistent application (e.g., all calls answered in under one minute), then track retention and churn metrics over time for both test and control groups.
- Analyse the correlation ā Identify links between improved service outputs (e.g., reduced call response time) and changes in retention/churn rates. Demonstrate how the service strategy led to increased customer retention and reduced churn.
An example of how an organisation might use the Retention and A/B Testing metric
A telecom provider noticed long wait times were driving customer churn. To test a solution, they prioritised 10% of customers, ensuring calls were answered within 60 seconds, while a control group experienced standard wait times.
After six months, the test group saw a 12% increase in retention, an 8% drop in churn, and CSAT scores rose by 15 points. Using CLV data, the company calculated an additional Ā£5M in revenue from retained customers.
TEST
Things to consider
Choose a service strategy that directly impacts customer experience. This can include: reducing call response times, enhancing self-service processes, personalised support, training and upskilling agents. You need to isolate one area that is easily connected to changes in your service strategy.
To implement this method your organisation needs a strong infrastructure to measure outputs to any changes made, such as when service initiatives are tested in specific locations or operations, with performance compared to similar areas.
Ensure your test group is a meaningful portion of your customer base (e.g., 10%) while keeping a control group for comparison.
Apply the improvement uniformly to avoid inconsistencies that could skew results.
Calculate revenue changes using Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to determine ROI.
Key research/insight from us
Research from post card
The Customer Knows (2016)
The Customer Knows (2016)
Building the Service Nation
Building the Service Nation
The research is based on interviews with senior executives (including Chief Executive Officers, Chief Operating Officers and Customer Service or Customer Experience Directors) and online surveys with 751 employees in a variety of roles, across organisations and sectors, 929 consumers and 500 young people aged between 16 and 21. The research was conducted between December 2022 and February 2023.
Around 67% of UK employees spanning a wide range of roles, departments or functions, spend significant amounts of time in their job dealing with customers. Therefore, for many organisations, the profession of customer service is about embedding a service culture to deliver the organisationās commercial and customer experience objectives, as well as developing appropriate skills in specific roles.Ā The research identifies that there is a growing requirement for broader and more advanced skills and lays out in detail what these skills and capabilities will be.
Customer service provides a challenging and rewarding career with genuine pathways to develop skills and experience but potential employees are not always aware of the breadth of career opportunities and many are more likely to see customer service as a foundation for other careers than a respected profession offering good career opportunities.Ā The research presents 5 main pathways for careers in customer service.
To conclude, our research highlights 9 areas to improve the perception and recognition of roles and careers in customer service as well as practical recommendations to aid organisations in addressing them.
A connected world?
A connected world?
Key themes of the research include:
- Which technologies and applications will be most important for customer experience
- What is required to implement technologies successfully and achieve business performance and customer service objectives?
- How best to achieve optimum blend of human and technology-based experiences?
- What should organisations do to reduce the risk of digital exclusion ?
- From an AI, data or personalisation perspective are there technologies that are āoff limitsā?
Productivity UK
Productivity UK
With almost 80% of UK GDP generated by the service sector, there is an urgent need to define, develop and measure productivity in a service context.
This Breakthrough Research examines the perspectives of senior managers, employees and customers on productivity in a service context.
The research looks at how organisations have sought to improve both their productivity and customer satisfaction, and recommends a framework to enable organisations to improve and measure their performance.
