Drivers vs Influencers: Why you need to pay attention to both

Living up to your customers’ expectations requires an understanding of both the drivers and the influencers of their satisfaction with the service you deliver.

What is the difference between drivers and influencers?

Drivers: The key elements of the interaction that drive the “Overall Satisfaction Score” a customer gives to a brand and best explain the overall satisfaction. There are only a few key drivers, and their importance weights vary from year-to-year.

Influencers: Diagnostic measures of what customers experience when they interface with a brand.

Why do you need both?

The drivers allow the customer to rate your performance on a scale (of 1-10 for instance), which is very helpful, but not sufficient to take action. The influencers, also called diagnostics that can be expressed as Key Performance Indicators, pinpoint the corporate behaviors (like transferring a call or asking customers to provide the same information more than once) that influence why the customer gave the service provider a particular rating on one of the key drivers.

What are leading drivers and significant influencers across service channels?

Are you building your performance improvement strategy around your customers’ drivers and influencers?

Every brand has its own operational approach which results in a unique set of performance gaps. Identifying the drivers and influencers of satisfaction for your customers helps you pinpoint the right gaps for performance improvement efforts. Prioritizing these specific gaps will help you move the customer experience up the most in the least amount of time at the lowest cost as you will be targeting the right actions for your customers and wasting less time and resources focusing on the wrong ones. 


If you don’t currently have a mechanism in place to identify how you are performing across all drivers and influencers of customer service satisfaction for your customers by channel so that you can identify and prioritize your performance gaps, contact our team today. Let us help your team get focused on the right actions to improve your business. 

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