Everyone’s Talking About the Customer Experience. So Why Aren’t More Companies Acting on It?
Customer journey map example: SuiteCX

Everyone’s Talking About the Customer Experience. So Why Aren’t More Companies Acting on It?

There’s no doubt that “customer experience” is one of the hottest topics in business today. And there’s a great deal of evidence that a better CX leads not just to increased customer satisfaction, but to reduced operating costs and improved sales, as well.

Aside from minor tweaks and efficiencies, however, few companies seem able to make any sustained progress in their efforts to improve CX over the longer term. Why is that?

Some companies claim to be customer-focused, because they’ve created a feedback survey or they’ve started tracking their Net Promoter Scores (NPS). Others take pride in doing a customer journey map, which they then mount on the wall – Check! That’s done.

Organizationally, I do see a lot of companies assigning responsibility for CX either to a senior staff executive or maybe to a whole department, but usually it’s purely a staff function and very little real authority is conveyed with this assignment. As a result, rather than making CX improvement into a key element of the company’s go-to-market strategy, the initiative can easily slide into a kind of token effort. It becomes a sort of organizational advertisement that “we take CX seriously,” a message with the same ring of truth as the call center’s annoying protestation, “your call is very important to us.” Really?

Quick wins, by their very nature, tend not to be as compelling in the long run, while long-run initiatives either get terminated outright when the sponsoring executive takes a new assignment, or they lose their luster one monthly meeting at a time, because the tools aren’t available to sustain the effort, while conflicting priorities sap people’s attention until the next “initiative du jour” steals the spotlight.

But improving your company’s customer experience is genuinely hard work, and to be successful you need to keep at it.

CX improvement is a journey, not a destination. You’ll never reach a point at which you can sit back and say “Wow! Our customer experience is now perfect!”

Alas, here’s what the rush to CX looks like from my own perspective, as a knowledgeable but independent observer:  

  • Motivation: Measurable. The purely financial benefits of CX improvement usually amount to 5-10% added to a company’s bottom line. And this is before the non-financial benefits, such as improved employee morale and engagement, more focused innovation, and better resilience in the face of disruptive threats to the business model.
  • Decision: Easy to take, but hard to sustain. Company after company says that providing a great customer experience is their primary focus, but then they can’t focus on it for more than a few quarters, if that.
  • ResultDisappointing. By any reasonable criteria, very few companies are successfully improving their customer experience on a continuing basis. 

If you want to start your company on the path to having a productive and sustainable CX improvement effort, then my advice is to begin with the data. Start by developing a clear picture of who your best (and worst) customers are. Marketing departments often have access to a wealth of customer descriptive and transactional data, and it is this data that should be leveraged first.

Is it worth the effort? Almost always. Because with better data you’ll be able to apply your CX improvement effort to: 

  • Demand-generation programs,
  • Prospect nurturing,
  • Customer loyalty and cross-selling,
  • User experience within your channels, and
  • Broader corporate strategies and decisions.  

Only after you’ve assembled the data will you be able to start exposing the friction and obstacles in your processes, along with key gaps and opportunities. You can do this by creating a focused set of questions, both for your customers and for your customer-facing employees, to develop not just an “inside out” view of your business but an “outside in” view as well.

Sophisticated tools are already available to help you map out these views, from several different vendors. (One highly rated solution is from San Francisco-based SuiteCX, for instance. This would be my personal favorite, because the company’s founder and CEO was one of the partners at Peppers & Rogers Group who helped develop our methodology, and a number of other ex-PRG folks are involved as well, including my co-author and business partner Martha Rogers, who serves on their board.) 

My next article, The Dirty Little Secret Behind CX Initiatives, and Why They’re So Hard, discusses one more very significant obstacle to the success of a company’s CX improvement efforts, and how to tackle that issue, as well. 

Tom Vleisides

Retired at Vleisides Industries

6y

Pegasystems has an interesting perspective regarding great CX which is that it is really about a customer journey. Too many time this problem is viewed from the companies perspective and needs to be from the customers perspective. That is what is expected and required now days. Check out https://www.pega.com/topics/customer-engagement.

Well said, the biggest requirement is to make the top business leaders meaningfully accountable for measurable change. Staff functions are needed to design collect and interpret measurement systems and improvement programs BUT it is only the top business leaders that have the power to act.

Colin C.

Managing Director at Anchor Digital Ltd

6y

I believe companies that create and maintain successful CX, focus just as much time on company culture and staff as well as department initiatives and procedures to directly address this. Its easy to say or provide token commitment to CX even after collating great research data, and identifying what needs to be implemented. The larger and older the organisation the harder this is to successfully undertake without staff, and company culture also aligning to help create better CX. As with most industries now, the tools and knowledge is easily accessible to collect research data, but the strategic planning, implementation and ongoing quality control is where a lot of organisations fail.

Mark Horwood

CEO at Captivate Connect

6y

Providing a low cost targetted medium for companies to improve their CX and engagement Captivate Connect utilises the customer time to engage, to seek feedback, develop database and entertain waiting callers during the time they normally waste listening to banal music on hold, yet a large number of companies say they would rather bore the customer than do anything differently!

Dave Duren

Manager-Wholesale Distribution, US West - Amtrol

6y

I totally agree! And I too, sometimes wonder why many companies fail to act "consistently" although short-sidedness for bottom line performance seems to trump the deck and any CX that is developing are pushed to the side. This then becomes a habit that is hard to break.

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