Developing a comprehensive Customer Experience (CX) strategy is more difficult than you might expect, and there is a lot of noise in the marketplace as to how to do it right. However, despite the massive amounts of talk, there are not a lot of intelligent recommendations for action. What are some of the barriers?
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Customer Experience: Getting past the Barriers to Success
1. suitecx ©2015, suitecx Inc. September 23, 2015 Customer Experience: Getting Past the Barriers to Success Developing a comprehensive Customer Experience (CX) strategy is more difficult than you might expect, and there is a lot of noise in the marketplace as to how to do it right. However, despite the massive amounts of talk, there is not a lot of intelligent recommendations for action. What are some of the barriers? Internal Organizational Silos Companies struggle with CX because it requires sharing information across the enterprise. It also requires getting agreement not only on what needs to be done but also on who will do it. Being successful at CX requires a deep understanding of customer needs and values, as well as all the internal people, processes and technologies that impact the customer experience. Many department heads don’t have the cross-‐functional technology and organizational skills to understand what needs to be done, let alone how to get the leadership on board to plan and execute. Lack of the Right Metrics Company metrics tend to be focused on individual department performance, not on mee.ng cross-‐departmental goals. Achieving margins and reducing costs tend to be the most significant priori.es. Customer experience gets put on the back burner as goals like risk avoidance, project completion time and technology up.me stifle innovation and reward the status quo. Advertising and Marketing Agencies Modern agencies are highly competent in guiding their clients around customers’ digital and social interactions, as well as helping them to understand broad emotional underpinnings of brand relationships. However, many agencies are not as attuned to the need to merge tati.cal evidence from on-‐ and off-‐line interactions with the digital and social knowledge they gather. Agency-‐driven customer journey maps are often aspirational and not grounded in fact. Thought Leadership “People, process, technology, and metrics makeovers are needed to implement a modern CX program. Companies should take a step-‐by-‐step approach, starting with Customer Journey Mapping and data-‐ driven assessments around CX maturity.” Lillian Murphy Vice President, Inventory Yield and Club Development Starwood Vacation Ownership No Common Definition of Best Customer Experience Marke.ng, Sales and Service are not aligned on who is the best customer and what a good experience looks like. If each area continues to operate independently and by their own defini.ons, customers will feel a disjointed experience at every point of engagement. Creating a seamless experience for the customer requires common organiza.onal understanding, data sharing and shared goals for improvement.
2. suitecx ©2015, suitecx Inc. September 23, 2015 Customer Experience: Getting Past the Barriers to Success How do you move forward when it seems like an impossible task? Begin with your customer data Implement tools that enable you to integrate customer data from multiple sources and systems to facilitate better business decision-‐making. Aim for a 360-‐degree view of the customer. Clean and match your data to make it current, complete and correct. Update your segmentation/personae Update your current categorization of customers to get a better understanding of your key segments. Focus on your most profitable and most growable segments first. Understanding what is unique about each segment helps you know what additional data to collect and use to bePer personalize their experiences. Embrace Customer Journey Mapping If mapping the en.re customer journey seems overwhelming, begin the process of mapping with your most profitable segment. Look at them across all the customer touch-‐points and the customer lifecycle in order to understand what they want from you and how you are or are not currently supplying it. Different segments, such as millennials and baby boomers, will experience the same interaction with your company differently. Your organization needs to know what is most important to each customer group (moments of truth) and what is broken (pain points). Build an Improvement Plan Mapping and validating the customer journey helps you identify and prioritze initiatives for organizational change. Create an improvement plan based on your journey map, and hold sessions with Marketing, Sales, IT, Service and other departments to agree on priorities and assign resources to make improvements. Thought Leadership About suitecx® Backed by over 120 years of combined experience in customer experience consulting, suitecx is a set of software tools that allow users to make fact based decisions and process improvements that are grounded in the customer experience. Customer-‐centric diagnostics, touch inventories, journey maps, customer storytelling and precision marke.ng are all components of this groundbreaking software. Stop using many different soRware tools to house your complete customer experience! suitecx is the glue that keeps your customer experience together. Metrics, Metrics, Metrics Create CX-‐centric metrics to monitor your progress. Focus on business outcomes rather than task completion. Revisit your customer journey periodically to measure success against the original baseline. Contact us for more information: [email protected]
1. suitecx ©2015, suitecx Inc. September 23, 2015 Customer Experience: Getting Past the Barriers to Success Developing a comprehensive Customer Experience (CX) strategy is more difficult than you might expect, and there is a lot of noise in the marketplace as to how to do it right. However, despite the massive amounts of talk, there is not a lot of intelligent recommendations for action. What are some of the barriers? Internal Organizational Silos Companies struggle with CX because it requires sharing information across the enterprise. It also requires getting agreement not only on what needs to be done but also on who will do it. Being successful at CX requires a deep understanding of customer needs and values, as well as all the internal people, processes and technologies that impact the customer experience. Many department heads don’t have the cross-‐functional technology and organizational skills to understand what needs to be done, let alone how to get the leadership on board to plan and execute. Lack of the Right Metrics Company metrics tend to be focused on individual department performance, not on mee.ng cross-‐departmental goals. Achieving margins and reducing costs tend to be the most significant priori.es. Customer experience gets put on the back burner as goals like risk avoidance, project completion time and technology up.me stifle innovation and reward the status quo. Advertising and Marketing Agencies Modern agencies are highly competent in guiding their clients around customers’ digital and social interactions, as well as helping them to understand broad emotional underpinnings of brand relationships. However, many agencies are not as attuned to the need to merge tati.cal evidence from on-‐ and off-‐line interactions with the digital and social knowledge they gather. Agency-‐driven customer journey maps are often aspirational and not grounded in fact. Thought Leadership “People, process, technology, and metrics makeovers are needed to implement a modern CX program. Companies should take a step-‐by-‐step approach, starting with Customer Journey Mapping and data-‐ driven assessments around CX maturity.” Lillian Murphy Vice President, Inventory Yield and Club Development Starwood Vacation Ownership No Common Definition of Best Customer Experience Marke.ng, Sales and Service are not aligned on who is the best customer and what a good experience looks like. If each area continues to operate independently and by their own defini.ons, customers will feel a disjointed experience at every point of engagement. Creating a seamless experience for the customer requires common organiza.onal understanding, data sharing and shared goals for improvement.
2. suitecx ©2015, suitecx Inc. September 23, 2015 Customer Experience: Getting Past the Barriers to Success How do you move forward when it seems like an impossible task? Begin with your customer data Implement tools that enable you to integrate customer data from multiple sources and systems to facilitate better business decision-‐making. Aim for a 360-‐degree view of the customer. Clean and match your data to make it current, complete and correct. Update your segmentation/personae Update your current categorization of customers to get a better understanding of your key segments. Focus on your most profitable and most growable segments first. Understanding what is unique about each segment helps you know what additional data to collect and use to bePer personalize their experiences. Embrace Customer Journey Mapping If mapping the en.re customer journey seems overwhelming, begin the process of mapping with your most profitable segment. Look at them across all the customer touch-‐points and the customer lifecycle in order to understand what they want from you and how you are or are not currently supplying it. Different segments, such as millennials and baby boomers, will experience the same interaction with your company differently. Your organization needs to know what is most important to each customer group (moments of truth) and what is broken (pain points). Build an Improvement Plan Mapping and validating the customer journey helps you identify and prioritze initiatives for organizational change. Create an improvement plan based on your journey map, and hold sessions with Marketing, Sales, IT, Service and other departments to agree on priorities and assign resources to make improvements. Thought Leadership About suitecx® Backed by over 120 years of combined experience in customer experience consulting, suitecx is a set of software tools that allow users to make fact based decisions and process improvements that are grounded in the customer experience. Customer-‐centric diagnostics, touch inventories, journey maps, customer storytelling and precision marke.ng are all components of this groundbreaking software. Stop using many different soRware tools to house your complete customer experience! suitecx is the glue that keeps your customer experience together. Metrics, Metrics, Metrics Create CX-‐centric metrics to monitor your progress. Focus on business outcomes rather than task completion. Revisit your customer journey periodically to measure success against the original baseline. Contact us for more information: [email protected]