CXPA Lessons learned from CXPA

Most companies are struggling with Customer Experience. They have very limited resources (the average department seems to be one or two people) so their ability to tackle some of the more strategic issues is very limited.

Senior management talks about customer experience and how important it is but they don’t really believe it because they don’t provide support for the CX staff and they don’t have any strategic plan for how to scale Customer Experience.

Most people think Journey Mapping is making pretty wall pictures and doing group exercises with sticky notes. Journey Mapping is a strategic effort that crosses organizational boundaries. It’s fine to do a journey map with your team from the inside out but real journey mapping needs to include the customer by segment or persona and needs to be updated with data on a regular basis.

There seem to be 2 schools of thought on customer experience. The first group is all about customer emotions and scores. There is nothing wrong with this but how do you take action on the basis of this? The second group is all about data and analytics. This is a great start but there needs to be a “translation” that moves you from measuring to action via testing new solutions and building models to help you anticipate the future.

Customer Experience Professionals have their own language e.g. NPS, Moment of Truth (MOT), CSat, etc. The companies we work for don’t care about our words. We need to translate what we do into concrete business jargon like an increase in revenue, incremental profit, cost savings etc. Don’t expect customers to know how to make our data relevant-it’s our job.

Most of the CX professionals are still trying to understand their organization and get them to move forward to improve their “scores”. Let’s face it –most of our scores don’t make any sense. Customers are sick of filling out surveys and they will fill in the blanks just to get it out of the way. We need to focus on understanding our customers by observing them, co-creating new solutions with them, and having them play with prototypes of new “solutions” so we really do understand them. Filling out surveys on a regular basis doesn’t tell us what changes we need to make to improve their loyalty and willingness to spend.

At the end of the day, the Customer Experience team needs to talk about innovation as well as incremental change. Industries like automotive, financial services and healthcare are being “reinvented” if we aren’t working on innovation, our company may not exist in a few years. Focus on what is important to your best customers and think about how to grow the business, not make your customers happy. Happy is nice but won’t necessarily mean more revenue.

In an effort to show how much we know about Customer Experience we have over complicated the process of how it works. We need to simplify our message and focus on delivering results so senior management feels this is something they need, want and can’t live without.

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