Customer experience strategy is the foundation for achieving business results, not just as ROI for your customer experience efforts, but for your business as a whole. In this season of planning for the new fiscal year, it will pay off to get it right.
At a customer experience (CX) conference, various roundtable options were aimed at about a dozen attendees each, but 57 people, with only room to stand, were stacked on the CX ROI roundtable. The pressure to demonstrate business results is high, but year after year, studies show that less than half of companies that aspire to excellence in CX actually have a CX strategy. The main obstacles to customer experience success are often cited as lack of CX strategy, lack of cooperation between organizations, lack of CX processes, and consequently lack of budget.
Top Obstacles to Successful Customer Experience Goals: Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management Best Practices Study, 2010-2013.
The shocking consequence of CX’s strategy oversight is described in the Forrester 2013 State of Customer Experience report: “Despite 90% of respondents saying that CX is a strategic priority for their company, a shocking 86% said their companies don’t really expect to get much value out of it. “
For other endeavors in business, would we settle for such a lack of enthusiasm or lack of compliance in our annual operating plans? As long as the answer is yes, we can certainly agree on a low probability of success. But don’t dump the baby out with the bath water just yet – you have a chance to be honest and whole in the future!
Here are 3 keys to getting it right in 2015: Be holistic, eliminate silos, and integrate.
1) Be holistic: For something as important as THE source of financing for your company, customers, think big and holistically. Partial attempts produce partial results.
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DO THIS: Implement an end-to-end system that connects customer feedback with internal improvements and innovations, and then customer engagement. Nothing in business is an island – Think of customer experience management as a system of interconnected efforts that must be fully synchronized and deployed before lasting results are achieved.
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NOT THAT: A program or technology is not a strategy – market research, CRM, referrals, engagement, and buyback / renew efforts are components that must be connected to “move the needle” for CX ROI. Our 4-year study indicates that ongoing coordination between the managers of all of these CX programs is a success factor for the CX ROI. Also, don’t forget the “middleware”: Customer intelligence connects the dots through disparate sources, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) prioritizes efforts and motivates action, CX improvement must be systemic to avoid disruption. recurrence of problems, CX innovation must anticipate customers’ expectations and contribute to customer capabilities, and internal engagement must be aligned with all of the above. Our 4-year study shows that this middleware is rarely part of what is considered a “CX strategy.” Do: Think of it as focus your business on customers Y focus your employees on customers. As the source of your company’s life blood, why would you focus it on something else?
2) Bust of silos: Customers think of a company or brand as “one”, so it pays to manage the customer experience accordingly.
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DO THIS: Put your C team “on the same page” with customer-centric CX terminology, vision and strategy. Unify your business units and support functions in your views and roles, and understanding your joint responsibility for the ripple effect on the CX goals of your transfers, decisions, and mindsets. Align data and methods across your enterprise, allowing the flexibility to address customer needs, while simplifying and creating consistency that will serve the well-being of customers, employees, and shareholders alike.
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NOT THAT – Silos built into your CX effort waste many opportunities. While methodology and technology pilots are helpful, it lays the foundation for change management for pilots to deploy horizontally and vertically to minimize silos in how you manage the customer experience. The same is true for data, systems, and methods – design right the first time and fix legacy problems. For sustained ROI from CX, run the business the way clients need us to represent ourselves.
3) Integrate: Because customers are critical to business success, integrate their views into everything you do.
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DO THIS: Integrate CX goals into all of your strategies, plans, rituals, processes, policies, and daily work, at all levels of management, and across all lines of business, accounts, and support functions. Rituals include staff meetings, operations reviews, everyone’s meeting, performance reviews, succession, planning and budgeting, etc.
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IT’S NOT THAT: Customer experience is not an interaction, touchpoint, usage instance, event, aura, or exclusive domain of frontline employees. Everything in your company can influence the experience your customers have. Like healthy habits for the physical body, the best results are obtained when actions and thinking focused on health permeate all aspects of your life. For long-lasting CX differentiation and ROI, make it a part of your lifestyle.
A sensitive approach to CX strategy is what is needed for a sustained CX ROI. In fact, companies that view customer experience as a determinant of corporate strategy, rather than a subset of, or unrelated to, corporate strategy seem to have broken the nut to derive great value from corporate strategy efforts. CX. Be holistic, eliminate silos, and integrate the customer experience into everything you do as you plan for the future of your business.