Customer experience strategy: do this, not that

Your 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 targeting a dozen attendees each, but 57 people, with standing room only, crammed into the CX ROI roundtable. The pressure to demonstrate business results is high, but year after year, studies show that less than half of companies seeking CX excellence actually have a CX strategy. The main obstacles to the success of the customer experience are often mentioned as the lack of a CX strategy, the lack of cooperation between organizations, the lack of CX processes and, consequently, the 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 strategy neglect is outlined in Forrester’s 2013 State of Customer Experience report: “Although 90% of respondents said CX is a top strategic priority for their company, a shocking 86% said that their companies don’t really expect to get much value out of it.

For other business endeavors, would we settle for such lukewarmness or incompleteness 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 throw the baby out with the bath water just yet, you have a chance to be honest and complete in the future!

Here are 3 keys to getting it right in 2015: be holistic, break down silos, and integrate.

1) Be holistic: For something as important as YOUR company’s source of finance, customers, think big and holistic. Fragmentary attempts produce fragmentary results.

• DO THIS: Implement a comprehensive system that connects customer feedback to internal improvements and innovations, and then to 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.
• IT’S NOT THAT: A program or technology is not a strategy: market research, CRM, referrals, engagement, and repurchase/renewal efforts are components that must be connected to “move the needle” for CX ROI. Our 4-year study indicates that ongoing coordination between managers of all these CX programs is a success factor for CX ROI. Also, don’t forget the middleware: customer intelligence connects the dots across disparate sources, customer lifetime value (CLV) prioritizes efforts and motivates action, CX improvement must be systemic to avoid recurrence of problems, CX innovation must anticipate customer 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 often not part of what is considered a “CX strategy”. Do: Think of it as focusing your business on customers Y centering your employees on customers. As the lifeblood of your business, why would you focus it on anything else?

2) bust silos: Customers think of a company or brand as “one”, so it pays to manage the customer experience accordingly.

• DO THIS: Get your C-Team “on the same page” with customer-centric CX terminology, vision, and strategy. Unify your business units and support functions in their views and roles, and understanding of their joint responsibility for the ripple effect on CX goals of their handoffs, decisions and mindsets. Align data and methods across your business, enabling the flexibility to address customer needs while simplifying and creating consistency that will benefit the well-being of customers, employees, and shareholders alike.
• NOT THAT: Silos built into your CX effort waste a lot of opportunity. While methodology and technology pilots are helpful, lay the foundation for change management so that pilots are implemented horizontally and vertically to minimize silos in how you manage the customer experience. The same goes for data, systems, and methods: design them right the first time and fix legacy issues. To achieve sustained CX ROI, run the business the way clients need us to represent ourselves.

3) Integrate: Because customers are an integral part of business success, integrate their perspectives into everything you do.

• 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, general meetings, performance reviews, succession, planning and budgeting, etc.
• NOT THAT: Customer experience is not an interaction, a touchpoint, an instance of use, an event, an aura, or the exclusive domain of frontline employees. Everything in your company can influence the experience your customers have. Like healthy habits for physical bodies, the best results come when health-focused thinking and actions permeate every aspect of your life. If you want lasting CX differentiation and ROI, make it part of your lifestyle.

A sensible approach to CX strategy is what is needed for sustained ROI from CX. In fact, companies that see customer experience as a driver of corporate strategy, rather than a subset of, or unrelated to, corporate strategy seem to have cracked the nut to get great value from marketing efforts. CX. Be holistic, break down silos, and embed the customer experience into everything he does as you plan for the future of your business.