How can you show the value of customer experience?

CX impacts sales by keeping customers happy and coming back for more. When people enjoy interacting with your business, they spend more and tell their friends. So, good customer experiences mean more sales, plain and simple.

Be upfront with your team and your customers about what you hope to achieve and how you plan to get there. Your goals might be as simple as improving customer retention rates or as complex as completely overhauling your product interface to better meet user needs. Whatever they are, let integrity guide you and always remember the power of Yes! in innovation. Similarly, your metrics should not only reflect your goals but also embody the essence of loyalty, another core value. Whether it's net promoter scores, customer satisfaction scores, or customer effort scores, make sure they truly serve to enhance the relationship with your customers, not just add numbers to a report.

It is important to make sure your CX goals are aligned with the current main objective of your company. It's a lot easier to engage your stakeholders when they do, and you will need everyone's buy in to cement your recent changes in the long term.

Fire the voice of the customer (VOC) towards the center of your organization. Don't gather customer feedback because you feel you have to, or just to share it with the customer service or marketing departments. The only way to create a customer-centric organization is to share the voice of the customer as far as possible towards the center of the organization. As organizations grow the number of people isolated from the customer grows exponentially - and so organizations have to combat this inevitable outcome - consciously.

Gather and analyze customer feedback, the ultimate weapon in our dragon-slaying quest. Like getting to know your dragon before you attempt to tame it, the "Know Me" principle of experience design fits in perfectly here. Honest feedback, both good and bad, lets us see the world through the eyes of our customers. Their insights, their experiences, their challenges are the raw materials that enable us to build solutions that matter, that resonate, and that inspire.

Start with your internal customers who can tell you more about your customer needs than you can imagine. They understand those needs at a level that the customer doesn't because employees speak 'org,' and can interpret so outcomes are superior for all parties.

Take your success stories and best practices, your golden nuggets from the dragon's lair, and share them far and wide! Showcase your triumphs, not as self-promotion, but as a testimony of your commitment to the customer. "Surprise Me," another core experience design principle, can be a beacon here. In a world where so many interactions are mundane and predictable, make yours sparkle.

A helpful strategy that is often overlooked with CX teams, because it is not measurable, is focusing on the feeling. When we define what we want the CX to be, as it supports our brand, our mission, goals, etc… figure out a way to directly connect that to how people feel. When leading a sales team at a high end retail chain in Seattle, I was looking for ways to improve the CX, hoping it would increase retention and sales. We did a training, that focused on showing our teams how positive interactions make people feel. Using interactive roll playing that didn’t put anybody on the spot, but engaged them in the training, proved to be game changing. Knowing how their actions made people feel, helped change their mindset about good CX.

Educate your team, empower them, and inspire them to create their own tales of triumph. When you embody transparency in this way, your team not only learns from the successes but also understands the value of CX at its most tangible level.

It’s important to educate and train your team on your CX goals but equally important is to keep them fully engaged throughout the process. If provided with the right tools and resources, fully engaged teams not only share valuable insights & ideas but also help solve bigger problems.

Involve and engage your customers in your quest. In the end, the CX journey should be about making it easy for your customers - "Make It Easy For Me" principle. Make it easy for them to give feedback, to find the solutions they need, to feel valued, heard, and appreciated. When customers see that they are a fundamental part of your dragon-slaying team, they become your strongest allies, your biggest promoters, and your most reliable guides.

Customers don't have time for that and they aren't going to be in a frame of mind or time and space to give you that feedback. Ask your employees. They already have the data.

The road to showcasing the value of CX may be a challenging one, littered with dragons and obstacles, but with honesty, transparency, integrity, and loyalty as your guiding lights, and with the powerful principles of "Know Me," "Surprise Me," and "Make It Easy For Me" as your weapons, you will not only slay those dragons, but you'll also win the hearts of your customers. After all, that's the real prize, isn't it?

Highlight your customers You can show the value of customer experience initiatives by highlighting your customers via case studies, reviews, testimonials, referrals, and more. The better the customer experience, the more advocates you'll have that are willing to put their name behind promoting your company. Then you can measure the impact of referrals coming in, testimonials on your site, case studies shared, etc.

We were asked this exact same question by the customer experience (CX) group at one of the world's largest technology companies recently and as you start thinking through the real, tangible impact of variation in customer experience, it is truly amazing the number of different metrics that customer experience can influence upwards or downwards. Revenue is the most obvious and one of the easiest to build a compelling story around, but we've catalogued a number of others to help show the value and use these internally and externally.