Breaking the Bottleneck: How Customer Experience Teams Can Regain Control to Drive Impact

Imagine your customer experience (CX) team is no longer a bottleneck for insights; they are no longer overwhelmed with ongoing requests from all business units seeking to qualify if their projects will positively influence their part of the customer journey. Instead, they are declaring what should be the focus. Also imagine that they are no longer a constraint keeping your company from enabling best-in-class customer journeys; they are no longer entertaining superficial analysis but instead they are able to get and share deeper insights.

You don't need a large team of analysts to pinpoint critical opportunities to improve Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) - you need to actually lead the CX strategy.

The Cost of Chaos: Exploratory Insight Requests are Often Non-Value-Add

When too many teams come to the customer experience team for data or insights just to see if the project will have an effect on NPS or CSAT, they become exploratory analyses. These often involve digging through a lot of data, which is time-consuming and essentially non-value-added activities that don't contribute to the company's bottom line. As a result, the team is only enabling marginal localized improvements by entertaining and supporting these projects. This is how CX teams become larger and larger as every business unit attempts to make any type of improvement.

Own the CX Agenda to Drive Meaningful Improvements

To break the bottleneck, the CX analysts should have intimate understanding of irritants along each customer journey. They should push these priorities to business units, ensuring that every applicable department is aligned to solve end-to-end journey irritants.

It's also critical to take a bold stance: if a project doesn't directly and significantly influence one of the top NPS issues, there will be no exploratory analyses.

Identifying the Top NPS Priorities

So, how do customer experience teams identify the top 5-7 NPS issues? This requires a combination of proactive and extensive data analysis, customer feedback, and stakeholder input that account for end-to-end customer journeys or workflows – not just local touchpoint irritants. By analyzing customer feedback, survey data, and behavioral metrics from tools like Qualtrics or Medallia, the team can pinpoint the most significant pain points and opportunities for improvement. Correlation analysis and data review can further help identify the root causes of NPS and CSAT issues, allowing the team to help the right business units prioritize and focus on the most critical areas.

Your CX team will declare what issues the business units should work.

Countering Pushback

When faced with pushback from other teams, the CX team can counter that requests outside the NPS priorities are non-value-add. The team's primary goal is to improve NPS and CSAT, and any requests that don't support this objective are not aligned with the team's mission. By prioritizing value-add activities, the team can ensure that their efforts drive high-value business impact.

This bold approach requires the customer experience team to be strategic and influential but provides higher-value outcomes by reducing waste and enhancing end-to-end customer journey alignment.