CX ‘Best Practice’ is evolving quickly

I am happy to say that the majority of CX professionals are unhappy with the way they have been doing their work for the last twenty or thirty years. That's good news, even if Gartner's 2021 report saying that 75% of companies will have abandoned NPS by 2025 still seems a bit dramatic. So, what's the problem, and how can we do better? I would like to consider this in the sequence of interactions that companies have in what we call the customer lifecycle. Let's start with sales, meaning the journey stage where customers become aware of our products and services, evaluate them, and decide to buy, or not. Sales and Marketing teams are responsible for the actions taken during this stage.

Customer journey stage: awareness, selection, purchase

Here is what typically happens when using traditional CX approaches for the 'buy' stage of the customer journey:

• If a customer buys, both the sales and marketing teams sincerely believe they have done a wonderful job.
• If the customer does not buy, each team believes the other is at fault, or that some outside factor has caused the failure.
• The CX team, of course, only sends brand-level relationship surveys to customers who have bought the product or service, and therefore gets no information at all about why someone did not buy. An of course, information from those who did purchase is only obtained for 10 to 15% of the customer base, and possibly not from the correct decision-makers. Survey results are expressed using terminology and metrics that neither the sales nor the marketing team uses in their daily work or regular progress reporting.
• As contracts come up for renewal, the same cycle repeats. Success is always considered to be entirely due to personal effort, while failure to renew is someone else's fault, as there is no data avaialble that might suggest anything else.

Let's face it. I have just described a disaster that you should all recognize. And you should also be able to accept that the survey-related point above does indeed reflect CX best practice, as we know it up to now.

So, what does the new best practice look like for the 'buy' stage?

Your sales and marketing teams use software like Google Analytics, Engagio, Salesforce, Mintigo, Mixpanel, and Microsoft Dynamics, to name just a few. They contain hundreds of data points and trends for each and every customer, even for those who chose not to buy from you, or did not renew. The data is used to prepare reports in Tableau and other tools. That's a lot of data.

Until recently, it has been close to impossible to accurately mine the data for insights about what sales and marketing actions actually work. To pick a semi-random example, you can determine how long before a contract renewal is due a sales person should contact or meet with the customer to maximize renewal chances. You can also work out how many sales calls it takes to win new business, and whether that varies by industry or geography. Best of all, for communication purposes at least, the result of such analytics is expressed using the KPIs and other data that the sales and marketing teams already use. And it's available in real time, rather than with the time lag built into surveys.

Ideal Customer Profiles

Perhaps even better, Customer AI can use the data to tell you which types or geographical locations of customers require the least effort from sales teams, negotiate the least discounts, and are most likely to renew even without a sales call. This sort of information can be fed in turn to marketing teams to allow them to target such Ideal Customer Profiles, thereby making marketing efforts much more productive.

That's just the beginning

That's just the beginning for 'buy' stage of the customer lifecyle. I will have a lot more to say about the evolution of CX best practice for the other stages, as well as more detail for the buy stage. Please let me know if you find this helpful.

Notes

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Maurice FitzGerald is Editor-in-Chief, Content at OCX Cognition. He retired from HP where he was VP of Customer Experience for their $4 billion software business and was previously VP of Strategy and Customer Experience as well as Chief of Staff for HP in EMEA. He and his brother Peter, an Oxford D.Phil in Cognitive Psychology, have written three books on customer experience strategy and NPS, all available from Amazon.