CX | When we bring the best together

With the cost and convenience to launch a new product or service, the market has been flooded with countless me-too competitors. This shift has moved customer expectations to commodity-driven (cheaper + faster) and they have lost sight of decisions around quality. 

However, brands are able to charge more when they deliver more than a product + service. When a Brand creates an experience for a customer they are able to shift buying decisions from commodity to loyalty. 

In addition to mounting competitive pressures, the number of touchpoints has also exponentially scaled. Customers interact with brands across more touchpoints than ever. What may start in a store, is enhanced by a mobile device, then eventually carried into a conversation with a device like Siri or Alexa. 

The culmination of these experiences and touchpoints is contained with the emerging organizational role CX. Loyalty-driven customer experience has solidified that customer experience (CX) is the new cornerstones to a brand's longevity.  

Companies, meanwhile, have worked to address this shift in customer expectations with the introduction of CX leadership and official organizations tasked to delight and retain the customer base.

With customer experience being a huge differential, it’s time we define what it is versus what it’s not.

As the hot new field, it seems like every employer is recruiting fewer, and every burgeoning executive is positioning themselves as the clear leader. For the institute, they must use this as a template to define the role for current and future needs as a template to conceive a customer experience organization. And the roles and responsibilities within it. However, upon quick inspection, you find job descriptions, expectations, and leadership backgrounds with little continuity.

Therefore I believe it’s important we stop for a second and assess the organizational placement of the CX organization role and how that aligns to what a company can expect in addition to the skills required to perform the job. 

While all expect a layer of innovation, transformation, and operational scalability

• If CX reports up through the IT org, a company should expect the group to take on a position of leveraging data to enable new experiences for customers. 
• If CX should exist in marketing many of the activities and expectations will focus on prioritization, positioning, acquisition, and messaging.
• If CX finds itself within the ownership of operations one can expect the team to deliver operations and support level efficiencies
• However, it is my belief that rather than live within a business vertical CX should actually be a horizontal business unit, much like HR, whose focus is to bring external continuity of experience with the company and brand across multiple (and often times disconnected) businesses.. 

CX is more than customer experiences. Doing so misses the drivers and delivery components which is where innovation and growth exist. It must include your partner experiences (the human face of your product) and your employee experience (the people who decide how to serve customers).

It is as much an offering as a capability. Meaning your company should use it for answers just as much as it uses it to train the rest of your resources to think with a customer-first mindset.

It’s all sides of the brain. It’s where 4 concentric circles merge. Creativity, business, delivery, operations.

Solutions: With the barriers and costs to deliver new products to the market so low, customers no longer differentiate brands based on products, but the experience and the memories they create with those brands. While customer experience obviously includes the experience customers have with products and services, it goes without doubt that we must also include the experiences of the people that support these interactions. Those best suited to address these needs are experts in Service Design and Design Thinking. These include partner experiences and employee experiences who typically have developed their skills in UX and PR Linguistics.

Strategy: An experience that no one knows about is like a tree that falls in the woods. Did it really ever happen? This is why sophisticated CX teams include customer acquisition and retention into their modeling. By leveraging advanced marketing techniques, loyalty metrics, and platforms, an approach to understanding where prospects are and what keeps them is essential. Traditionally, a member of marketing is best suited to serve this capability. However, they will have to evolve from evaluating patterns of the past to exploring more mechanisms of evaluating hypotheses and assumptions. 

Stories (Insights): Data is our friend, and we can never have enough. In order to understand what are the current customer/employee behaviors, we must jump between quantitative and qualitative data. To start, look at leveraging an ethnographic approach to identify areas of curiosity. Dive into the quantitative data (such as traffic, buying patterns, etc) to evaluate the scope and then turn back to manual qualitative research to understand the motivations behind these patterns and their root cause. Once you arrive at a hypothesis and assumption for the root cause of the behavior and have an experiment you want to run then leverage A/B data with customer capture tools to observe behavioral changes with statistical significance.

Those who are best suited for this capability are data and analytics executives who understand how to compile and execute complex queries across both internal and external data sources.

Success: In order to have a successful experience with customers a brand cannot forget or abandon those it relies on once a product or service has been delivered. It must continue to support them with customer service to ensure if they have any problems the appropriate resolution is available, it must work with them to ensure they are achieving the maximum results and when they finally do achieve success it must also showcase them and their stories as a beacon for future or struggling prospects. Traditionally this role is a combination of Customer Service Executives and Influencer Marketing.

As CX organizations mature, one can anticipate that we will see this capability shift from a responsive role and relationship to one where the brand is enabling customers to create community and influence one another. 

Automation: At the crossroads of experience and strategy we find machine learning and automation. With these, brands are able to successfully use customer behaviors to unlock new experiences and opportunities to existing customers, as well as proactively drive responses from partners and employees, and more accurately target ideal customer profiles based on success metrics and behaviors of existing customers.

Enablement: When strategy and data come together we can inform traditional business operations with empathy-driven opportunities and ultimately enable them to run informed experiments around new experiences.

Feedback: How likely is a customer to recommend your product or service to a friend at a Barbecue? This question, called Net Promoter Score, can help a brand understand how well it has met expectations. When we merge Service Experiences with an insight-first mentality, teams are able to learn from existing customers in order to evolve their offerings, refine targeting, and ultimately improve the relationship with customers, employees, and partners.

When we bring together two traditional responsibilities, new capabilities emerge for how a brand may address the needs of its customers, partners, and employees. When we mix experience and strategy, we find opportunities to automate previously very menial tasks, which are an unnecessary burden to our audience. When we mix strategy with data we unlock the ability to rapidly enable new experiences. When data and service come together we find new means of feedback from the VOC; And as you find new success managing cost-effective growth of your new service and experience offerings, it then becomes an operation and scalability task.

Operations: Success will inevitably bring additional requests and new experiences to explore. This explosion in growth can lead to compromises to consistency, quality, or experience. Finding ways to centralize reusable elements like Design Systems, Experimentation frameworks, research, and talent management will help your group move faster while leveraging each other.