Everyone’s Talking About the Customer Experience. So Why Aren’t More Companies Acting on It?

There’s no doubt that “customer experience” is one of the hottest topics in business today. And there’s a great deal of evidence that a better CX leads not just to increased customer satisfaction, but to reduced operating costs and improved sales, as well.

Aside from minor tweaks and efficiencies, however, few companies seem able to make any sustained progress in their efforts to improve CX over the longer term. Why is that?

Some companies claim to be customer-focused, because they’ve created a feedback survey or they’ve started tracking their Net Promoter Scores (NPS). Others take pride in doing a customer journey map, which they then mount on the wall – Check! That’s done.

Organizationally, I do see a lot of companies assigning responsibility for CX either to a senior staff executive or maybe to a whole department, but usually it’s purely a staff function and very little real authority is conveyed with this assignment. As a result, rather than making CX improvement into a key element of the company’s go-to-market strategy, the initiative can easily slide into a kind of token effort. It becomes a sort of organizational advertisement that “we take CX seriously,” a message with the same ring of truth as the call center’s annoying protestation, “your call is very important to us.” Really?

Quick wins, by their very nature, tend not to be as compelling in the long run, while long-run initiatives either get terminated outright when the sponsoring executive takes a new assignment, or they lose their luster one monthly meeting at a time, because the tools aren’t available to sustain the effort, while conflicting priorities sap people’s attention until the next “initiative du jour” steals the spotlight.

But improving your company’s customer experience is genuinely hard work, and to be successful you need to keep at it.

CX improvement is a journey, not a destination. You’ll never reach a point at which you can sit back and say “Wow! Our customer experience is now perfect!”

Alas, here’s what the rush to CX looks like from my own perspective, as a knowledgeable but independent observer:  

• Motivation: Measurable. The purely financial benefits of CX improvement usually amount to 5-10% added to a company’s bottom line. And this is before the non-financial benefits, such as improved employee morale and engagement, more focused innovation, and better resilience in the face of disruptive threats to the business model.
• Decision: Easy to take, but hard to sustain. Company after company says that providing a great customer experience is their primary focus, but then they can’t focus on it for more than a few quarters, if that.
• Result: Disappointing. By any reasonable criteria, very few companies are successfully improving their customer experience on a continuing basis. 

If you want to start your company on the path to having a productive and sustainable CX improvement effort, then my advice is to begin with the data. Start by developing a clear picture of who your best (and worst) customers are. Marketing departments often have access to a wealth of customer descriptive and transactional data, and it is this data that should be leveraged first.

Is it worth the effort? Almost always. Because with better data you’ll be able to apply your CX improvement effort to: 

• Demand-generation programs,
• Prospect nurturing,
• Customer loyalty and cross-selling,
• User experience within your channels, and
• Broader corporate strategies and decisions.  

Only after you’ve assembled the data will you be able to start exposing the friction and obstacles in your processes, along with key gaps and opportunities. You can do this by creating a focused set of questions, both for your customers and for your customer-facing employees, to develop not just an “inside out” view of your business but an “outside in” view as well.

Sophisticated tools are already available to help you map out these views, from several different vendors. (One highly rated solution is from San Francisco-based SuiteCX, for instance. This would be my personal favorite, because the company’s founder and CEO was one of the partners at Peppers & Rogers Group who helped develop our methodology, and a number of other ex-PRG folks are involved as well, including my co-author and business partner Martha Rogers, who serves on their board.) 

My next article, The Dirty Little Secret Behind CX Initiatives, and Why They’re So Hard, discusses one more very significant obstacle to the success of a company’s CX improvement efforts, and how to tackle that issue, as well.