The Future of CX is Bright—Here’s How to Get It Right

?Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the customer experience trends of the past few years and thinking about the opportunities ahead. Well, grab your shades—the future of CX is bright! Let me explain.?

Customer satisfaction across industries has plummeted to a near two-decade low. Why? It’s largely because customer expectations have skyrocketed. Today, customers increasingly expect effortless and incredibly personalized experiences across their preferred channels, a bar that got even higher during the pandemic. This is especially true in B2B SaaS—our customers demand consumer-grade experience across every business application they use. At the same time, many companies have pumped the brakes on CX efforts due to economic uncertainty. (Forrester predicts that one in five customer experience teams will disappear by the end of the year—yikes.)??

However, this widening chasm between customer experience and expectations offers a unique opportunity for brands with the foresight to invest in significant CX improvements. After all, investing in customer experience can make for happier and more engaged employees, fuel growth for existing customers, and reduce the cost of acquiring new business. Not only is CX the great differentiator for companies, but it's an innovation accelerator. And the data backs it up: According to Bain & Company, customer experience leaders grow twice as fast as their competitors.??

So, ready to bet on CX? Here’s what I’ve learned while leading CX efforts at some of the most innovative B2B tech companies: To meaningfully move the needle on customer experience, you need to do the following four things really well. ? ?

? Build a listening and action engine.??

If you don’t combine listening with action, you won’t get very far in your CX efforts—it’s one of the biggest mistakes I see CX teams make. Why is this such a misstep? Closing the loop with customers both one-on-one in real time and at scale is crucial for driving customer loyalty. You must define an actionable, personalized process that routes all that rich customer feedback to the right teams, at the right time, to take the right action. Remember, every follow up action is an opportunity to improve the customer relationship—in fact, in our recent research at ServiceNow, we found that consistently closing the loop with our customers led to a significant boost in customer satisfaction (10+ pt. improvement in NPS).??

Another tip: Make sure you centralize your company’s listening efforts, ideally on one CX management platform. This powerful view into your customers’ experience across the end-to-end journey can break down silos and help align your entire company on top customer experience pain points and opportunities.?

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? Put customers at the center of your CX improvements.??

Responding to customers 1:1 is vital, but your voice of customer data should also help you prioritize larger, systematic improvements across the end-to-end customer journey. Before long, your collected insights (enriched with operational and financial data) will reveal a key opportunity to improve an aspect of your customer experience. What you do next can make or break the outcome. ?

We have a special sauce at ServiceNow: We deploy our CX researchers and designers companywide to anchor cross-functional teams in the challenges and experience of the customer. Then, we use human-centered design to continuously co-create and validate experiences with our customers—this discipline helps ensure that we are designing what’s best for our customers, and not just what’s best for internal teams.???

What’s more, co-creating with customers and partners is the most effective way to resolve systemic customer experience problems and to close the customer expectation gap I mentioned earlier. And there are often pivotal "aha!” moments that come from listening to customers—this priceless feedback can put projects and products on a better path.?

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? Operationalize and activate your company’s customer centricity.?

The holy grail of CX is integrating a customer-centric culture into every system and process of your company—to make it muscle memory across the organization. Done right, this customer-first mindset should influence how you hire, how you allocate budgets, and how you make decisions.??

To determine an organization’s customer centricity, I always start with these questions: Is there a focus on hiring for customer empathy, for both customer-facing and back-of-house roles? Do managers consider "impact on customer experience" as one of the benchmarks for promotions? Is CX improvement one of the key criteria for company-wide budget priorities? And do leaders have access to critical customer experience insights and dashboards to help them make customer-friendly decisions every day? If the answer is no to any of these questions, then you have your marching orders to activate customer centricity.???

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? Always be proactive with your CX program.?

Companies can no longer rely so heavily on customer feedback and survey responses for one inescapable reason: declining survey response rates. Simply put, most companies are not hearing from most of their customers—also known as the silent majority conundrum.?

That’s why every B2B company needs to build predictive analytics into their customer experience program. Using customer and other operational data, you can identify at-risk customers and accurately assess when and where they need help—and then recommend the right resources to proactively address these customer needs and desires. And layering in generative AI is an ideal way to support and empower frontline teams, allowing them to quickly deliver the right response to customers and improve the quality of interactions—at scale, this can save time and boost productivity.??

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While most SaaS companies talk a big CX game, very few are giving it the right level of focus. As companies continue to make investments and tradeoffs as we head into Q4 of 2023, leaders should reframe customer experience as mission critical. Your listening and action engine will fuel continuous improvement. And systemizing your CX efforts—while incorporating powerful new tools like predictive analytics and GenAI—will drive maximum impact and growth. When executed well, this will pay deep dividends for years to come. A bright future, indeed.?

#customerexperience #customerdriven #customercocreation #SaaS #insightstoaction #genAI?