Are You Underfunding CX?

Hey there, thanks for stopping by! I hope your week is going well, if not please click here then read on. So, I’m glad you’re interested in hearing what I’ve got to say about CX, or customer experience. It rides the rollercoaster of popularity and often gets the short end of the stick as a critical stepping-stone to company-wide success. So, grab that coffee with eggnog creamer (no judgement here), and let’s have a conversation.

What makes you think CX is a rollercoaster of popularity?

That’s a great question. CX is definitely top off mind for a wide range of companies from large B2B corporations to smaller start-ups. However, it’s often seen as a nice to have, kind of like half the William Sonoma catalogue of business units (sure it’s nice, but does anyone need the personalized cutting boards ?). If we take a break from that eggnog coffee to watch the ebb and flow of organizational designs, we can see how easily CX shifts around where more traditional orgs (hey marketing, hey eng) are less likely to get treated like a snowflake pancake pan on clearance . And that’s all if CX exists in the first place. Sometimes, C-Suite gets a bit more creative, and CX is rebranded as customer success.

I thought Customer Success was basically the same thing as CX?

I hope that’s still the eggnog coffee talking. Customer success is often grouped into CX, the same way Williams Sonoma groups tea kettles into cookware. I don’t know about you, but it’s been a while since I tried to make omelets in my tea kettle. Much like tea kettles, customer success has a unique purpose, typically a focus on developing deep relationships/sales experiences with customers. This could be considered a sub-category of CX, but certainly not a replacement for an area focused on the end-to-end customer journey. So really, rebranding CX into customer experience is often an elaborate move that says sales trumps voice of customer. But just like tea kettles and cookware, shouldn’t the CX and CS live side-by-side?

Ok I’m with you, but is CX really a priority to resource?

That’s a hard yes. How do we expect our engineering efforts to add value if we don’t know what our customers want them to fix? How can product managers design without understanding customers’ needs? How can William Sonoma know how many Millennium Falcon waffle makers to produce each quarter (secret answer is infinite amount)? ?Customers’ partial feedback passed on to customer-facing teams will provide a limited view of customer needs, these companies will sadly miss out on broader themes and pervasive insights if they only focus on the select customers that happen to speak up. A structured and evolving VOC program is fundamental to enabling every organization to design and build in a direction informed by customer data instead of internal assumptions.

So what do we need to do?

Don’t kill CX. It can’t be treated like an overpriced trivet that’s going to be put on clearance before being erased from existence. Corporations and start-ups alike need to keep themselves equipped with the strongest weapon they have in surpassing competitors by exceeding customer needs and eliminating pain-points. Don’t let CX become a snowflake pancake pan, help put it up on the center aisle shelf where it belongs.

What do y’all think? Should CX be a priority? Did you get distracted looking at Millenium Falcon waffle makers?