Customer Experience: Time to press the ‘reset’ button

Fire up the CX team and start again…

If your business already has a clear strategy for CX based on hard evidence of how CX uniquely contributes to business performance, this article is not for you.

Every company is rightly challenging every cost line to ensure all are critical to business performance, and this needs to include all expenditure on CX, VOC and CRM — indeed all customer facing expenditures.

Now more than ever, every penny spent needs to drive value for customers, but also:

CX has unique potential to deliver in each of these areas. A clearly articulated CX “North Star” drives efficiency and effectiveness by potentially aligning the company behind a common purpose, supported by deliberate behaviors and mindsets, when engaging with their stakeholders.

But as you review the cost lines above ask a few questions of the CX team:

• What have they been doing in the last 10 weeks? Have they been central to the “do now, do next, do later” plans for the organization’s response?
• How are they helping the organization to prepare for a potential second wave later in 2020?

If they’ve not been central to these responses, then you really should be asking .. are your current CX capabilities a crucial expense going forward?

So, what does a “reset” mean?

1. Demand rapid “proof points” that CX uniquely drives improved business performance in your organization
2. Use the hard evidence from these proof points to build an objective, evidence based CX plan and harvest the learning to shape a playbook capturing “how we do CX here,” and start to scale these capabilities and learning
3. From day 1 of “re-set” drive “how to do CX” into the business. You need to build “execution muscle” into the whole business, not just rely on a central team.

Also, two points on customer technologies:

VOC systems:

Most large companies have invested in very sophisticated means to systematically capture customer feedback, sentiment etc. But, few have in parallel, equipped their organizations with a systematic approach of how to respond to these insights eg: sharing details of what operational responses are proven to work.

If your VOC system does not identify problems, pain or insights into “what needs fixing” AND share details of what’s been proven to fix it, you’re likely to be wasting money and more importantly losing customers!

Customer Technology systems e.g. CRM:

These platforms can truly transform the end to end experience delivered to customers. They can also automate costly steps and improve efficiency.

But, if your tech investment doesn’t place equal emphasis on driving cost optimization AND growth then again you’ll be wasting money and leaving money on the table by not getting the full potential from these investments.

Looking forward, the only certainty is that C19 will return later in 2020. There’s time now to “re-set” your CX program to build company-wide resilience by:

1. Harvesting the learning: It’s a tragic waste of all the efforts over the last 10 weeks if the learning hasn’t been distilled into a “playbook”
2. Step change in “Clock speed”: There are few certainties about the future, so organizations need to be able to sense, assess, then pilot and scale their response at an unprecedented speed

Focusing the CX team on building this playbook and driving proof points that run at this increased clock speed means the business can be sure it’s getting a return on the CX cost line in this disruptive world, and in the best shape for whatever the future holds.