Addressing the Deficit in Customer Experience Strategy

Strategy for customer experience management is lacking for most organizations, according to numerous studies, and lack of strategy is a cited widely by customer experience (CX) practitioners as a key obstacle to achieving business results. [1] A close look at the most prevalent CX practices underscores this dilemma: we 're "putting the cart before the horse" with near-brute-force on business results and by forgoing the essential building blocks to sustainable CX ROI.

Truth About Customer Experience Goals

Most of us are pursuing retention, loyalty, service excellence, and customer experience differentiation. Let 's explore the nature of these goals:

Customer retention (duration of relationship) and loyalty (share of budget, recommendations)

Customer intelligence integrated all sources of CX data for a holistic picture of customers ' plight. Everyone across the company had an insatiable curiosity about customers and passion for innovating the customer experience.

Why the Cart 's Before the Horse

Career path biases of CX practitioners, pet projects of executives, ambitious purveyors of CX technologies, and eagerness to embrace shiny silver bullets are some of the perpetrators of the gold-rush strategy for customer experience business results. We need to step back and take a look at logical cause-and-effect of business and human behavior (externally and internally), with a holistic viewpoint, in order to get on the right track toward our goals for differentiation, excellence and financial rewards.

How to Get Customer Experience Business Results

Here are 6 truths:

First, revenue comes from customers. We are pretty good at "tuning our radar" to what turns on/off our boss who has power over our salary and career progress, so it makes sense to likewise tune our radar to our ultimate boss: customers. This is the Customer Voice building

This is the CX Improvement & Innovation building block. Fourth, keeping our boss ' well-being at the center of our decisions and actions gives us a secure backdrop for moving things forward on-the-fly and for being in the right place at the right time to make the most of the best opportunities. This is the Customer-Centricty building block. Fifth, it certainly makes sense to center our teams accordingly: get everyone on the same page with regard to what makes the boss tick and how their work impacts the boss ' well-being and our collective success, and to engage everyone in proactively managing their work for the best outcomes. This is the Internal Branding building block. Sixth, with all these building-blocks in place, now you can feel at ease to toot your own horn. Let your stakeholders know about the great things you 're capable of providing, and make it compelling for them to help themselves through your capabilities. This is the External Branding building