Today’s organizations are under pressure to keep up with the ever-changing needs of their customers. To maintain a competitive edge, it’s essential to deliver an exceptional customer experience (CX). However, this can be difficult to achieve if companies do not clearly understand where they are falling short, where they are excelling, and where improvements will make the biggest impact.
Organizations often have a high-level understanding when they have customer experience challenges but identifying the root cause and how to adequately address the issue is difficult. In some cases, individuals or teams have great ideas on how to improve their customer experience, especially the front-line employees who directly interact with customers, but the challenge is to transform those ideas into action.
Why do companies struggle to take action?
Identifying areas of improvement, finding the right solutions, prioritizing them, and quantifying the results are extremely difficult for organizations to do on their own.
There are a few key reasons why companies struggle to take action to improve their customer experience:
- Identify the priorities – There is always more to do than time or budget provides, which can make it difficult to know where to start.
- Prove the importance and relevance of CX – it can be challenging to have stakeholders agree on new projects without data backed research and the analysis to quantify expected business impact.
- Inspire lasting CX passion – Sustained improvement require winning over hearts and minds. Without a clear vision of CX’s future state and why it matters, it’s challenging to make lasting changes.
- Accountability – Employees need to be on board with the new strategy and have a clear path to improved outcomes. Without clear ownership of actions and timelines, improvement efforts lack the focus needed for quick wins.
Quick CX strategy wins offer sustainable long-lasting impact
To improve your CX strategy and overcome internal challenges, companies need to focus on quick wins that will have the most significant impact on customer experience. One way to identify these quick wins is by using targeted analytics and CX research to pinpoint and quantify the root cause of the issues. This information can then be used to focus CX improvement efforts and adjust the company’s CX strategy and ecosystem. With this approach, companies can:
- Make data driven decisions when designing the future CX state to target investments wisely
- Recommend improvement plans that balance quick wins with a roadmap for strategic initiatives
- Quantify expected results to prioritize what to do first and why
- Deploy structured governance to align actions with company prioritizes and ensure clear ownership
- Use pilots to test ideas rapidly and prove quick success
- Measure and communicate the positive results to build momentum and additional use cases
- Additionally, it’s essential to continuously monitor the ecosystem and make changes as needed to keep up with customers’ ever-changing needs.
By focusing on specific areas of improvement, companies can quickly experience positive impacts to revenue growth, customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. In addition, companies can improve efficiencies that have a direct impact on reducing operational costs.
This approach is highly successful because it provides a short-term impact on the business. In recent projects, one of our clients saved $7M in annual revenue in just 6 months by reducing customer churn through a series of changes that followed a defined roadmap. Another client improved Net Satisfaction Scores by 24 points in just 3 months by focusing efforts in the highest impact areas.
While it’s important to focus on quick wins, companies must also ensure that they are making long-term changes in their CX transformation. They need to ensure that they are creating a customer-centric ecosystem that delivers an exceptional and sustainable customer experience. This means making changes to the way they operate to put the customer first, which may include restructuring, process improvements, and technology investments. By taking a holistic approach to CX strategy and embedding continuous improvements into their program and ecosystem, companies can create a lasting competitive advantage.
