Article

Tackle These 3 Key Areas to Improve Customer Experience

Gartner reports that despite a requirement to deliver exceptional customer experience, more than 70% of CX leaders struggle to design projects that increase customer loyalty and achieve results.

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Customer experience (CX) is on everyone’s radar. Great experience drives churn reduction, revenue growth and builds competitive advantage. Though the importance is ubiquitously acknowledged, most CX leaders don’t believe they currently have the strategy in place to improve customer experience in a transformational way.

The difficult reality is that it’s far easier to envision thought leadership on this topic than it is to operationalize it. There’s a huge gap between best practice visions and where most businesses are operating. Of course, the vision work is critical to building the roadmap, but brining business goals, business unit functions, and all related technology and all supporting people into the path is incredibly complex.

Gartner reports that despite a requirement to deliver exceptional customer experience, more than 70% of CX leaders struggle to design projects that increase customer loyalty and achieve results. Not only that, fixing the obvious experience customer service interactions isn’t enough on its own to drive long -term brand loyalty. Experience programs that are rooted in a holistic view on overall product and brand experience are the ones that drive the deepest loyalty.

Get an actionable and holistic CX strategy by tackling these 3 common barriers

  1. Insufficient executive focus. Achieving transformational CX is more than a ROI driven success strategy managed by a CX team. To reach a differentiated and sustainable status, the very spirit of experience needs to travel through the nervous system of your company, starting at the top. Experience must be engrained in how your business operates. This may require a major dialogue shift. ROI driven decisions are an approachable entry to shifting the way leadership prioritizes CX, but often result in a hyper-focus on specific metrics and losing touch of the actual goal.

    What leadership can do to enact change. Businesses need to define experience. What does this experience mean to the business? Within the industry? And what does it means across each unit and role in the organization? How should those roles align and work together? What data and systems do they need to facilitate that? And will there be proper budget to support? Answers to these questions help build effective strategy and align each role and person to the plan. Communication through vision, strategy, funding, measurement and review is the backbone to this shift.

  1. Expecting a silo to transform CX alone. Often a business unit will own specific CX goals, but aren’t cross-functionally aligned to other groups within the organization. While this focus by each department can make a dent in achieving goals, it can cultivate inherent team misalignment and data silos. If only one business unit is responsible for the outcome (and only one is funded to achieve the outcome), the other supporting teams may not be incentivized to align.

    Empower teams with CX strategy as the grand unifier. Develop (and fund) a cross functional team that has executive voice and an aligned cross-functional strategy for internal motions, tech stack and service partners. Aligning across all related functions and systems will enable a holistic view of your customer journey.

  2. Limited technology strategy. Customer experience happens on a complex cross-channel journey. The entire experience from brand awareness through product use and gathering feedback on experience are the backbone of the journey. In mid-size and large enterprises, there may be hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people supporting this full journey. These employees are likely to be in different departments and using different tools to support the unique needs of their specific portion of the journey.  Being able to properly strategize, understand, track and enable experiences across this complex spectrum relies heavily on a shared source of truth about the experience. Data that gets siloed with teams or systems creates missed opportunities within the businesses. Solving for siloed data is one of the most challenging issues in today’s digital world.

    Align on data to unlock holistic understanding of the customer journey. Leading companies are twice as likely (55% versus 26%) to be able to translate customer data in action according to Accenture research. These leaders noted there are limits to data and what you can do with it, but to truly transform customer experience better ways of managing this is a necessity. In order for data to be leveraged, a single source of truth must exist within your systems.

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What if your data is siloed now and you need to start this dialogue shift?

Look to the contact center for untapped single source of truth. 

On the front lines of customer experience, the contact center manages a large share of conversations. Even in informational inquiries, there may be learnings about issues or improvement areas that stem from the barriers designed by limitations of the organization’s customer experience model.  From lack of executive focus on customer experience to lack of shared business unit goals to major gaps in data sharing across the buyers journey, many vectors contribute to overall experience.

The contact center has unique potential for achieving CX super powers by harnessing all this data and playing a central role in achieving larger digital transformation and customer experience goals.  The contact center can access data to illuminate the effectiveness of digital strategies and experience throughout the organization. With this, contact centers can improve customer experience by validating assumptions of the business through customer feedback data. 

Expand your view on technology and programs 
Data is one of the most powerful assets in your organization. Contact center leaders can devise a strategy that brings data out of silos and into the hands of the business users who can improve critical KPIs across the organization.

For example, does marketing have visibility into how their campaigns are impacting communication and requests to the contact center?  Could they increase their results by understanding and tuning programs based on how customers talk about and reach to information marketing brings to market?  Having a full 360 view of conversation data empowers organizations to align with customer focus across business units to achieve maximum outcome for the business

By selecting the right technology stack, the contact center has a unique opportunity to connect all conversation and experience data into a unified view.  With this, they can build reports and validate initiatives through customer feedback.  This powerful data can help the contact center to take lead on:

  • Choosing the right technology to get a unified view of customer experience
  • Getting data out of silos, up-leveling and aligning the CX conversation across teams
  • Making the business case to leadership to shift business focus to key CX alignment areas

Build a business case around the core KPIs that you will improve CX at the forefront of the organization. Backed by data from a holistic view, show how the business can reduce customer churn, improve employee retention, improve product satisfaction and product experiences.

SuccessKPI transforms the contact center by unifying cross-channel Conversation Analytics, Speech & Text Analytics, Quality Management and outcome data to provide a 360 degree view of the customer and agent experience.  Learn more!