What are your Customer Experience (CX) priorities for the new year? If you have to pick one thing that you would most want to achieve, what would it be? Name it, claim it, and make it true. There are probably fewer barriers to success than you fear.
We did this make-a-wish exercise at a recent client workshop and came up with a rather long list. We then tackled the perceived obstacles one by one and came up with a plan for the year that was much, much better than anyone had hoped for at the outset. This is such a valuable thing to do.
For what will you wish?
Higher response rates: Don’t everybody want this? Especially from hard-to-reach segments such a young mobile-first customers. But remember that you can only have one wish; are you clear on what you would do with the data?
New improved Voice of Customer (VOC) platform: Perhaps you have outgrown your existing platform; perhaps you have outsourced the research to an agency and want to take it in-house, or the other way around.
Social media management and analysis: Love it, hate it, can’t ignore it. You need social media for customer engagement and crave it for advocacy. It is where all the cool kids hang out, isn’t it? But there are so many and it is hard to use them right and difficult to know what works. Tools will help (a lot).
Improved natural language (text) analytics: There is gold in the verbatim comments from your customers, if only you could process them at scale to get practical insights you can deploy in your operations. But do you go for the solution integrated in your VOC platform or for a stand-alone best-in-class general text analytics engine? And in either case, does it give you the insights you need to change the business?
Native voice analytics: It is often much easier to gather verbatim feedback using voice. (I wish more VOC platforms would make this easy on the mobile devices.) But if you thought text analytics was difficult then you have something else waiting for you here. And if you are already doing it, then you know how difficult it is to get right. Fortunately, the vendors are getting much better. Hint: look for call centre technology providers like Nice (www.nice.com) who recently acquired what was left of one of the companies for which I used to work.
Leadership buy-in: Customer Experience is a journey of transformation. Sustaining leadership engagement and commitment is difficult but critical. Expectations will at times be out of line with your ability to deliver. This is a topic for a whole other article….
Clear operational priorities: Do your functional managers really know what change to prioritise to improve the customer experience? They likely have a long list of operational KPIs that are all important, and which they know are important, but you usually can’t improve everything for everybody all at once. Are your CX analytics able to give them clear operational priorities for different customer segments? Eg ‘improve the call centre handling time from A to B before you even look at the wait time’?
Trusted financial impact: If you are struggling to get your CX change initiative prioritised at the leadership table, ask yourself if the people at that table really believe in the financial impact. Are you able to track it robustly from previous initiatives? Do you have a CX Economics model that show you the impact of CX on the metrics that your CEO cares about, be that EBITDA, lifetime value, gross margins, or even revenues? If not, why not?
Employee Engagement and Experience: CX isn’t all about metrics, processes, and tools; perhaps not even mainly about any of that. Your employees who are the ones who design and deliver the experience is probably where you start and where you end. All the other things are really there to help this outcome.
Something else? What did we miss? Let us know in the comments on LinkedIn.
If you are looking for ways to re-invigorate and revitalise your CX or CEM Programme, then talk to us: we have a distinct approach we call CX Impact that directly addresses points 6-8 above and we have successfully helped organizations like yours.