Improving CX: Are you in it for the Long Run? You Should Be!

Thanks to accelerating socio-economic enlightenment and recent advancements in AI, personalising customer experiences has increasingly become a necessity to stay afloat. In this regard, industry leaders have been providing more innovative and immersive customer experiences. This has raised the bar even higher for the rest of us, as customers now expect more personalised and interactive customer journeys. As a matter of fact a recent study found that 76% of customers expect companies to fully understand their needs and expectations. Not only do these customers expect more but are now more willing to simply take their business elsewhere if they feel they are not being over serviced. More interestingly, the study further found that 51% of companies have been missing the mark in meeting customer expectations.

“51% of companies have been missing the mark in meeting customer expectations”

With almost half the companies missing the mark on CX, it begs the question why. To start off, many times organizations go head first in improving their CX without properly understanding the amount of resources, organisational realignment and time required to achieve the desired outcomes. Convinced by the sheer volume of research flowing through the wire, management eagerly jumps on the bandwagon of enhancing and personalising customer journeys targeting short term quick wins. Often not realising the transformational change required to successfully create a customer centric culture for the long run.

“Organizations do not realise that improving CX requires Transformational Change”

Organizations get the first few stages right. Making the right investments in collecting and analysing large volumes of customer data usually through the help of CX Partners. Ideally these CX partners will have a deeper understanding of CX Principals allowing them to promptly materialise actionable insights and implement Customer Engagement programs.  However, many times the insights or programs are under-utilised by the organizations, limiting and stunting their customer success agenda. This commonly happens due to frictions CX Initiatives create with operational agendas which generally go unmanaged and unplanned. Organizations struggle, as they did not initially plan to set the right communication channel and processes to adopt the learnings from their Customer Engagement Programs. With only a few customer champions on board with the customer success agenda, organizations start to view CX initiatives as a sunk cost with poor ROI. In certain cases, this even negatively impacts the customer experience as they become frustrated with the fact that organizations are listening but are not able or willing to act.

“Simply listening to and engaging customers will not boost their satisfaction nor enhance their experiences.”

Organisations must be willing to reassess operational practices and align them with the customer feedback they receive, then reengage customers to inform them of the changes. It’s often difficult for management to comprehend that achieving customer success is a long term and ongoing game which can only be achieved through well connected and synergistic efforts between departmental staff and management. Luckily, to help get the ball rolling, we have provided some useful pointers here and here.

“Achieving Customer Success is a long term and ongoing game; however, it just takes one bad experience for a customer to never come back”

While adopting customer experience programs, organisations should establish the required strategic channels internally to successfully leverage and implement the learnings from their CX programs. Not utilising these programs can make customer experiences worse. Its vital management works to embed a customer centric culture to mitigate operational frictions and conflicts that may normally disrupt their CX enhancement initiatives. Only after establishing such internal framework should organisations start to measure CX Initiatives ROI.

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