What Lessons Should Businesses Learn? 

Those of us who have united to form CX Leaders have accumulated many years’ experience providing insight into what customers truly value, identifying the actions required to deliver a demonstrable financial return, and inspiring employees and their teams to genuinely want to provide a better customer experience.  

Having partnered with organisations of all sizes and across many different business sectors, what we see now are many of the same pitfalls within the CX programmes we encounter as we have done over many years. Unfortunately, many are just as problematic as in the past, with history repeating itself and businesses failing to learn from past lessons. 

1. Businesses desire a customer-centric culture, but many find it difficult to define what this actually means, and are unsure how to achieve it.

Every organization has a culture, some are deliberately planned, some are organic; some are positive, some are less so!  The common thread is most are seeking a culture that puts customers ‘at top-of-mind’ and lays the foundations upon which to build a better customer experience. This goal is proving just as problematic as it always has.

When businesses struggle with this aim, the blame can be squarely put on the disconnect between employee behaviours, the company’s brand values, and the clarity of its customer insight. Here:

• employees often feel their organisation’s values lack clear definition and are incongruent with their day-to-day role and behaviour; they are simply ‘nice to have’ for the customer; 
• customer feedback is ineffectively communicated and falls short of furnishing personnel with the insight required to improve the way the business works day-to-day. 

2. Businesses can be guilty of jumping on the next CX bandwagon without first gauging its potential value to the business.

Over the years, businesses have vigorously pursued various customer initiatives: ‘customer focus’, ‘customer intimacy’, ‘customer first’, and so on. Believing them to be a success elsewhere, they have adopted the approach (or a variant) in the anticipation that it will help retain customers and improve business results, only for the ultimate impact to be less than desired.

Failure in many cases is often the result of the goal simply being to increase the overall metric (customer satisfaction, overall rating of service, net promotor, for example), particularly where this is linked to any financial bonus. What cannot be ignored is the importance of understanding whether this is the optimal approach for the business, planning how it will work in practice, and most importantly having a clear vision of how it will link with business-critical KPIs and employee behaviours.

Ultimately, the lack of desired outcome raises wider questions as to the purpose and benefit of the initiative and the inevitable move to the next big thing.

3. Businesses possess vast amounts of customer data, but often little genuine insight into the customers’ world 

Various mechanisms are employed to measure customer sentiment (traditional surveys, complaints, social media, behavioural analytics, etc.), some organisations being significantly more successful at doing this than others.  

Even with all this input, many businesses don’t manage to convert this into real, practical insight or truly understand what it means to be a customer of theirs, or the associated emotions that define their experience. An obvious omission is the failure to grasp the impact of those occasions when a customer has no contact with them (perhaps while waiting for a reply to a request they have made); even during this time the business is still very much on the customer’s mind, and how they feel at this point forms a critical element in their overall assessment of the experience. 

Adding to this deficient picture, businesses can also fail to engage effectively with employees to garner their perspective on what customers really value. Ironically, this is particularly true of front line employees who potentially have most to contribute.

4. Despite striving to deliver a better customer experience, businesses too frequently fail to remove, or even recognise, the barriers to doing so 

Within any business, there are inherent barriers that prevent deriving real value from their CX activity. In this respect, we encounter the same hurdles time and again: 

• a firm silo structure which prevents effective collaboration across the business 
• an emphasis on process, procedure and paperwork over and above furnishing employees with the flexibility needed to ensure customers get the right experience 
• CX budgets and responsibility being split across different departments making addressing CX issues more problematic 
• internal teams with little or no contact with customers, failing to understand the consequences of their actions on the front line’s ability to deliver a better experience. 

5. Business leaders can be too removed from customers to really understand their needs.

There has been a significant increase in senior level roles which specifically focus on the customer experience, and a consequential rise in the profile and value of CX. Against this, many senior leaders continue to view CX activity as a cost to the business - a view reinforced by the difficulty showing the link with key financial metrics. 

At the same time a focus upon their own business area prevents senior stakeholders having an intimate understanding of customers. This is compounded by them spending little or no time talking and listening to customers or experiencing what it is like to be one. 

Finally, the absence of a unified focus on CX can make senior leaders more defensive when their customer satisfaction score goes down, rather than focussing on what this means and how best to reverse the decline. 

6. Despite huge investment, organisations freely admit they are not getting the ROI they desire  

We are often engaged by businesses with a view to generating greater value from their customer initiative. While business leaders will claim some degree of success improving key metrics, many are frustrated by a lack of real change directly attributable to the investment being made. As we have witnessed many times in the past, this is often the result of businesses failing to: 

• fully engage with their employees in developing and implementing an effective CX strategy; 
• truly understand the customer’s world, what is important to them and what the experience is really like; 
• recognise the impact of CX improvement activity and enable cross-functional teams across the business to collaborate in developing solutions to the most pressing issues, implement the agreed actions, and monitor their impact on key financial metrics. 

Making Progress 

We have seen businesses vary enormously in how they’ve moved towards addressing these stumbling blocks, and more significantly the extent to which they have been successful in doing so. 

In making progress against these obstacles, it’s important for businesses to consider the level of their CX maturity - the degree to which they have aligned and linked the three key components of a truly customer-centred business: first, the effectiveness of their CX insight and improvement activity; second, the extent of employee engagement; finally their key financial and business-critical metrics. 

For the more experienced organisation further along their CX journey, the best action is reflection. In moving closer to the desired customer-centred culture, they should take a step back to determine their ‘as is’ state through a far-reaching CX audit. To provide direction to the actions necessary to achieve this state, they need to objectively appraise their understanding of their customers’ world, the engagement of their staff, and how well the organisation’s fabric generates an environment that properly enables staff to deliver the optimum experience.  

At the opposite end of the spectrum, those businesses with a more embryonic CX programme rightly ask themselves, ‘just where do we start?’ Our advice here is: just do something. 

• First, ask customer insight and front-line staff to collaborate in reviewing everything known about the customer, and identify where the business is falling down delivering the experience customers desire;

• Once issues have been identified, task those across the business responsible for delivering the customer experience with identifying potential solutions to the problem areas identified; 
• Finally, crucially, feedback to senior stakeholders all potential improvement opportunities, agreeing which should or should not be implemented and how best to move forward.