In many ways, formulating a customer experience plan of excellence is like any sport. You’ve put together talented employees across the organization, and now you’re looking to those leaders to build a winning strategy.
Collaboration is key—that’s true in business, sports or life.
In rowing, there’s a hard-to-define feeling called “swing” when near-perfect synchronization of the rowers’ motion occurs in the shell, enhancing the boat’s performance and speed. That’s exactly what happens when CX decision-makers are in sync with improvement goals and moving forward together, achieving quantifiable benefits:
- Improved customer acquisition and retention
- Lower marketing, sales and support costs
- Higher monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
- Increased customer lifetime value (CLV)
If your team isn’t in sync, how can you offer consumers a cohesive experience that meets their expectations?
Identify what’s obstructing your CX vision
Often, there are multiple decision-makers within an enterprise who have a vested interest in making the customer experience frictionless. But surprisingly, they may not even realize they share the same goal—and may not be communicating the way they should. And that creates barriers instead of bridges.
So, who are the CX decision-makers who should be collaborating if they’re not already? Let’s meet the team.
Customer experience leaders
In organizations where there’s a designated customer experience leader, this role sets the pace for improving the entire customer journey—all products and services, all business units, for all customer interactions. They have an overarching goal of capturing voice of the customer (VOC) across all departments, and can take advantage of AI solutions to analyze voice and text interactions to better understand feedback and sentiment in a quick yet holistic way.
Customer success leaders are typically responsible for onboarding new consumers and helping them quickly realize value from their purchase. They provide a knowledge base of training, including “how to” guides, and may suggest products and services they could leverage to achieve business goals. Their actions help build loyalty to earn repeat customers.
To encourage loyalty, digital experience leaders are focused on the experience a consumer has with interactions on digital channels. A lot is riding on it.
Running a digital customer-facing business like e-commerce means the digital experience leader is focused on designing the right CX, enabling customer brand interactions at the right points and offering self-service solutions wherever the consumer is.
Operations leaders
Operations leaders run day-to-day operations and implement growth tactics, including improving customer acquisition, retention and lifetime value. They’re focused on KPIs related to CX such as cost per interaction, utilization and efficiency rates.
Customer support leaders provide frontline support for contact center agents and have typically moved up the ranks in the team. They know the ins and outs of the center to represent the voice of the customer (VOC), and want to meet and exceed customer satisfaction and retention, and improve the agent experience and productivity by increasing first contact resolution and reducing handle time, speed of answer and average after call work time.
Technology leaders
Technology leaders are in constant pursuit of stability, security, and innovative solutions to business challenges.
IT leaders evaluate how technology can grow the organization and want business solutions that can be measured by ROI, end-user adoption, end user productivity, usability score, time-to-implement and support response time.
Digital transformation leaders work to modernize systems and implement completely new systems and processes to take advantage of the best tech in market. They’re also tasked with delivering the best ROI using data and predictive analytics. Automation and innovation are the key attributes for any CX solution so they can improve efficiency to meet strategic growth objectives.
Why it’s time to collaborate to transform CX
Consumer expectations for seamless CX have reached new heights and raised the stakes for competition. Companies doing it well have set the bar and companies falling short could be losing potential customers who know they can get a better experience somewhere else.
NICE found 95% of consumers say that customer service impacts brand loyalty, and 41% will abandon a brand after two bad service interactions.
Consumers across industries are willing to spend 10% more if the experience meets or surpasses their expectations, and 73% of Americans would be willing to go out of their way to go to a company that has better customer service. [1]
Here’s an example of the immeasurable value resulting from collaboration: A food delivery service company relies on customer data in real-time. There’s an interplay of different CX owners within the food service company. Each digital interaction captures data in real-time and stores it centrally in a cloud-based platform (managed by IT) so employees can better serve customers or guide them to the next best action. The CX leader monitors the effectiveness of these interactions through VOC data and guides internal data-based discussions for improvement.
How about elevating the value of collaboration even more? Wrap up that data in a nice, neat bow (so to speak) by investing in a CX solution that systematizes the chain of collaboration to bring it all together inherently, making those analytics and customer data visible and actionable across the team.
By now, it must be clear why these pivotal leaders should join forces to right-size their organization’s CX solution.
For an organization to truly succeed with CX, each CX stakeholder must collaborate to build a common vision and standard to work toward, ensuring every customer touchpoint contributes to the realization of that vision.
Taking that first move toward success should be a priority now rather than something left for next quarter—or even next year.
Why is now the best time to invest in CX? Because there is a proven link between the quality of experience and revenue—your organization cannot afford to wait.
Companies must navigate unforeseen market challenges to survive and sustain a competitive advantage and having an unrelenting focus on customers is the best way to do this.
Research shows improving CX impacts the bottom line. For a large multichannel bank, even a 1-point improvement in its CX Index score can lead to an incremental $123 million in revenue. For a direct bank, it can lead to an incremental $92 million in revenue, according to Forrester.
The effect of CX changes on business outcomes for U.S. banks is exponential — i.e., revenue growth from better CX gets progressively larger, so larger U.S. banks have the highest gains from improving already good or excellent experiences.
Steps you can take to achieve CX ‘swing’
All signs point to the value of collaboration in making a decision about CX solutions to achieve “swing.”
An investment in customer experience reaps rewards across the board. One recent report found that when customer service is perceived as a value center at an organization, revenue growth is 3.5X higher. [2]
Still, your organization might still be wondering how to reach that sweet spot.
Begin by identifying all CX stakeholders in your organization. Ask them: How can we work together to meet customer needs and offer a consistently superior customer experience all the time?
Begin by establishing a cross-functional team of CX stakeholders to build a holistic customer experience map. This map will help the organization to understand customers’ perspectives, identify sources of friction and ensure customers receive a consistent brand experience regardless of their path. An effective customer experience map accounts for all touchpoints (both attended and unattended), handoffs, operational data, and customer feedback that make up every customer journey.
Use the map as a guide to identify which CX improvements will have the greatest impact, and develop a plan for continual improvement with processes, systems and technology.
Taking a collaborative approach to improving customer experience can transform a fragmented customer journey into what can be described as a smooth glide that will help customers have the experiences they expect with your brand.
Leveraging innovative technology to connect customer experience interactions (CXi) that are streaming from multiple spaces and managed by separate siloes will improve your customers’ ability to reach resolution.
A unified solution that can solve for the gap in collaboration is available whenever your organization is ready to seize the moment and upgrade.
Take a closer look at our cloud-based digital CX solutions here, and get a demo to start understanding the immediate benefits your organization will see.
[1] Shep Hyken: The 2021 ACA Study: Achieving Customer Amazement (2021)
[2] Accenture: End-to-Endless Customer Service (2022)
