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The significance of a robust Customer Experience is undeniable. Companies generating a billion dollars in annual revenue can expect an average increase of seven hundred million dollars within three years of investing in CX (Tenkin). Furthermore, Gartner reports that two-thirds of businesses now view CX as the primary competitive battleground.
Despite over eighty percent of business decision-makers acknowledging the importance of CX, only a minority witness significant improvements in CX quality, according to Forrester. Often, the reality is a cycle of measurement without meaningful action, or an interest hampered by budget constraints and uncertainty about where to begin. Achieving a distinctive CX is not an overnight task — it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Flexibilize Your Roadmap
Customer expectations evolve, and organizations must adapt their processes, people, and technology to stay relevant. Your roadmap guides this journey. A static roadmap, with little feedback on actual channel performance, will disconnect you from your customers. This disconnection manifests in various small inconveniences: an extra click here, a cumbersome filter there, inaccurate product information, insufficient payment options, or a frustrating return process. UX expert Steve Krug explains in his bestseller “Don’t Make Me Think” (pdf) how increasing the interaction effort makes it harder for customers to engage with your business.
The solution begins with making your roadmap more flexible, continually identifying and addressing customer pain points, whether front-end or operational. Priorities are set by diving into the data.
From Data to Action
Collecting data is one thing; the real challenge lies in its application. Observe how customers interact with your channels, solutions, and products — from initial consideration to repeat purchases. Identify drop-off points and behavior patterns. Determine what works well and where you can make a distinctive difference.
Formulate hypotheses, such as reducing the vertical space on the checkout page to make the checkout button immediately visible, potentially speeding up the transaction process. Develop and discuss these hypotheses with a cross-functional team, then schedule them for testing on your roadmap. The pitfall to avoid is the temptation to go big immediately — focus on keeping it manageable.
If you’re feeling behind in your CX efforts, the urge to address every issue at once can be overwhelming. However, a bottom-up approach is more manageable and allows for more frequent, polished improvements to CX.
Measure the Right Goals
With internet expansion, markets have grown in both potential reach and competition. Many businesses have become interchangeable, a realization not everyone has made. It’s crucial to set the right organizational goals. In a demand-driven market, focusing on customer experience — how people interact with your brand and their satisfaction — is wise. Key metrics to measure include customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Setting your KPIs requires refining your strategy. For instance, a national retail chain considered increasing the average order size to cover shipping costs better. However, they discovered that encouraging in-store pickups was more beneficial than reducing shipping costs.
Overarching Goals
Larger organizations often struggle with departments operating in silos with misaligned goals. The solution is a holistic approach that builds bridges and involves the right stakeholders. Aligning different departmental goals under a unified vision can break down silos and place customer experience at the core of business operations. If this sounds like a culture change, it is, but it doesn’t have to be disruptive.
Step by Step Toward a CX-Focused Organization
Transforming an organization’s approach to work is challenging. The following five best practices have proven effective in embedding CX into the organizational fabric gradually:
Small Successes: Start small to quickly achieve success and gain internal recognition, which encourages further efforts.
Rituals: Establish recurring meetings and processes to maintain focus and adapt strategies based on new launches and outcomes.
Engage Users: Always validate improvements in CX with actual user feedback, choosing between qualitative and quantitative testing as appropriate.
The Improvement Cycle: Tailor the cycle of data analysis, hypothesis testing, and adjustment to your organization’s size, fostering a constructive rather than a one-time process.
Ambassadors: Support departments in achieving tangible results to build support and create CX champions who identify opportunities to enhance customer-centricity.
Expectation Management: Not every hypothesis will lead to improvement; learning what customers dislike is equally valuable. This deepens understanding and sharpens future hypotheses.
Gaining more control over your organization’s CX identifies critical dependencies and barriers in your technical landscape, demanding smart IT infrastructure renovations, from updating Product Information Management systems to adopting modern composable technology stacks. Always consider the impact on CX with each step.
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
The key to improving CX lies in continuous small steps. Begin modestly and grow constructively. CX improvement is a human-centric process that requires extensive communication and sometimes navigates internal politics. Continue building bridges — towards customers by enhancing CX and internally towards other departments and stakeholders. This approach ensures ongoing, scalable, and distinctive enhancements to your CX.