Top 3 CX Program Missing Links

Do you dream of turning your customer experience (CX) insights program into an integrated, empowering, growth-driving source of customer truth for your company? You wouldn’t be alone.

Despite emphasis on CX as a brand differentiator and major revenue builder, many organizations grapple with the same common challenges and CX insights program “missing links” that hinder their full potential. And, like them, you may find yourself struggling to identify, let alone bridge, those gaps in your company’s CX insights strategy.

Enter our latest ebook, “Fill in the Blanks of Your CX Research Program.” It’s your guide to the top 10 most common “blanks,” or missing links, in enterprise CX programs that hold them back from real, tangible impact. You can grab your copy of the ebook, but here’s a sneak peek at the first three missing links and how they may be impacting your program.

Just like people and their goals mature and evolve over time, so does your customer experience strategy and program. Much like people, CX programs mature at different speeds, for different reasons, and in a variety of ways. And growing better, faster, and stronger starts with first understanding where you’re at, then envisioning where you want to be.

However, numerous factors like budget, resources, data capabilities, and organizational and market dynamics make it challenging to assess your CX state, let alone plan for growth. A Customer Experience Maturity Model helps leaders at any stage of maturity navigate these challenges, even with just the initial step of understanding their company’s current level of CX Maturity. This knowledge enables leaders and their teams to leverage strengths, optimize resources, and focus on high impact CX efforts.

CX Maturity is gauged by the degree to which CX strategies, goals, insights, and wins are embedded into your company culture, corporate strategy, organizational action planning, and employee experience. For instance:

• • • The degree to which a well-defined CX strategy exists within your company
    • The integration of CX metrics and outcomes into corporate strategy and goals
    • How often your company uses CX information to support brand strategy, marketing campaigns, and differentiation efforts

The CX Maturity Model is an excellent tool for managing, assessing, and growing CX impact. It identifies areas for improvement, helps aligns upgrades with customer needs, and fosters a customer-centric culture for business growth. Discovering your current CX Maturity stage helps you gain clarity on where your CX program stands and, more importantly, where it can go.

To get the most ROI and value from your customer experience initiatives, it’s critical to set yourself up for success with a CX goal setting process that can help you deliver the highest impact. And to be actionable, your goals ultimately need to be aligned with specific aspects of your business strategy that will drive overall growth. But…

Ever had parts of your corporate strategy shift mid-year? Maybe the business context around your insights goal suddenly changes or new leadership causes priorities to shift. Or something disruptive is (always) happening in your industry and seems to throw all assumptions into the air.

Any of these things can happen quickly, which is why setting insights goals for your program can’t be one-and-done. It’s critical to revisit goals and metrics consistently and re-align them to evolving growth strategies when necessary.

This process should happen with your stakeholders to closely monitor progress, review assumptions and hypotheses, and determine a consistent cadence for reassessing your goal(s). Together, you can ensure they are still relevant for stakeholders, tied to your greater corporate strategy, and reflective of your voice of the customer.

Organizations who meet and exceed their goals also continuously revisit the WHY (root causes) behind their metric scores, key drivers, and supporting metrics that may also impact goal achievement.

It’s well known that there is a strong link between a company’s customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and financial performance. However, many companies overlook just how much their employee experience impacts their customer experience. There’s a misconception that only customer-facing employees and leaders drive customer success, but employees across all roles influence customer experience through their perceptions, attitudes, and motivations.

Integrating CX and EX is crucial for a customer-centric culture. It starts by understanding every employee group’s direct and indirect impact on CX at every stage, which can help you align employee experience initiatives with customer centric aims.

By necessity, this takes EX way beyond that annual employee engagement survey, making it a much more robust feedback tool intertwined with CX. That’s because employees of ALL functions, not just customer facing, have insights to share that can enlighten and inform CX for the better. And generating those insights – whether via employee survey, CX/EX  initiatives, or even as a part of regular manager-employee feedback sessions, is a great way to start more customer-centric conversations.

However, making the CX and EX connection isn’t just about gathering employee insights and perspectives on the customer experience. It’s a two-way street. It’s equally important to share customer feedback with employees and give relevant teams and individuals access to CX data and insights they have the power to act on.

Did any of these blanks ring true for your program? Did any surprise you? If yes, great! Discovery is the first step toward transformation. Now that you know, don’t let those missing links in your CX insights translate to missed connections with your customers.

Explore more of the top 10 most common “blanks” in CX programs with our Fill in the Blanks of Your CX Program ebook. Also included: our framework for thriving CX insights programs,tips for persistent CX insights pain points, and practical strategies, tips, and resources to help you fix the missing links you uncover in your company’s program.