Stress Test Your Customer Experience Strategy

These seven tests will help identify the major gaps in the foundation of a strategy.

As summer comes to a close, planning season begins for 2017. It’s the time of year when firms revisit their visions, objectives, and actions to map out their strategic plan for the year.

With this in mind, marketers should put together a checklist to help assess the health of their customer experience (CX) strategies and identify both gaps and opportunities. By understanding your strengths and weaknesses, you can accurately communicate what strategies should take priority with your leadership team as the planning begins.

Use this customer experience strategy self-test to quickly identify gaps in your CX strategy and assess your strategy’s strength. This test is not meant to provide a comprehensive evaluation of your strategy, but rather highlight foundational elements that are working well and areas for quick improvement.

•Test #1: What’s the target experience? Southwest Airlines delivers a dramatically different experience than Emirates Airlines, yet both perform well overall on CX surveys. Is your company trying to deliver something that looks more like Southwest or Emirates—or something entirely different? When executives don’t know the answer to this question or provide vastly different answers, employees are left without clear direction about the kind of experience to deliver.

•Test #2: Who is the experience targeted to? Firms can spend significant resources trying to make certain customers happy that the company should not have sold to in the first place. Firms that try to be all things to all possible customers end up being nothing special to any of them.

A CX strategy needs to identify the key customer who cares and is willing to pay for the target experience. Firms that haven’t done the research to understand their best customers should make this a top priority.

•Test #3: What strengths does it tap for differentiation? Many firms seek to be trusted or easy to work with. While these are worthwhile attributes to aim for, not all firms will achieve them equally in the eyes of their customers. As the leader of one health insurance company stated: “Our industry is so bad, simply being easy to do business with would be differentiating.”

A CX strategy should identify the distinct capabilities the firm has (or will build) over competitors to deliver the experience.

•Test #4: What metrics will indicate success? Without a clear sense of how your firm will measure success—and a benchmark for current performance—leaders have little insight other than a gut feeling for company progress toward the goal.

Firms serious about improving the customer experience will constantly look for root cause drivers of the metric and tie the metric to financial results.

•Test #5: How will resource allocation change? A strategy is empty words without a clear connection to how the firm spends its money.

Leading firms drive customer experience into a project management office or another governing function that reviews business cases and makes funding decisions. The most advanced use customer journey maps or “moments of truth” as a funding criterion; others make customer impact a consideration in the business case. Regardless, the CX strategy should specify changes in how the firm will allocate resources.

•Test #6: What is the plan to engage employees and partners? A hefty strategy that only the leaders understand is a recipe for the status quo.

Leaders need to articulate the key activities (e.g. communications, training, recruiting, rewards) the strategy requires to change the belief systems and behavioral norms across the ecosystem of employees and third-party partners that deliver the experiences.

•Test #7: How will the strategy adapt? Only months after USAA launched its mobile app, allowing customers to deposit checks by phone, other banks followed suit. Dynamic markets and changing capabilities require companies to take advantage of opportunities and to adapt on short notice.

A CX strategy should articulate how the firm will use signals from its listening program (e.g. voice of customer, employee, and partner) to identify windows of opportunity to adapt to changes in the marketplace. These seven tests will help identify the major gaps in the foundation of a strategy, allowing marketers to build a more comprehensive and effective strategy going forward.