A Blueprint For CX Success

The quality of customer experience provided by a brand is becoming ever more important, and those who ignore it pay a hefty price. Here is how to transform your business into a CX-powered machine.

Does CX really drive bottom-line growth, or is investing in it just the latest hype? A study conducted by Forrester, which compares the revenue growth of companies with superior CX to that of their direct competitors with inferior CX, has shown that CX leaders grow revenue faster than CX laggards. While a study done by NewVoiceMedia has revealed that U.S. businesses lose more than $62 billion each year due to poor customer service.

Many big brands have seen success after investing in CX. However, bettering your customer experience doesn’t mean you need deep pockets. Many smaller companies flourish by doing simple things. For example, In-N-Out Burger publishes its popular custom orders online and reminds people that its core focus is providing personalised experiences, says “Welcome to the Human Era” report.

Brands that are building deeper relationships with customers and seamlessly connecting the dots to provide a joined-up service are stealing a march on traditional businesses whose focus has been on efficiency and cost-cutting. Whether you’re the market leader or a challenger brand, there are six key steps to a customer experience transformation.

1. Insight—Start With The Customer

When customers are both functionally satisfied and emotionally attached, they are almost twice as likely to recommend the brand. However, just as importantly, don’t take what customers say as gospel. Reframe it in a way that gets to the heart of the customers’ problem, by looking at their needs, wants, emotions, and the context of the situation.

2. CX Blueprint—A Holistic View Of Services, Operations, And Customer Insights

By mapping customer insights against the existing organisation’s services, operations, and technology, you get a view of the whole picture. This creates a CX blueprint for your business that identifies the things you should be doing and, more importantly, those you should stop doing.

Afterwards, working with the key stakeholders from across the business, map out a new CX blueprint, showing where to invest in innovation over time. This reduces risk by demonstrating today how we will succeed in the market tomorrow.

3. Action—Do Something Quickly

Having mapped your future CX blueprint, you will be able to identify areas of opportunity that will make the biggest commercial impact. Build something quickly, get user feedback, and continue to iterate. CX transformation is an evolution that can easily falter, so it is pivotal that an organisation can see short-term value if it is even going to consider the long-term vision.

4. Buy In—Complete Conviction From The Top

Organisations that have a unified vision do significantly better than organisations that lack a shared purpose. Salim Ismail, a successful entrepreneur and advisor to many Fortune 500 companies, describes this principle in his book “Exponential Organizations” as the Massive Transformational Purpose (MTP) that is rooted in CX. The desire for change needs to be initiated at the top, with everyone in the business understanding its importance and working towards this common goal.

5. Create—Like A Startup

Start small and fail quickly to iterate and learn from your mistakes. Projects should be undertaken with a startup mentality to rapidly come up with the concept, and then design, build, test, and refine ideas allowing them to evolve and grow.

6. Deliver—Employee Interactions Matter

A successful customer experience implementation begins with cultivating a customer experience culture across your whole organisation. Your front-of-house employees are the face of your organisation. Therefore, engaged employees play the pivotal role in transforming the customer experience.

These six steps will deliver an organisation that has customer experience at its core, while defining real opportunities for growth and gain.

If businesses want to improve their public image and reputation, they need to step outside of traditional efficiency thinking and ensure the experiences they provide satisfy their customers across the whole of their journey.