Customer Experience Management: Why CX Pros' Influence Expands

The Gist

• CX importance. Effective customer experience management can significantly boost revenue; 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great experience.
• Silo struggles. CX programs often work in isolation, hindering cross-functional collaboration and creating disjointed strategies in customer experience management.
• Real-time insight. Contact centers offer invaluable real-time customer sentiment, enabling organizations to improve services, products and overall customer experience.

Today’s customers have endless choices and aren’t hesitant to switch brands if they’re not getting what they need. A customer's perception of a brand is not just influenced by product quality or price — the overall customer experience, the personalization and the service and support they receive play a considerable role in creating long-term satisfaction. Great customer experience management can mean more revenue — and according to PWC's research, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

That fact is a core reason why IDC predicted CX-related spending would cross the $600 billion threshold in the past year and why 64% of CX leaders told Forrester they expect a boost in their budgets for CX initiatives in 2024, despite a rocky economic climate.

While CX pros are growing in headcount and influence, they still face many hurdles as they grapple with driving behavioral change with customer experience management within their organizations. In many cases, CX programs currently function as siloed units, working in isolation with their own data systems and roadmaps. These programs only sporadically collaborate with other related areas of customer experience management, such as customer support, UX, marketing and product teams.

The presence of isolated functions and disparate data often leads to incomplete or conflicting perspectives on achieving company objectives. Gaining support from the necessary teams can be challenging, as they may lack trust in the data, have conflicting priorities or lack motivation to drive improvements proactively.

Lets dive into a few reasons why overcoming these organizational challenges and building a CX-informed approach is well worth it.

Related Article: The Secret to Creating a Customer-Focused Culture

Benefits of Customer Experience Management

By adopting an integrated CX approach across functions, organizations can more easily identify patterns, trends and sentiment across customer interactions and touchpoints, giving them invaluable insights into how customers are experiencing their products and services. One area that benefits significantly from a customer experience management approach is an organization’s contact center. The employees on the customer frontlines, including contact centers, are the lifeblood of any organization and the face of the brand for its customers. Organizations need to understand how these employees feel about the processes and solutions they are provided to get their jobs done.

Understanding the frontline employee experience can help a company identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, training needs and the core drivers of employee engagement and motivation. It also has an impact on the customer experience — happy and engaged employees lead to improved customer satisfaction. Qualtrics research shows that brands with a high level of employee engagement have a 24% higher Net Promoter Score (NPS) than less-engaged competitors, with 12% higher customer advocacy.

Related Article: Companies Are Misusing Net Promoter Scores: Here’s How to Fix That

Collaborative Decision-Making Is the Rising Tide That Lifts All Boats

While traditional voice of the customer data like survey feedback and reviews provide a snapshot into how customers are experiencing a brand, contact center conversations provide the customer sentiment in real-time, ripe with insights that have the potential to unlock improvements across the entire organization.

By connecting and sharing contact center insights and feedback across all other customer-focused teams, organizations gain a holistic view of their customer's experiences and enable cross-functional teams to collaborate, identify patterns and jointly develop customer experience management strategies to improve products, services and processes.

Embracing a CX-Led Approach

In turn, by embracing a CX-led approach, contact centers can foster growth and enhance customer satisfaction by effectively leveraging valuable insights derived from customer feedback from any channel or business function across the organization. For example, a marketing org can share insights about customer preferences, behavior and demographics as well as messaging guidelines, brand positioning and promotional materials, enabling agents to effectively communicate new products, features or offers to customers.

Equipped with this data, service agents will have the knowledge needed to proactively address recurring customer issues, personalize service, escalate urgent matters, and address customer concerns more efficiently.

Final Thoughts on Customer Experience Management

The expanding influence of customer experience management will continue blurring operational lines across the enterprise. Companies realize that a great customer experience is not just a nice-to-have, but a critical differentiator in today's competitive landscape.

By adopting an integrated CX approach across functions, organizations can gain valuable insights into customer sentiment, identify improvement areas, drive collaboration among teams and position themselves for long-term success.

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