Editorial
The Gist
- Clear leadership needed. Leaders should set specific, actionable CX goals to empower employees and enhance customer satisfaction.
- Break silo barriers. Foster understanding and empathy across teams to improve collaboration and customer experience.
- Metrics matter. Establish meaningful and measurable CX goals to truly enhance both customer satisfaction and business value.
Those in the customer experience space might feel good to hear all the talk about how important it is for brands to be customer-focused these days. Yet recent studies have shown some rather bleak numbers in regard to how well brands that say they are customer-focused are actually performing. Do you have a strong customer experience strategy?
As shared at the recent Forrester CX Summit North America in Nashville, the firm’s, 2024 CX index for U.S.-based companies showed the biggest drop in recent years — 1.6% — which, compared to a .4% drop from 2022 to 2023 puts companies on a steeper decline, with 39% of brands and 10 out of 13 industries’ CX quality dropping.
For many who have been walking the CX walk for years this may be disheartening, but for all the other brands out there, it’s time to capitalize on a real opportunity to close the gap with your customer expectations and call your competitors’ bluff. Let’s look at four customer experience strategies to capitalize on a downswing in your competitors’ CX by improving from within.
How Can CX Leaders to Provide Clarity?
While the work of a customer experience strategy is most often done at ground level, whether face-to-face physically or virtually with customers, the directives and goal-setting need to start at the top. Not with vague motivational phrases about “focusing on the customer” or that the “customer is always right,” but with clear, actionable goals and the provision of tools that empower employees to do the right thing by their customers.
Sometimes, this means building in processes that ensure customers are taken care of through automation, and sometimes it means giving employees the latitude to use their judgment to do the right thing to keep a customer happy (and loyal).
When there is ambiguity, leaders are leaving too much to chance, and the customer suffers from this. Most employees want to do the right thing but aren’t empowered to do their best work when they don’t have a clear understanding of what success looks like. This is the No. 1 place leaders can start when seizing on their competitors’ CX shortcomings.
Related Article: Effective CX Strategies: Digging out of a CX Standstill
Stop Complaining About Silos and Start Doing Something
Siloed teams, processes and data are a cliché for these reasons: They are real, they are pervasive, and they’re hard to solve when egos, incentives and more are actively getting in the way.
Your competitors are likely suffering from similar issues, but the time to act is now. It starts with incentives. Look at what success looks like for your team and how those are either aligned or misaligned with other teams. Start aligning incentives with other teams, and you’ll start experiencing less friction between them.
Then, breaking down silos extends to education about other parts of the business. How well do your team members understand the business as a whole? If that is too big an ask to start, how about the immediately surrounding areas of the business? With understanding comes empathy as well as a fuller picture of the customers’ challenges.
Greater education about the business from the inside and out then turns to into greater collaboration. After all, it’s easier to work with other teams when you are speaking the same language. Add shared incentives to that and you are building something pretty powerful.
Finally, to call silos a thing of the past, that collaboration you are building turns into integration of goals, data, processes and, ultimately, success. The business wins because there is less friction and greater efficiency, but the real winner is your customers, who are now having less and less reasons to look at your competition.
Related Article: Drive Growth by Improving Your Customer Experience Strategy
Make CX Meaningful — and Measurable
It’s not enough to say “we love our customers.” To take on your competition in the battle for greater CX, you need to make it both meaningful and measurable.
In this context, meaningful means making the experience valuable to those participating in it, rather than simply checking the boxes. This means that your customers are getting what they need, but that you as a brand are adding value along the way. This is going to mean very different things in different contexts.
In some customer relationships, speed of delivery and getting out of the way might be optimal for a very transactional business. Or, empowering employees to tailor experiences to a customers’ needs may be more meaningful in a high-touch environment.
Of course, measurable in this context is a little more straightforward, but no less important. You can have the happiest customers, but if you can’t quantify the benefits of that, you are likely spending resources and effort where it should be spent. Instead, align measures of success with both meaning to the customer and value to the business. You’ll find that while this may feel like a compromise, it is a great way to get sustainable results.
Related Article: What Defines World-Class Customer Service Now and How to Get There
Adopt a Shared Set of Success Metrics
Finally, for those leaders that want to capitalize on their competitors’ declining customer experience scores, it is important to tie the previous ideas together by adopting a shared set of criteria for when success is achieved.
This is the logical conclusion to the previous three points. By providing clarity on what we mean by great customer experience, as well as business success, we are setting the North Star for everyone in the organizaiton.
Then, by actively working to integrate teams and aligning incentives through education and collaboration, teams stop working against each other and start working with each other to the benefit of the business and the customer.
Related Article: The Secret Sauce: Must-Haves for Exceptional Customer Experience
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Parting Thoughts on a Strong Customer Experience Strategy
By making a customer experience strategy something that is meaningful to all involved and measurable in a way that takes both customer and business needs into account, leaders can then align all areas of the business to work toward the same things together.
With customer experience scores on a decline, brands with these areas of focus can pull ahead and make meaningful advances in the months ahead. Others are sure to catch up as well, but a head start with a strong customer experience strategy can mean a big difference by stopping customer churn and picking up some new loyal customers along the way.
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