Four reasons your customer experience strategy might fail

In today’s highly competitive market, more and more companies are using customer experience (CX) as a competitive differentiator. If you’re in the process of implementing a CX strategy, there are four hurdles you need to overcome to make sure it’s successful.

Four common reasons that interfere with the success of your CX strategy

1.    Not linking CX to business goals

The link between investing in CX and your business bottom line is vital and you need to demonstrate the effect poor CX has on business profitability. For example, if you’re currently sitting at a 5% customer churn rate, how much of it is due to poor customer experience? Understanding the revenue lost or potential revenue gained as a result of investing in CX would give you the right buy-in from not only EXCO, but across the business.

A good CX strategy will have multiple benefits to business profitability including reducing customer churn, increased customer lifetime value as well as improving brand image, which could lead to reducing your customer acquisition costs.

2.    Not having executive ownership

Having someone from your C-Suite who has the power to drive your CX culture from the top down is essential. It gives credibility to your strategy and will make sure all levels of staff buy-in to CX.

It also builds unity within the company and will put a stop to employees thinking CX is only customer services’ problem.

3.    Failing to get all departments out of a silo frame of mind

Managers and employees from every division in your company must understand that they are all responsible for CX. Actions by a specific department could influence CX down further down the customer journey. As an example, the root cause for complaints in your call centre, could be due to inaccuracies by your billing department. While your customers are satisfied that your agents are fixing these errors, the calls could be prevented by making sure your billing department focuses on their accuracy.

You need all departments to work together to improve customers’ experience. Collaboration on results as well as frequent communication is essential to drive the right results.

4.    Don’t think customer feedback is an annual exercise

CX is a dynamic environment as your customers’ needs and outlooks are constantly evolving. Doing an annual customer experience feedback exercise will give you a result and pain points, but at that stage it’s too late to impact the score or retain any of the customers who left due to a poor experience.

Implementing a real-time Voice of the Customer solution will not only give you results you can action on immediately, but also gives you the opportunity to retain a customer who had a negative experience. In addition, it allows you to see if the CX changes you’re investing in are having the right impact. The benefits of measuring CX continuously, as a whole, far outweighs a once-a-year exercise.

It’s important for you to partner with the right CX company that will help you develop and implement a successful CX strategy that makes a bottom-line business impact.