In part I of our series discussing all things customer experience (CX), we explored the common pitfalls that result in 32% of customers globally walking away from a company after just one bad experience. So, what do your customers actually want? And how can you achieve this? Research shows that when asked what they value most, it’s the basic things that customers want companies to get right: 

  1. Speed 
  1. Convenience 
  1. Knowledgeable help  
  1. Friendly service  

Quite often, discovering the answer is as simple as asking your customers what would keep their loyalty. If you’re a bank, for example, you could hold a focus group with some of your longtime customers and ask them about the current experience of your banking products and services, as well as insight on what could be done to make it better.  

Getting CX in the good books

Many times, leaders of legacy organisations want to leverage customer experience for short-term profit-generation – a quick win that does not actually contribute to the long-term success and health of the company. CX should not just be the focus of the moment, but rather a consistent practice, ingrained in the culture of an organisation. In fact, CX often requires the serious commitment of organisational resources to accomplish, like establishing a customer experience function as a CX centre-of-excellence (CoE).  

A CX CoE is an internal function that helps to define, develop and share CX standards and leading practices in a place that employees can easily find. This serves as an internal advisory group to help drive customer-centric thinking and design around any customer experiences, new and old. The CoE is a centre of reference, but should be active in all conversations about new products and business transformations, ensuring that customer-centricity becomes a way of thinking internally. CX representatives should be cross-functional and actively involved across all internal departments and lines of business. Even more crucially, the CX CoE should be the loudest voice in the room and biggest advocate for how CX links to business value, and crucially, the value lost without it. 

Build the business case

Revenue generation and growth is not complete without support from other business segments, so the CX CoE must demonstrate the clear link of CX to overall organisational value. When going about a new transformation, especially one that proposes to augment the CX for the better, making the financial case for this new initiative is vital for its success. Carefully describe the opportunity presented, the background of the project, project goals, quantification of project benefits (financial projections: detailed revenue, operational cost model, financial model, cash flow statement for DCF analysis). Quantifying how much the project will cost and how it will financially help the business over time will enable executive sponsorship to understand and more feasibly support large CX initiatives. Without the sufficient quantification of benefits, it can be hard for senior leaders to see the value of CX programs. 

Leverage data to drive innovative CX

When thinking about those key points for improving a CX that your customers want – one that is quick, convenient and has knowledgeable help and friendly service – how can those experiences be enhanced and enabled? The answer inevitably ties back to data enrichment. Consider how you can leverage data, whether externally or internally, to enhance your customer’s overall experience. 

Internally, consider: 

  • Customer account data 
  • Email / call records 
  • Audio / text data from customer service interactions 
  • Customer lifecycle information 
  • Customer feedback 
  • Navigational data from your website (clickstream) 
  • Customer specifics (share of wallet) 
  • CRM data 

And externally: 

  • Telecom / utility data 
  • Property records 
  • Other financial institution data  
  • Retailer / e-commerce data 
  • Credit card transaction data 
  • Publicly available information 

Let’s say you are a credit card issuer who wants to heavily overhaul the CX around your onboarding journey… A piece of data enrichment and integration that would have a high level of return on effort would be integrating on-hand customer account data when an individual goes to apply for a credit card. Practically, this would mean enabling autofill of much of their key personal information, increasing the level of speed and convenience in gaining credit. Similarly, external data enrichment would enhance the overall CX for a credit card issuer – for example, the integration of telecom and utility data into the credit decisioning process. This would help confirm an individual’s ability to pay around credit issuance, helping to expedite speed of approval and general breadth of approval for individuals with less stellar credit history.  

In both cases, the integration of internal and external data helps to achieve 2 of the 4 top customer desires in customer experience – speed and convenience – helping to drive retention and revenue growth for the organisation. 

Need help getting started?

In essence, successful CX transformation is built on ensuring the integration of CX principles and advocates across the organisation, linking CX outcomes to quantifiable value, understanding the needs and desires of your customer base and establishing internal initiatives that support your customers and employees.  

CX is a large-scale organisational initiative that requires input, feedback and iterative design to ensure the cementing of customer-centricity at all levels. Our CX experts have vast amounts of experience across these practices, helping to transform all types of businesses to develop more customer-centric organisations. 

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