Customer Experience (CX) teams have a difficult job in that they must convince everyone at a company why their objectives are important. CX is one of the few functions that must operate across the entire company, sometimes without an executive sponsor. The end goal of every CX function is to not only be experts on the customers, but to shift all business teams to become customer advocates. Given the complexity of both customers and businesses, this objective is difficult to achieve .
While there are many data, customer, and leadership obstacles CX must overcome, none of those will matter if you don’t gain company-wide adoption. In order to get company wide buy-in, there are three behaviors that must be eliminated.
Here are the three behaviors thwarting companies from culturalizing CX:
1. Complacency - This usually occurs when a company is performing well, or when there is a brand halo effect where customers overly favor a product or service regardless of the experience. When a company is seeing improved growth QoQ or YoY, it can cause them to become less aggressive in pursuing improvements to the customer experience. This may become even more apparent as we come out of the pandemic and consumer’s purchasing behavior starts to return to normal. When a company is performing well, that is the best time to prove out the value of CX and request an increase in funding from leadership and support from co-workers. Remember, it only takes one bad experience to lose a customer. Regardless of company performance, it is paramount that everyone understands the importance of CX and why it is key to continued growth.
2. Myopia - Silos: One of the most common obstacles CX is constantly battling. These silos create myopia, where each employee or function becomes so focused on the area of the experience they own, they don’t realize how they are actually impacting the entire end-to-end customer experience. I never blame these functions for their myopia. In fact, they are oftentimes doing their job very well. It’s the responsibility of the CX team to break these silos down and provide awareness for how everyone is affecting the customer experience. With silos dispersed, work no longer gets shelved between the cracks or kicked around to different owners. Business functions can more readily collaborate on projects, and with a holistic view of the customer, can better understand how their work impacts other teams.
3. Apathy - Customer Experience is emotional. The professionals that work in the industry will tell you they work in CX because they enjoy hearing and seeing how they make a direct, and sometimes profound, impact on the lives of their customers. Whether you are a food delivery service helping those with at-risk immune systems stay safe and healthy during a pandemic, or an insurance company making sure a family is taken care of after a disaster, everyone at a company needs to understand how the good and bad experiences can impact customers' lives. Customer experience functions need to make sure they disseminate the emotions and feelings of customers. A goal for any CX program should be to help the entire company become emotionally invested in the experience they provide. Everyone works harder, smarter, and will look to CX more often if they feel they are making a difference.
These three behaviors are detrimental to any CX program and will prevent full company-wide adoption for what you are trying to achieve. The behaviors listed can be solved by constantly communicating the importance of CX using key metrics such as ROI, educating business teams on how they impact the customer experience, and showing how the experiences your company provides impact customers emotionally. I would love to hear from others on how they remove these types of behaviors.
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If you found this post valuable, I encourage you to watch our webinar “Why CX Programs Struggle to Demonstrate Results.”
In this webinar, I’ll be discussing the three common obstacles to proving the business results of your CX program and how to overcome them.
