Customer Experience is the Glue to Transformative Changes

In today’s world, most companies, small or large, have shifted a large portion of their focus to customer experience (CX) to stay competitive with industry leaders and disruptions. Often individual departments within an organization will own separate pieces of the customer experience with differing abilities to understand the customer pain points as well as to prioritize and make changes or process improvements to better the customers’ experiences. While this focus may be to varying degrees, the importance of providing a valuable, satisfying, and effortless experience to customers is vital for any business to innovate, differentiate, or survive.

“Everyone from the CEO down to the Contact Center agent should know what it feels like to be a customer.” –Blake Morgan, Senior Contributor, Forbes

As Blake Morgan notes, in any customer-centric organization all employees should take some degree of responsibility to understand and improve customer experience. This begs the question, how do you unify your business and ensure everyone keeps customer experience top of mind?

As my colleague discussed in Who Owns the CX Experience, a CX team or centralized function can help alleviate some of the pressure on resources and priorities. CX has to be the glue that brings everyone together to understand customers’ needs, perceptions, and determine best ways to make improvements. For starters, this can be achieved by allocating resourcing and funding to setup and maintain a centralized Customer Experience (CX) or Voice of Customer (VoC) function.

Breakdown the silos and bring together all sources of customer feedback into a central repository.

Sources of customer feedback are often disseminated across the company - calls and chats in the contact center, site intercept surveys with digital experience,social media engagement with marketing, and loyalty Net Promoter Score studies with research teams - meaning each department may have access to different pieces of customer feedback. Additionally, customers are inclined to use specific channels of feedback depending on their need which suggests you could be missing part of the story when not looking at the feedback collectively. Allowing the feedback to be collected in a centralized location mitigates these issues and captures the full scope of the customer journey.

Form a centralized CX function to provide holistic insights and approaches to experience improvements.

Without a centralized focus on customer feedback analytics decisions are made in silos. This results in different priorities or solutions for similar issues to better the customer experience. When looking at customer feedback holistically, it allows you to better understand and connect the largest drivers of satisfaction, loyalty, and effort across all customer touch-points. What’s more, when you make experience improvements, a centralized CX function can help measure the impact of those changes to confirm return on investment and impact on customer satisfaction.

Let the centralized CX function level the playing field for smaller or lightly staffed departments.

Some parts of your organization will have the structure and resources to be able to analyze customer feedback and make experience improvements while others are bound by resourcing and bandwidth limitations. A team might own a specific touch-point along the customer journey but not understand how customers feel about their experience and which changes would make the most impactful improvements. Using a centralized approach gives everyone in the organization a 360° view into your customers’ experiences and drives cross collaboration across departments to focus on the most pressing issues from your customer’s perspectives.

Having a centralized CX team is critical to success as they can utilize allocated resources to help the entire organization, breaking down barriers between departments and driving process improvements that betters the customer experience. This will generate loyal customers who proudly promote the company to friends and family which is ultimately the Return on Investment (ROI) that companies are looking for.

Here at Farlinium, we are here to help you. Let us help you evaluate how tuned you are to your customers’ needs and give you the tools and information you need to make the next step towards actioning on initiatives that are most rewarding for your customers.