Although every industry and every company is different, there are shared challenges when it comes to providing your customers with the right experience. So if you're having a hard time making your CX programme work for you, no worries, you're not alone. Here are 4 cross-industry challenges and how you can tackle them.
Challenge: Typically it's a top-down decision to implement a Voice of the Customer programme. But how can you turn customer centricity into something more than a buzz word? How can you make it live throughout your entire organisation?
Key take-away: Simply put, it requires support, context and engagement. It isn't a project for only one team, there isn't something like a "CX department". Customer centricity is a group effort. The rush of the day often makes it difficult to stay involved and customer centricity poses different challenges for each level of your company, from the CEO to the floor. It's vital to have a cross-department team in your company that is engaged to keep the programme alive. In short: it's change management.
Challenge: Implementing a CX programme is an investment. You invest in data collection, in time and resources to get everyone aboard. How can you prove these efforts lead to more engaged customers? What's the correlation between higher NPS℠ & CSAT scores, number of customers and revenue?
Key take-away: Until today calculating the precise ROI of CX remains a challenge, simply because it's different for each company and industry. However, collecting feedback via a platform such as Hello Customer makes things measurable. You can move past your gut feeling and use data to support strategic decisions. Changes in strategy can be measured by monitoring evolutions in scores and feedback.
One tip: Start small, work with a proof of concept. Focus on one issue and try supporting it with data. Keep reporting to management on the changes you make, actions you take based on customer feedback. The other way around, it's equally important that management stays involved and keeps supporting the programme.
Challenge: People tend to focus on scores when they collect customer feedback. It's easy to track and it's easy to measure. But a score as such doesn't tell you much, does it? Let's say your NPS is 55. That's great, but what does it mean? Is it because of your products, or excellent service? In other words: how do you move past scores to insights?
Key take-away: If you want to get real value out of your CX programme it's vital to get to the why behind the scores. Want to know what customers expect from your company? Just ask! This gives you the opportunity to determine if there's a gap between customer experience and customer expectation. Once you've managed to detect this gap, you can use feedback to prioritize issues and fixes. In a next step, you can operationalize your programme and use it to steer employee behaviour based on customer feedback.
Challenge: Customers expect to be serviced online and offline. They might buy something in your store, but contact customer service through chat. The boundaries between these different channels are blurring. You book a plane ticket via a website, but when your flight gets delayed you might contact the company through WhatsApp. How can you keep up?
Key take-away: Customers expect the same level of quality and professionality, whether that's online or offline. Digitisation isn't only a challenge for your customers - it offers a whole variety of channels through which they can contact a company - it's one for your employees too. They need the mental and physical space to evolve and adapt to meet customers' expectations. This is why it's crucial to make everyone part of the CX programme. Put your customers first, but don't forget your employees along the way.
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