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The Challenges to Customer Experience | Xpedition

Many businesses are hampered by customer experience challenges. From a lack of alignment on measurement to insufficient technology infrastructure, identifying and addressing these challenges will help your business drive serious improvements on CX.

Ownership and understanding

While most businesses implicitly understand the value of improving CX – and the internal systems and processes that underpin it – taking on the responsibility to own delivery can be overwhelming. Other priorities can feel more pressing and manageable, while our own experience indicates that tackling the first step of a transformation project remains one of the biggest hurdles. Before investment, it’s easier for businesses to find reasons to postpone action on CX.

Between 2017 and 2020, the amount of organisations with a CXO or equivalent increased from 65% to 90%.

Gartner

But can you afford to risk it?

Deferring these decisions is at best a short-term option. As your competitors build new CX capabilities, their capacity to disrupt your customer operations, create more customer experience challenges and limit your market share will grow. Eventually you will need to respond anyway, and without early investment in CX transformation you’ll be playing catch up rather than leading the way. The sooner you decide to transform your CX, the greater the potential rewards will be.

Resistance to cultural change can also be a significant roadblock. Transformation requires new skills internally, plus new external relationships to realise value, which is a step some businesses struggle to accommodate into existing plans. Without clear ownership, departments can lack a shared understanding of what CX is – and of how CX strategy should be defined. This leads to misalignment of responsibilities which can hamper progress.

Defining who should take ownership of your CX transformation raises complex and difficult questions:

Clearly defining project leadership and teams can help to ensure board advocacy and progression of your transformation objectives. But working with an external strategic partner who can advise your IT teams on best practice is equally important.

Focus

When commencing a transformation project, businesses may designate broad, generic aims which aren’t tightly matched either to their strategic goals or with existing systems. Many also struggle to show how the project will deliver trackable ROI over time. Focus is needed in both these areas, to help build consensus around the value of CX investment, as well as to ensure that a project will progress according to a reasonable schedule.   

One of the biggest tasks we help our clients to navigate ahead of transformation is to interpret a coherent picture of how value will be produced. This helps to ensure realistic timelines – and helps leaders to track progress against predefined milestones to support regular reporting to assuage anxieties about attaining firm ROI.

Legacy systems

You can’t redesign your CX – particularly when it comes to digital journeys – without investment. Modern CX uses customer data to map preferences and behaviours, supported by AI and automation which deliver faster, smoother and more efficient processes. These technologies are essential to reduce costs and address your customers’ needs better to contribute to growth.

But not every business is set up for intelligent back-office processes and operations right now. Legacy platforms and traditional data centres still dominate in many businesses, partly because they’re so hard to shift. It feels like a long process to integrate new platforms, and wariness about downtime can make it difficult to build consensus at board level.

Businesses need to build the momentum to move critical infrastructure onto the cloud, and create a reliable, trusted foundation of clean data to support future technological investments. The building blocks of better data and insight will help to quickly show the value of AI and automation, increasing alignment and reinforcing the business case for further CX development.

Measurement and insight

Any transformation project should be able to prove its value to internal stakeholders and budget owners. You want to see a good return of investment – so you need to be able to measure value accurately and effectively over time. Organisations often struggle to set the right metrics to do this however. Linking your customer and revenue data together takes a concerted effort and reporting framework, which itself requires specific expertise.

Even if you know what you’re looking for, unless you have the right insight in the first place you can’t match your efforts accurately to the rewards of growth and revenue. Bringing in the right support and partners is key if you want to take full advantage of the data you have at your disposal and make decisions based on real insight.

[2] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/what-matters-in-customer-experience-cx-transformations [3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-02-10-gartner-says-nearly-90–of-organizations-now-have-a-c