Many frameworks exist to help CX practitioners measure the impact of their work, but doing so still presents problems. In fact, when CX Network researched the Global State of CX this year, 63 percent of practitioner respondents said CX delivers benefits to their organizations that go unmeasured. Ours is not the only research to back this. Kantar found a mere one in eight say their work impacts overall business performance.
In July, Bain & Company, Kantar and Qualtrics unveiled a solution to this age-old problem; a way for CX leaders to measure and communicate the value of their work, and of the CX function. Their Global Standards for Customer Experience Teams comprise more than 50 standards grouped over seven pillars, and cover everything related to CXM and what a CX program should look like to be successful.
This is not a tick box exercise: rather than giving practitioners another administrative task, they are auditable common standards. They’re also intended to help redefine what CX is, and what its mission is in the business.
However, the standards are not set in stone – until August 31, practitioners and others leaders across business are invited to have their say as part of a consultation process, which you can get involved in here.
CX Network caught up with Stan Swinton, EVP for Bain & Company and Rob Huijboom, global head of CX at Kantar to find out why they collaborated and how the resulting standards solve CX’s biggest challenge.
CX Network: Your introduction to the new standards states the current lack of clear standards has “led to misconceptions about the role of CX and made it challenging for practitioners to make a significant impact with their brands and customers”. What are some of those misconceptions and what is the true role of CX?
Stanford Swinton: As I was coming back into Bain I talked to a number of the clients I had worked with over the years, but I didn't see the impact that I was hoping to see in a lot of CX functions. I think a lot of it did come down to the definition of what customer experience is.
I think what the CX function does has been misconstrued as understanding how customers feel about a business, which means by application a lot of it is related to customer insights. You might have a customer experience design hub or some sort of journey center of excellence within CX, and we just felt like they got it all wrong.
If you go back to the early days of NPS, why was NPS the prioritized metric? Because it is a proxy for growth, and customer experience should be and is the steward of growth in the organization.
When you define it as the steward of growth, there are a number of different disciplines that are required to be effective in that function that are not prioritized for investment or resourcing today, and this is the heart of the problem statement. Ultimately it is the thing that gave rise to the standards; the need to redefine what CX is and what its mission is in the business. It's not ‘get us another five points of CSAT or NPS’.
Rob Huijboom: That’s how we came together - to tackle the misconception of the power of CX.
CX is the biggest and most important caretaker of growth. Kantar is a brand business. Often, brand and CX people do not understand each other very well, and we started to investigate with the team how we could re-position Kantar within the CX world.
We did a lot of research, including a lot of internal research, and we built off the back of our BrandZ research on brand equity, which we have conducted more than a decade with more than 21,000 brands. What that told us is that customer experience is driving brand growth.
We are seeing the same thing as Stan and we have the evidence that experience as whole is driving 75 percent of business growth. Customer experience is a large part of that, and paid media is around 25 percent.
In future, we want to talk to CMOs and get them invested in the customer experience.
It is a new approach and we know from experience that brand people and customer experience people don't immediately understand each other, but let us help you!
CX Network: You have jointly devised standards that cover customer centric culture, customer experience capability and customer experience execution. Explain how they work and how the standards can help CX practitioners in their work?
Stanford Swinton: Three themes arose from the research, which involved going out and looking at a number of different customer experience functions, what was going right or wrong and interviewing a lot of clients. We found the brands that were delivering outsized impacts were able to shift their position in relative perception.
They were able to grow not just their business, but their NPS targets and other things over years, and they felt themselves like they were having business impact.
That one-in-eight leader who was able to deliver business impact, had three common elements in their CX programs: a focus on delivering exceptional customer-obsessed culture, having the right capabilities in place to truly understand and prioritize their investments in customer experience, and then having a very strong ability to go execute against those priorities.
There's a different archetype for each of those in terms of failure. The companies that were not doing it well, many of them were spending and had capability nailed.
Many of them fell in this category, spending hundreds of thousands or millions on great SaaS platforms and vendors, collecting millions of data points and surveys and still being out-competed by others in their industry; unable to move the needle on the scores, the sentiment or lifetime value, or even associate it back to lifetime value.
It's a very common failure type to invest a lot in capability and forget the bookends of culture and execution. Likewise, we saw the other two scenarios, where you have a strong culture and an ethos of execution, but leadership wasn't committed or the employees were not being brought on the journey; it wasn't a mission of transformation. Or again, you've done all the tee-up, but there's no follow-through, and so the experience wasn't changing or meeting customer expectations through execution.
That last pillar, lifecycle management, is a great example of this. Most companies are not deliberately scripting and designing the ways they engage with individual customers throughout the lifecycle, in a way that is orchestrated across the lifecycle, end-to-end. That has a really detrimental impact on the way that you manage that customer relationship.
CX Network: When we researched the Global State of CX in 2024, we found practitioners are struggling with competing priorities and proving the value of CX to the wider organization. In fact, 63 percent said CX delivers benefits to their organizations that go unmeasured. How can the CX standard help practitioners to overcome challenges like this and better measure the value of their work?
Rob Huijboom: It's pretty simple because we have the evidence and metrics now to do that. Driving value with CX is going through brand growth and market share. That is something that we measure every day for about 20,000 brands.
If we, together with a client, make interventions in what they do in the customer experience blueprint, we can actually also see where they are missing opportunities and bring that to the table. It becomes a completely different discussion.
We are no longer talking only about existing customers. We have stretched the universe to the full market, and we use customer experience as a driver of predisposition, which then drives brand growth. We can measure that. That's where the value is!
Of course, every model like NPS and many others are looking at existing customers too and driving retention and share of wallet. We're not forgetting about that.
But the exciting part is that we're driving new customers to the brand through excellent customer experience. That is where we see the value at the moment, and that is our value pitch to the market.
CX Network: What feedback have you had from practitioners on how the framework works in practice?
Stanford Swinton: There's a lot of nervousness from practitioners around this. They assume it’s still all about surveys, but the reality is the messaging is quite disruptive. It has been interesting over the last 18 months to start to socialize these messages.
At first, I got a lot of defensiveness, but a couple of months later, people's eyes were starting to open up because they were experimenting in their own companies with generative AI and machine learning algorithms and they were starting to understand prediction.
Now they are curious about that, I get clients just asking me how to get on and do it. The openness is coming, but it has taken time for people to accept the world is changing.
Maybe actually the skills we require in customer experience today are very different than what we used to need.
CX Network: What are some of the emerging skills you see the need for practitioners to have?
Stanford Swinton: Much more comfort with numeracy.
Quantitative data with financials, business financials, definitely an understanding of how to use big data and technology to derive insights. The ability to work with product and engineering teams is also critical.
Contrast that to what we used to have, it was frontline customer service, market research, background, qualitative focused. I think that's going to be one of the big shifts here.
CX Network: In conclusion, how can CX leaders take charge when communicating the value of their work?
Stanford Swinton: We as CX practitioners and leaders need to take responsibility for the fact that business leaders do not believe we are delivering value today. The standards are the starting point for that conversation, because they are an auditable common standard across the industry. Kantar’s research found a mere one in eight leaders can show their work impacts overall business performance.
If you looked at any other function in a business and said that was true, the CTO, the CFO, the CPO would lose their jobs. We have to hold ourselves to a higher standard and this is where we start. It looks like CX is a bit of a hobby now. Let's make it a profession and start doing this right.
That at least is my dream. Let's hope people take the lead and join the conversation!