Customer experience (CX) initiatives have always been seen as a separate investment to other business activities, or worse, an additional cost with returns that need to be proven to the business for it to be embedded in it.
There are multiple of articles and research companies who speak as if businesses can continue without CX investment or integration in these challenging times. Well, I am here to challenge that mindset.
Challenge the whole industry and market? Yes! I also hear you asking if I will come up with something innovative, radical or disruptive that is going to revolutionise CX. No, but hopefully I will change your perspective about CX.
Accidental or intentional CX
Every business provides a customer experience on some level, through serving customers with products and services and providing a journey throughout that engagement.
Therefore, if this is the case, does this not mean that CX is already embedded within your business? Accidental CX, if you will, is not separate to what you are currently delivering via your end-to-end business processes and customer engagement.
If the above is true, then why is CX seen as a separate entity? You either learn to improve what you are already doing – which in turn will further improve your ROI and bottom line – or continue as you are and in time you will be superseded by your competitors that do improve over time. This is intentional CX.
Let’s look at a few business functions where intentional CX operationally improves the key areas of your business:
- Data
- Technology
- Services/products
- Single channel or omnichannel
- Employees
- After sales service channels
- Back-end and front-end policies and processes
- Customers framework and customer duty
- Complaints, continuous improvement
- Regulatory and risk strategy
A better approach to embedding your CX strategy across the business helps improve every end-to-end process as well as every touchpoint that supports customer engagement. Not only that, but it helps to clearly define a vision and goal on how you create value in your customer’s life.
RELATED CONTENT: How to get started with the UK's Consumer Duty
Securing leadership buy-in
This perception can only be changed if it starts from the leadership to the rest of the business. Culture and a customer first mind-set are the drivers of everything CX.
Therefore, you either do what you have always done or understand that if you do not improve, even taking smaller steps, you will eventually be left behind.
In the UK a new consumer duty comes into force in 2023 which has seen many companies revisit their claims of being customer focused and actually put it into action. This is not just for CX professionals, the entire business needs to be onboard and it presents unprecedented opportunities for CX practitioners to collaborate beyond their silos. Everyone from product and sales team, customer service teams and journey designers, to marketing, web and mobile engagement, data, research, insight, processes and technology.
If what you offer your customers as a business is not beneficial to them, then you are failing in being customer centric. Hence, it is imperative it is to invest in your intentional CX in order to succeed.
I hope I have managed to change your perception that CX is already part of your daily business.
Identifying where you need improve requires investment in people, process, and technology. It must be driven by what your customer journey needs based on what your customers perceive to be “valuable”. And that is just the start.
Muss Haq talks more about this topic during CXN Live: Voice of the Customer 2023. Watch the session on demand via our Replay library.