Why is your customer experience still suffering?

A recent research report revealed that only a handful of businesses can establish financial results through their CX programs.

The ‘State of CX’ survey, run by Confirmit and Engage Business Media, revealed that despite increasing recognition of the importance of a customer-centric approach to business and investment in CX programs, ROI is the biggest area of failure with only 20% of companies scoring 9 – 10 for seeing an ROI, and 14% scoring 0-2.

The study also showed many businesses could provide anecdotal evidence or use key metrics to measure CX program success, but very few were able to link the CX program with financial results.

To do so, data integration and stakeholder buy-ins are critical.

Integrating your customer feedback with your businesses financial or operational data is critical because 1. It quickly identifies business critical correlations that can be followed up with and 2. It makes CEO’s sit up, listen and act. Without showing how customer feedback affects your company’s financial performance, you will never get investment from the organisation.

Furthermore, without the ability to demonstrate ROI, it is much harder to set the right goals for the business and secure the desired improvements and culture change. Driving the right actions means the ability to clearly calculate the ways in which your customers, your operations, and your financial performance are all connected to make business decisions with the highest returns.

The link between data integration and low ROI performance pinpointed by the research highlights the very real need to not only better integrate financial, operational and customer data, but also to break down the silos of data lying stagnant in many businesses. These could be brought together in a more meaningful way to create a holistic view of the customer and encourage CX innovation.

There’s also a large element here of CEO’s personally owning or directly advocating the Customer Experience strategy. There’s many facts and figures out there that show the benefits of adopting a strong CX strategy, but to get exec buy-in, you really need to connect your feedback to real time monetary values.

Our recent paper explains what the CEO’s role is in the CX strategy.

Other key findings of the research include:

Businesses integrating data from four sources scored a 31% higher ROI than those collecting from only one source

88% of respondents are capturing feedback from customers but only 25% are including feedback from suppliers or partners

Just over 50% are collecting employee engagement feedback, but as a one-off annual employee engagement activity, rather than as a continual listening program, and

30% of respondents said that key stakeholders were truly invested in the goals of the program.

Once you begin to integrate your data and gain the understanding of other executives, only then can you apply real decisions that will result in delivering winning customer experiences.