Good CX Involves Good Relationships with Customers and CoworkersGood CX Involves Good Relationships with Customers and Coworkers

Over the last six months, No Jitter has tracked multiple reports pointing to a disconnect between the business and customer perception of the customer service experience that is delivered – businesses say they’re doing great, consumers disagree. And while this disconnect is typically tied to businesses investing in AI-powered bots to automate service/support while consumers prefer speaking with people, last week noted Forrester’s CX Index report which found an ongoing decline in overall customer experience (CX) scores.

Importantly, the customer service experience is only one touch point – albeit a critical one – in the overall experience a customer has with a brand. According to Isabelle Zdatny, Head of Thought Leadership at Qualtrics XM Institute, “if you just focus customer experience in the customer service department, you miss all those opportunities to identify and prevent issues at their source and then coordinate those improvements across the rest of the organization to drive meaningful business outcomes and often increase revenue, not just decrease cost.

No Jitter (NJ): How do you define customer experience? It seems like the term is often conflated with customer service?

Isabelle Zdatny (Zdatny): We see customer experience as the discipline of systematically understanding and optimizing the experience customers have with your organization, helping build lasting relationships and driving business outcomes. It's not an isolated set of improvement projects or a laundry list of tasks you can check off and be done with.

Related:Workforce Engagement Tools Can Boost Agent Experience

If an organization is going to systematically understand and improve people's experiences, it needs to build an enterprise-wide set of shared standards and processes and continuous improvement mechanisms which I think need to be coordinated by a central CX team or a CX Center of Excellence.

NJ: How does an organization go from not being as CX centric as they'd like, to one that's focused on it?

Zdatny: It depends where you’re starting, how much executive support you have, and what other transformations are happening across the organization.

If I was advising companies starting from scratch, [they should first] do an inventory of where they have existing customer insights across the organization. They’ll probably have many different relevant behavioral and operational data living in different systems, so [they need to] figure out what data already exists across the organization and which teams own it. That will help them identify existing data silos or gaps in their current understanding.

Related:The PBX is Back, Baby (It Actually Never Left)

I would then secure executive sponsorship by connecting CX explicitly to the business outcomes that executives care about. The goal often isn't just to make customers happier, it's to drive business results. For example, if your data inventory finds a drop off in satisfaction between digital customer support and moving into the contact center, you can [then] put together a compelling business case about how digital experience improvements can improve call volumes or wait times – those are things executives care about.

Then I’d work with that executive sponsor to identify two or three of those opportunities and prioritize those areas where you have partners across the organization that get it. That way you’re not wasting time early on trying to convince people that improving customer experiences is inherently a good idea. Find people who are willing to share data with you and do a few interventions, ideally with a control group and treatment group, to see how business outcomes improve.

NJ: Any insight on what approaches might work best in breaking down those internal barriers or convincing people that CX is worth pursuing?

Zdatny: Whenever I talk to CX people, they say, ‘yeah, the theory is great, but then I have to convince [other departments] to share their data.’

Related:How To Integrate Microsoft Teams Phone and the Contact Center

Stakeholder management is real and gets to the soft skills that a CX team really needs to have, especially as things like the data and insights, I suspect, get more automated. For example, [much] of the [voice of the customer] work will probably go away to some extent, whereas the interpersonal stakeholder management skills will become increasingly important for CX professionals.

I think CX professionals have to start with what people are trying to achieve and how having a continuous flow of customer insights [along with] the skills and training will help them take more meaningful action on those insights – and make faster, smarter decisions.

NJ: Beyond drumming up internal support, what are some of the other challenges CX teams face?

Zdatny: Two of the biggest challenges I see CX professionals wrestle with are competing business priorities and technology integration. [On the latter point], let’s say you own a CX platform with lots of experience data in it and you want to bring in some operational or behavioral data that lives in the point of sale or contact center system. Start by identifying the use cases. Are you trying to build predictive models, personalized experiences or ROI modeling? Then, focus on the data you need to help you do that. And again, you need to partner with those teams to share that data.