It’s time to make your list and check it twice. Not the items needed for the office party or gifts to give, but rather your customer experience (CX) wish list for 2023 and beyond. Like any good wish list, it needs the right balance of dreaming big while remaining practical.
Making CX Merry & Right
Most CX leaders want to deliver convenient, easy customer interactions, yet many are struggling to meet that promise. Executives have been working hard, creating PowerPoint presentations and holding countless meetings to decide where to start. They have mapped journeys on Post-Its and spent big bucks on new tools that only added more complexity.
Investments of time, effort and money aren’t producing sufficient improvements. According to a study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of CSG, most of the 480+ CX leaders surveyed (58%) said their organizations are currently spending at least $2.5 million on CX initiatives and strategies. Yet 30% report that “investment in CX tools has been unsuccessful in the past.” CX is and will continue to be a board-level issue with many organizations and C-suite decision-makers backing initiatives with expanded budgets and resources. There is more pressure than ever to deliver significant ROI results.
It’s time to do away with endless conversations, generic tools and “we can do this in-house” mantras.
It’s time for well-thought-out strategies rooted in industry expertise and backed by real ROI. These require aligning your wish list with the broader CX goals of the organization.
Move From Coal-Oriented to Goal-Oriented
It’s easy to get hung up on negative reviews or low email open rates, but don’t let it define what makes a successful or easy experience for customers. In order to determine organizational objectives, think holistically about how exceptional CX permeates all aspects of the business.
In the Forrester study, CX leaders identified their organizations’ greatest priorities for 2023. The top four initiatives included:
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- Maximizing profits related to CX (78%)
- Increasing customer satisfaction (75%)
- Initiating an enterprise-wide CX strategy (71%)
- Improving the omnichannel customer experience (69%)
If these goals seem familiar, then your CX wish list should include a partnership with a CX expert; an industry-specific, off-the-shelf CX tool; and a library of customer journey best practices. These three core assets will help turn CX from buzzword into your business advantage.
Sleigh Your Customer’s Experiences with Three CX Must-Haves
1. A consultative partner who is a CX expert
More than half (57%) of CX leaders said they need access to advisors and consultants who are experts at CX delivery to help them improve customer journeys. The ideal partner is more than a technology vendor who tells you how to use their software. Advisors should help develop CX strategy, identify relevant journeys in focus, and implement new solutions that integrate with your existing tech stack.
2. An off-the-shelf CX tool purpose-built for your industry
Generic CX tools have limited capabilities. You can use a CRM to track customer interactions and provide insights based on past behaviors, but CRMs don’t employ decisioning to activate those insights in real time. Similarly, a voice of customer (VoC) tool may send a survey, but it fails to trigger a relevant real-time response to correct a customer’s experience. Especially as the economy at large continues to face digital disruption, not all industries are created equal and therefore, require similar but varied approaches to enhancing CX.
Industry-specific CX tools include journeys to proactively address complex industry-specific touchpoints:
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- Telecommunications: Outage notifications; new service installation and activation
- Retail: Buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS); targeted offers; customer surveys
- Healthcare: Ambulance location updates; payment installment negotiations; test result notifications
- Financial Services: Missing card status updates; account benefit offers; new bank account onboarding
3. A library of customer journey best practices
You can learn a lot by observing top companies like Amazon, Apple, Netflix, One Medical, and American Express. By studying a playbook of CX best practices, you eliminate the guesswork on what it takes to master the most important experiences across your organization. When you adopt tried-and-true strategies, it doesn’t take years to see the results come to fruition.
Leave a Fa-La-La-La-Lasting Impression on the Board
Turning your CX wish list into an approved strategy requires a solid business case to back up your recommendations. To do this, leverage value engineering tools to quantify the impact to your organization. Include qualitative and quantitative analyses to understand which enhancements are feasible, zero in on a specific customer journey, and project relevant KPI outcomes.
If this seems daunting, reach out to CSG’s customer engagement experts. We’ll help you assess your organization’s CX maturity via an interactive workshop to help you build a business case for change and roadmap to ROI success. In fact, this is just a small piece of our much larger end-to-end customer journey management solution we call CSG Xponent Ignite.
Contact the team today to learn how CSG Xponent Ignite delivers extraordinary customer experiences (the gift that keeps on giving)!
