Are You Proud of Your Customer Experience?

Most top executives are not! According to a Harvard Business Review Analytic Services study with in-depth interviews, completed recently, with 680 top performing executives, there is a lot to be desired. Only 15 percent of the executives thought their customer experience was very effective. I'm sure the effective ones were basing their opinion on internal organization created surveys. This is disturbing in an era where the catch phrase is "A Customer for Life". The reality of the situation does not stack up to the desires. The study found there were three key success factors for the customer experience transformation necessary to keep customers. They were a customer centric culture, management/leadership buy in and getting real visibility into the actual customer experience.

Customer Centric Culture:

While 90 percent of the executives thought that a customer centric culture was important, only 45 percent thought they were effective. If you talk with the employees, I think you mind find the 45 percent number inflated. The accountants and the lawyers are chipping away at cost and governance creating a stiff head wind to traverse to the destination of an effective customer experience. It starts with the organizational charter and gets magnified by the CEO and executive team. Words are often there, but they get diluted by the time it reaches the actual customer experience. Often the customer service representatives are the shock absorbers between poor customer journeys supported by tired process and systems and the actual customer. They are the heros here.

Management/Leadership Buy In:

A goodly number of executives, 88 percent, thought leadership buy in was key, but only 49 percent thought they were effective. It's because nobody really measures it and gets rewards based on real customer satisfaction. Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are not the real measures in a stand alone way. There are other measures to track and reward. Of, course all executives want customer satisfaction, but is becomes lip service under fire. If it was important, it would be a bonus/reward factor for everyone.

Visibility and Real Understanding:

This is where the survey hit the skids. While 87 percent said that visibility was important, only 35 percent they were effective at visibility. Three-quarters of the companies were not able to act on the majority of data they collect because of disjoint systems and artificial stove pipes. Only 13 percent had a single source of customer intelligence though 30 percent were pursuing it. Only 23 percent of the managers were free to act on the data they collected. I would also guess few performed customer journey analysis in this mix.

Net; Net:

Customer experience is a crucial step in the digital transformation that can't be skipped or band-aided for long. If executives were serious the customer journey mapping and mining technology vendors would be over loaded with new business. It is not the case yet.  It's time to leverage some profits to help us walk the talk with better customer experiences. In all the companies I do business with, not one is even close to a good experience, much less a great and engaging one. In the mean time we all make due as customers.

Additional Reading:

Future Proof CX
Journey Listening
Existing Process Problems
Customer Journeys and Organizational Silos
Journey Mapping for All
Journey Mapping Case Study