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Customer experience is a team sport, and an approach that focuses on the customer journey is what separates the contenders from the pretenders.
Any time a sporting champion is crowned – whether in football, basketball or another sport – it leaves several good, even great, teams missing out on glory because they failed to execute at a high enough level.
That includes the “best team on paper” you always see. You know the one – sky-high expectations and investment. Big-name talent. Great coaching. And then a mediocre record and a disappointing season.
When it comes to customer experience (CX), so many consumer brands feel like that team. They should be winning in CX. But they’re the bank that’s struggling to cross-sell to existing customers, or the retailer that needs more customers to act on digital offers. Their digital engagement program isn’t driving results, but it’s not for a lack of effort.
What’s holding back your customer experience?
Let’s start with the fact that most brands are spending more to improve experiences. According to a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of CSG in September 2022, the majority of decision-makers report their organisations have increased CX budgets (62 per cent), indicating the issue is not about the lack of funds, but rather confusion about how to effectively leverage and invest in them.
More brands are also implementing tools to improve CX: 60 per cent of respondents said their organisations have invested in customer engagement solutions in response to changes in customer expectations and behaviours.
If your organisation is underperforming on digital experience despite these investments, you’re not alone. Here’s what might be holding you back from bringing your vision of data-driven CX to life – and how to fix it.
Your digital channels lack chemistry
Even 53 per cent of respondents using a customer engagement solution, according to the Forrester Consulting study, found it very or extremely challenging to keep customer experiences consistent across multiple platforms, channels and lines of business. Brands may have high-performing individual channels, but unless those channels talk to each other, they’ll still dole out negative experiences. Think of a customer who gets blitzed by SMS, email and mobile push notifications for coupons when they only historically redeem them through email.
Improvement means breaking down your data silos and connecting your engagement channels. You need the ability to maintain a single, comprehensive data profile of each customer that updates in real time. You can then respond to that customer in a consistent manner with timely and relevant messages, even when they switch channels. Integrating your engagement solutions and data sources to this degree is normally a long, costly process. But a customer engagement platform with preconfigured integrations can be like a training camp to sync up your systems.
You can’t properly measure success
Can you imagine a team trying to improve on scoring without deciding which stats to prioritise? They wouldn’t know why they kept failing, let alone what adjustments to make. The business metrics that brands need for proving the ROI of CX initiatives are less obvious, but just as essential. If a promotion seems like it’s not working, how do you determine that? If it’s failing to reduce churn? If conversions are down?
For every single customer journey, you should decide on at least one metric that measures its success or failure. It should also be concrete so you can confidently tell both whether the journey is meeting business goals and what to adjust it if it’s not.
You lack an effective game plan
When it comes to orchestrating customer journeys, many brands are trying to draw up their own plays from scratch. Their customer engagement solutions offer precious little guidance on what works, never mind what works for journeys specific to their industry. This leaves brands to conduct costly, time-consuming trial and error to figure out how to map even the most basic journey frameworks effectively.
Seek a customer engagement solution that comes with industry-specific journey maps. Instead of having to draw up the routes and coverages of customer interactions yourself, you can launch the prebuilt journeys quickly with minimal IT effort, and adjust them from there.
You can’t adapt your game plan
A solid strategy won’t do much good unless you can also improvise. When competitors make moves or customer behaviours evolve, can you tweak your customer engagement solution to keep producing better results? Too many brands work with static journey maps that are difficult to adjust on the fly, which is like having players who can’t read formations, let alone switch tactics in real time to exploit them.
Employ customer journey analytics that gather insights to inform your journey adjustments. Make sure, too, that your customer journey orchestration solution lets you apply those insights with minimal time and effort.
2023 will be your year
The toughest part of being a great CX brand on paper is the board-level pressure for getting results. In 2023, that pressure will only increase as we all face continued economic headwinds, and CX initiatives must be tied more convincingly to ROI.
Fortunately, with the right customer engagement solution, you can address those ROI challenges while launching game-changing customer journeys in weeks, not months or years. This year, you’re going to bring in the missing pieces of your CX strategy to drive revenue and customer loyalty on a whole new level.
Learn how CSG Xponent Ignite is helping brands get a running start on data-driven, loyalty-winning customer journeys.
Originally published on Business Reporter
