Avoiding Poor Customer Experiences: Selling Your SLT on a CX Strategy

The Avtex Digital Roundtable on The Cost of Bad Customer Experience explored the primary indicators of poor CX and the impact they can have on your business. The panel included Kurt Schroeder, Avtex Chief Experience Officer, and Dan Gingiss, a customer experience keynote speaker, consultant, author, and podcaster. Kurt and Dan examined where the CX focus of brands should be, what to do with a problem once you find it and why you should never make assumptions about the impact of your CX. Kurt and Dan also discussed the intricacies of a brand's relationship with CX and why your customers' input is vital to the success of your CX strategy.

Within this blog, we’ve highlighted some key takeaways from Kurt and Dan’s conversation – view the full webinar to learn more.

Organizational change often starts with one individual having an idea or discovery that reveals a potentially better process. Unfortunately, sweeping change isn’t easy or swift. The initial barrier to large-scale change can be buy-in; getting the right people – especially the relevant Senior Leadership Team members – to embrace and support the change effort is critical to success.

Changes in Customer Experience strategy, oversight and delivery are no exception. Selling your leadership team on the need for a holistic CX strategy can be difficult, especially when overhauling an organization’s CX can cause disruption, cost money and impact customers. The effort is worth it, however, as improved CX can lead to stronger customer relationships and improved brand reputation – not to mention increased revenue.

When attempting to obtain SLT buy-in for sweeping CX changes, remember these key factors.

Data is Crucial to a Sound Argument

Data can help you clearly demonstrate the inadequacy of your current CX efforts, as well as the potential return on investment of effective CX transformation. Your SLT will likely want to know how your current CX is impacting your business, as well as the potential costs and ROI of your proposed changes.

When gathering data to support your proposed changes, remember to be thorough. Gather as much data as you can, from as many different sources as possible. Assemble that data into easy-to-understand reports and visuals. Creating a Return on Investment Hypothesis will clarify the pitch you are making. Showing how your current CX costs your business and how the changes you are identifying will alter that cost will strengthen your overall message. Indicating the hard numbers that an SLT will need to engage with to make this decision equips them with all the factors they will need to evaluate the path forward.

Effectively demonstrating the need for change will certainly sway your SLT to your thinking.

Identify Roles and Responsibilities

CX transformation will likely require the involvement of every member of your organization. In order to establish a plan of action, it’s important to determine who will be integral in the process of improving your CX and how that process will impact employees’ daily lives. Share this information with your SLT.

Individuals most likely to play an active role in CX transformation include:

• Front-line employees: Everyone in your company contributes to the experiences your customers have every day. For your customers to truly have better experiences with your brand, your front-line employees must be following the new processes consistently and have bought into creating better CX.
• Your management team: Your management team will play a key leadership role across your business as they engage with these new strategies for providing better experiences. Their role in helping their teams impact customers positively may mean the difference between good and exceptional experiences.
• Your SLT: For genuine and effective change, it's important to have executive buy-in from the start. Your SLT will ensure that across all business units, new processes are put in place for your CX strategy and that all members of the organization embrace the transformation.
• A Chief Experience Officer: It may also be worth considering installing a CXO that is fully responsible for the experiences your customers are having with your business. This is a person whose entire job is to look from a birds-eye view at every piece of the experiences you are creating and looking for improvements. This moves the effort from 5 percent of everyone’s job to 100 percent of one person's job, dramatically changing the focus and impact of your CX.

Learn more about The Cost of Bad Customer Experience by viewing the on-demand version of the Avtex Digital Roundtable with Kurt Schroeder and Dan Gingiss.

For more information about what it means to be a CXO, and the importance of having one in your own business read Kurt Schroeder’s recent interview with Forbes.