How to Achieve a Paced Customer Experience Transformation Strategy

If you know your business needs a customer experience (CX) transformation but you’re concerned about the resources and time required to impact change, rest assured – it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

While many businesses have innovated and evolved through big, company-wide change or strategic home runs, not all organizations have the ability to implement entire CX transformation overhauls. Some companies need to start small and start today.

In today’s constantly changing market, there’s a lot to be said for the payoff of a nimble, agile strategy that can make small course corrections to adjust to shifting customer expectations. Starting small isn’t only more cost-effective and accessible, it also allows you to be more flexible right off the bat.

By implementing a paced customer experience transformation strategy, you can take immediate steps, however small, to meet your customers’ needs and start planning for the future.

What Is a Paced Customer Experience Transformation Strategy and Why Do You Need One?

A paced strategy is a plan for implementing small changes that eventually contribute to a major customer experience transformation.

It’s commonplace for organizations to look at the gap between where they are and where they want to be and become paralyzed by the distance they need to cross. Sometimes, it’s easier to talk about what needs to be done, than it is to actually do it. Analysis paralysis.

Anytime you embark on a strategic planning initiative, regardless of your focus but especially when it comes to your customer experience, it can be tempting to stay in strategic mode for months or even years. If you never start, you can’t fail, so businesses often spin their wheels fixating on every last detail of their end-to-end CX strategy.

Of course, this isn’t to say planning isn’t important. You should absolutely start with a clear strategy laid out in a detailed roadmap, but you have to move into orchestration at some point if you hope to make progress. And there’s no amount of planning that will guarantee your safety against failure, either, but the small failures and wins are part of the trial and error required to build a holistic plan for success.

This is where the paced transformation comes in. Making small, bite-sized changes and assessing them according to your predetermined success metrics will help you understand which steps are making a meaningful impact and which need further adjustment.

Take action, measure the results, and repeat – that’s our recipe for a successful paced transformation.

Where to Start

So, what areas should you tackle first, to make an immediate impact on your customer experience? There are hundreds of CX improvements you could focus on, but to avoid getting bogged down in analysis paralysis, we recommend choosing one or two of the below as a starting point:

• Customer journey mapping
• Friction points
• Channel integration
• Employee experience
• Brand reliability
• Marketing automation
• Voice of the Customer programs

Things to Keep in Mind

Brand loyalty

If you haven’t been measuring your brand loyalty, the time to start is now. As you make changes to various elements of your strategy, look for corresponding boosts in customer satisfaction. Are your sales or customer numbers increasing? Is your average purchase price or frequency going up? How has the change affected your NPS?

Data gathering and analysis

Data is essential to understanding whether your changes to your CX operating model are working, but it’s also great for helping you make those changes in the first place. For example, segmented customer data can give you the insights you need to send targeted messages to particular demographics.

Make sure that throughout the process you continue to gather data, glean insights, and act on those insights. If you're getting great results on two out of four things you're trying, then double down on the two that are working and stop doing the other two.

Success metrics

The key to taking a phased approach is to rigorously measure each and every method you implement and assess the results according to predetermined metrics. Make sure your success metrics are consistent throughout the process, so you can compare apples to apples during the assessment phase. This should be part of your roadmap, which includes logistics, timeline, and success metrics. Customer experience transformation is crucial to the success of any business, but it doesn’t have to happen all at once. It’s a journey, and the destination is the same no matter how you get there.

If you’re thinking about implementing a paced CX transformation in your organization, Avtex can provide the resources and guidance you need. Our consultants have helped hundreds of companies deliver meaningful, impactful customer experiences through manageable, bite-sized steps. Reach out today to learn more.