Friction within your Customer Experience is your Company’s kryptonite. You could have the best marketing campaigns in the world, but if customers can’t get a product question answered when making a buying decision, or they are bombarded by messaging they don’t care about, or they experience lengthy hold times, or there are tech issues on your website, or the product you’re marketing is unavailable, or the product ordered is delayed, or any other snag customers encounter interacting with your brand, they will turn their attention—and their dollars—elsewhere. This is the Cx Friction you need to eliminate to ensure a smooth and seamless experience for your customers that garners repeat business and brand loyalty.

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Enterprise Customer Experience (Cx) is the comprehensive and holistic result of company efforts impacting every aspect of a customer's perception, emotions, and relationships with a company, its products, services, and brand, throughout their entire lifecycle. Delivering world-class Cx is as much about actively eliminating friction (sub-optimal to downright unpleasant customer interactions) as it is about building bespoke customer-facing elements that elevate the customer interaction and build loyalty.  To eliminate friction in Cx, company resources must not only have an enterprise view of Cx to see where friction exists, but also have the capabilities to act holistically. 

 

In short, Cx is Holistic, Frictionless and Customer-First:

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• Holistic.  Cx is the complete impact of a company on each customer's perception, emotions, behaviors, relationships and purchasing behavior across all products, services, and brands, throughout their entire lifecycle.

• Frictionless.  Bespoke Customer Experiences elevate customer interactions and reduce/eliminate friction that create negative perceptions of the company or brand.  Eliminating friction requires actions based on a holistic view of Cx.

• Customer-First. Companies striving to deliver bespoke Customer Experiences view their businesses from the Customer’s perspective first.  This is difficult, as businesses tend to see their customers through the lens of company tools and capabilities.

 

Cx Confirmation Bias

Company Stakeholders, including Marketing and Sales, tend to view customers through the lens of the process, tools, programs, channels and journeys they control.  This is a completely different view than the customer’s perspective of a vast sea of touchpoints, some initiated by the company and others by the customers themselves.  It is the gap between these views that represents both the challenge and the opportunity for businesses, and it is also the source of Cx Confirmation Bias in the assessment of program impact.  Company programs, tactics and interactions viewed as successful can inadvertently perpetuate a disjointed experience that repels rather than cultivates customers.

 

Expanding the Cx Horizon

The path to delivering Best-in-Class Cx and eliminating Cx Confirmation Bias begins with transforming the Cx Horizon from Capability-First to Customer-First.  This approach leverages existing data and tools in the Enterprise to form a data-driven holistic view of Cx, including operational flags, triggers and defined actions that serve as a layer above current marketing and sales capabilities. 

 

The approach to harnessing Holistic Cx:

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Define Cx “North Star”

The starting point for expanding the Cx Horizon is orienting around the current Cx vision using actual, anecdotal and aspirational thinking from stakeholders.  During this step we define/uncover:

• Anecdotal and Aspirational Cx scenarios

• Scenarios of Friction and approaches to Frictionless Cx

• Aspirational Measures of Cx Success

 

Review Enterprise Data Ecosystem for Cx Adjacent Elements

In this step, we uncover source data that would be potentially useful to build the Cx Quality Measures that drive Cx activation.  While some of the data exists in expected sources, such as Omnichannel capabilities (Web data and Marketing Automation), other data reviewed includes Call Center and Sales Interactions that are typically not brought together in this way.

 

Operationally Define Cx Faults, Cx Behavioral Events

A Cx Fault is a distinct point of Friction in Cx that is defined operationally in the data and that can be acted upon.  Examples include:

 

• Over Marketing.  With an expanded Cx Horizon, incidents of over marketing are more clearly and accurately determined and acted upon

• Cx Flow Difficulty.  Excessive Hold Times, Sub-Optimal Web Interaction Flows, etc., exist in Enterprise Data, but are not typically pulled together to create a picture of Cx Flow Difficulty

 

Cx Behavioral Events are changes in behavior that can indicate if a Customer Relationship is trending positive or negative.  Examples include:

 

• Increase/Decrease in Share of Requirement (SOR) across products and brands

• Opt-In/Opt-Out choices across programs and websites.

 

In this step, we define specific Cx Faults and Cx Behavioral Events through the available Enterprise Data.

 

Define Cx Quality Metrics through attribution of causality between Cx Faults and Cx Behavioral Events

Armed with operationally defined Cx Faults and Cx Behavioral Events, we model causation to determine the patterns in Cx Faults that result in negative Cx Behavioral Events, and we determine sequences of positive Cx Behavioral Events that indicate reductions in Cx Friction.

 

Monitor & Take Action

The final step to achieve improved Cx Quality through an expanded Cx Horizon is to deliver Cx Quality Metrics to stakeholders and provide the tools to take action:

 

• Triggered Actions. A framework of recommended actions and interventions based on scenarios of Cx Quality Metrics.

• Cx Quality Scorecard.  A view of Cx Quality Metrics over time to determine the degree to which Cx Quality is improving / Cx is eliminating Friction

 

Using this structured approach, Companies can leverage their existing data assets to expand their Cx Horizon, eliminate Cx Friction and continually improve Cx Quality thereby driving up additional purchases and customer loyalty.