Every business talks about how important customer experience is, but not every business is doing everything it can to improve its customer experience programs.
A PwC report reveals approximately one in three consumers (32%) would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience.
Customers walking away is a big no-no, as your brand will struggle to thrive. Today customers are not ready to compromise on the experiences they receive. CX has become one of the deciding factors in whether a customer will go for your product or service.
Bad customer experiences increase the churn rate, negatively impacting your brand perception and revenue growth. And your brand surely doesn't want to face rejections from customers. To avoid such worst circumstances, keeping customers satisfied and happy is crucial.
Here's where a successful customer experience program enters and becomes the go-to solution for fulfilling all customer-related ambitions, as you can ensure customer happiness with your CX agenda functioning without friction. Let's start by understanding what it is and then move to issues and solutions.
What is a Customer Experience Program?
A CX program is a systematic approach to bringing all your CX endeavors under one roof to smoothen the customer journey by providing a good customer experience at every touchpoint. From planning to deliver the best customer experience to executing procedures for achieving the same, the CX program covers everything.
Since leaders understand the importance of imparting customer experiences, most of them already have a CX system established for retaining old customers and acquiring new ones. The major problem many companies face is that their CX programs are not as fruitful as expected.
And to add more on it, here comes the bad news, Forrester predicts that in 2023 one in five CX programs will disappear, but it also says one in ten will be stronger than ever.
You have to make sure that you stay in the latter category to keep a tight hold on customers and your niche market. And for that, you need to figure out why your CX program is ineffective and then work accordingly to bring it on the right track. We’ll start by pinpointing the possible problems that degrade your CX program.
What are the Potential Issues with a CX Program?
A deranged Customer Experience (CX) program gets you in the wrong direction, negatively affecting brand image that further results in decreasing customer loyalty and revenue. Consider these potential issues that could arise with your CX program and understand the root causes to resolve them.
1) Misunderstanding Values
Today's companies compete on the basis of CX, which means leaders do understand the need to provide a great customer experience. But, leaders miss on comprehending the whys and hows of their customer experience program.
The overall positive value, whether strategic, operational, or financial, a well-crafted CX program can bring is ignored. The reason behind the ignorance and missing point of how significant the CX program is, include the disinterest of stakeholders, lack of participation of the C-suite, insufficiency in outcomes, and many more that disrupt the proceedings of the CX program.
2) Technological Insufficiency
The CX programs are nearly valueless without the technology. Whatever may be the reason, if you are not tapping into rich customer insights produced with the help of techs like AI and ML, you won't be able to get to the roots of customer behavior.
Technological insufficiency might be due to a lack of funds, unfamiliarity with the latest technology in the market, and comfort with the old tech stack. Also, brands do not consider the involvement of customer experience analytics platforms that directly provide them with CX analysis reports through which they can perform competitor analysis, market research, and figure out the point of failure in their CX program.
3) Unfitting Customer Experience Management (CXM) Strategy
Leaders struggle to set up the right customer experience management strategy because of a lack of clarity regarding how to proceed with customer experience efforts. The unclear decisions disrupt the structure of the CXM strategy. The vague CX resource investment and procedural plans snatch away the trust of authorities which brings your CX program into more trouble.
Even if the devised strategy gets a green signal from top executives, it won't show results. As an end result, the company-wide morale goes down, and you will find more dissatisfied customers who no longer want to stay associated with your brand.
4) Improper CX Framework
A CX framework is a vital element of a CX program. The error in structuring a CX project ruins the core of the CX program. A lack of awareness that a CX leader has regarding the trends, latest tools and tech, systems, and market standards, deform the framework.
Improper CX framework affects the marketing, impairs your CX efforts, and disconnects you from potential customers as you fail to maintain relevancy. Moreover, an inappropriate CX framework takes away the power to control CX projects, as a damaged CX structure creates a disorder and requires extra effort and time to fix them.
5) Lack of Right Mindset
Gartner says most customer experience programs are not delivering on the promise of improving differentiation. It is a fact that solely focusing on purchasing route that a customer follows to buy your products or services will not help your brand to offer an unbeatable customer experience.
Brands with the wrong mindset don't consider if or not their customers are happy with the customer support or services. Those brands exclusively concentrate on sales that decrease the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Only following sales numbers and considering your CX endeavors are perfect is totally useless in the 21st century, where customers are ready to pay extra for customer experiences.
6) Not Closing the Loop
Closing the loop of a particular CX operation under the CX program is critical to track the progress. Incomplete or loose ends create a lot of confusion, hampering the productivity of the teams involved in the program. Further, there is a chance that two CX operations overlap, and you lose the trail you needed to follow to get expected CX outcomes.
Another disadvantage of not closing the operational loop comprises a decrease in employee engagement as chaos troubles them to work efficiently, and lack of results pushes CX authorities to provide justifications for financial investments allocated to run the CX program. At worst, top executives may direct to shut down the CX operations.
7) Unrealistic Expectations From CX Program
The rate of customer retention and acquisition does not increase on the basis of merely establishing a CX program. Oftentimes brands hold the idea that owning a CX program can solve every crisis. No, just having the program will never solve your brand and customer problems.
The brands lack the notion of connecting their goals with the CX objectives. And expect the program to do wonders in bringing more customers to increase revenue growth. These ambiguous expectations and problems stop a brand from setting up a successful CX program. Brands must strive to figure out and work on the solutions to these issues.
Related Read:- 6 Biggest Threats to Customer Experience Initiatives.
How to Improve the Customer Experience Program?
The customer experience is the sum of all the interactions a customer has with your company, from their first point of contact through to post-purchase follow-up. Creating a positive customer experience should be a top priority for any business, as it can lead to increased customer trust and repeat business. So, how can you improve your customer experience programs?
Here are 7 tips for improving your customer experience program.
1) Define the Goal of the CX Program
Executing a CX program without any direction is equal to exhausting your resources for nothing. Having a CX vision serves the purpose of setting a customer experience program in your organization. You can:-
- Collaborate with internal stakeholders to define what you want to achieve from this program.
- Discuss everything, from the efforts required to put in the program to benchmarking the potential outcomes according to industry standards.
- Merge the activities promoting Unique Selling Proposition (USP) with the goals of the CX program to get the purpose statement without much hustle.
2) Align CX Endeavors with Customer Service Goals
The primary goal of the CX program is to make a comfortable environment for customers at each and every point of contact. Your customer service pursuits must align with your CX attempts so you can effortlessly maintain a high Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score. As a CX executive, you can:-
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Ensure the implementation of a successful Voice of the Customer Program that will assist you in monitoring customer services processes according to consumers' wants and needs.
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Involve C-suite while deciding on CX endeavors and customer service goals that come under your CX program to gain clarity on brand expectations.
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Create a template that helps you to scrutinize all your customer-driven operations to upgrade the CX program.
3) Improve Customer Experience Governance
Enhancing customer experience governance is the pathway to supporting your customer experience program. A sound CX governance assists directors in specifying the particular issues with the program. As a CX administrator, you can:-
- Refine CX governance by analyzing the roadmap you have been following till now to execute the customer experience strategy.
- Generate a feedback system to keep a check on your governance scheme.
- Fix guidelines for your CX governance agenda before activating any CX initiative to ensure the customer experience program's sustainability.
Related Read:- 3 Drivers of Best-in-Class CX Governance.
4) Encourage Inter-Departmental Collaboration
Customers get uninterrupted experiences with brands when all units collaborate with each other seamlessly to increase the efficiency of CX workings. Since the organizational operations are interdependent, it is your responsibility as a CX leader to:-
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Encourage the different departments to share their respective work without hesitation and align the outcomes in favor of the customers and brand growth.
- Set the ultimate CX objective for departments to make it easy for them to level up the delivery of end-to-end customer experience.
- Schedule pre-planned collaborative exercises for various teams to strengthen the inter-departmental bond.
5) Foster Customer-First Mindset
CX managers and executives need to provoke employees to pursue customer-centricity in their daily operations. You can:-
- Foster a customer-first mindset by conducting educational CX-driven sessions and meetings to discuss the current status of CX endeavors and future CX plans.
- Urge your employees to share their thoughts and suggestions on the same. These activities will increase the curiosity and involvement of employees in customer-related procedures that will further improve your CX program.
6) Use Data to Drive Decisions
Data-driven judgments are super efficient because you can deep dive into the fundamental causes of any failed or successful CX actions. Accordingly, the data helps to determine if or not you should continue seeking outcomes from a particular CX project or stop its operations. To drive decision-making backed by data, you can:-
- Use customer insights while determining future CX action plans involved in your CX program.
- Look for areas delivering an unsatisfactory experience by examining customer complaints and initiating a new CX project to address customer problems.
- Consider innovative ideas to include in your CX program and take it to the upper phase of CX ambitions through recommendations you derive from customer data.
7) Track Results To Bring Transformations
Simply going on and on without keeping an eye on what's happening with the CX program refrains you from chasing the CX outputs you want. To ensure you track the results and bring applicable modifications to your CX program, you can:-
- Identify CX opportunities that your business can afford and start designing a solid implementation plan.
- Collaborate with stakeholders and demand their participation in CX transformation activities.
- Nurture agility in your CX strategies and operations so that the lane to transformation is trouble-free.
Related Read:- 9 Strategies To Eliminate Risk in Your Customer Experience Program.
To Wrap Up
The CX program is the foundation of every CX-based activity you plan to initiate or that already exists. The outline of your customer experience program assists you in managing CX strategies and processes. Usually, CX programs are weak because they are not up to the mark due to a variety of reasons, such as a lack of understanding of values and the right mindset, technological insufficiency, unsuitable CXM strategy and CX framework, not closing the loop, and unrealistic expectations.
Your company needs to have a robust CX program to comfort customers and make every interaction with your brand meaningful. From determining the intent of the customer experience program to promoting customer-centricity, your brand can take several measures to guarantee that the CX program runs fluently and serve in the best interest of customers and your company in the long haul.
Want to know about the functionalities of a Great CXM Program? Read Customer Experience Management Program: 9 Capabilities To Improve Business Performance.