“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” ― Albert Einstein.

The majority of roadblocks stopping your brand from improving customer experience are internal in nature. The good news is that you can control internal ones and work on them to fix them for better organizational outcomes. But, the problematic thing that bothers the enhancement of customer experience is most companies miss out on deducing those internal problems. 

The barriers to understanding the customer experience include a lack of clarity, not using consumer insights, working in silos, budget constraints, no proper knowledge, not being prepared to change for the better, and also no proper technology. This tip sheet explores 7 of the most common barriers to understanding the customer experience and offers solutions on how you might overcome them. 

What Are Some Common Barriers to Customer Experience?

In this article, we discuss seven barriers to customer experience:

1. Lack of Clarity 
2. Technological Limitations 
3. Departmental Silos
4. Unwillingness To Accept Changes
5. Not Employing Customer Insights
6. Budget Constraints
7. Lack Of Awareness

Let's dive straight into the details of the barriers to customer experience:-

1) Lack of Clarity 

Gartner says that most of the CX programs are not delivering on the promise of improving differentiation. Also, the data reveals concentrating only on the path to purchase cannot drive influential CX outputs.

Usually, brands focus on increasing sales rather than customers and their experiences that drive sales. On top of that, a blur CX program enforced aimlessly just for having a customer experience initiative in the organization and keeping up with the CX trend brings zero results. Working on CX operations without clarity and misunderstanding the role of planning, development, and marketing in CX is a big no-no to your CX ambitions.

It severely affects your authenticity when your internal stakeholders are clueless about a different aspect of the organization's customer dealings. Customers witness ignorance while interacting with your brand at various touchpoints, ruining their brand experience.

Solutions:- The motive of having a CX program established in your organization must to clear to all the stakeholders in the form of a single organizational goal so that every person associated with your brand can contribute accordingly. Here are a few questions associates should continuously ask themselves when they analyze the result of an old CX program and start a new one to maintain clarity.

For the old CX program:- 

• How effective was the program in serving the customers?
• Were the CX efforts in the program put in the right direction?
• Have we achieved the predicted outcome with this program?
• Can we continue with the CX program? Is it worth upgrading with additional resources?

For the new CX program:-

• Why is this CX program established in the organization?
• What difference can we make in customers' lives through this program?
• How can we leverage the program at its best to serve customers with relevant solutions at every point of contact? 
• What are the different stages of the program, and at which stage is our contribution most impactful?

Answering these questions brings transparency to CX processes and the minds of internal stakeholders, assisting in getting the most out of customer experience programs.

2) Technological Limitations 

A considerable number of companies still use outdated technologies to carry on their daily operations, including CX-related tasks. Lack of funds for investing in CX tools or unavailability of a unique solution needed, whatever may be the reasons behind technological limitations, it would cost a fortune to settle down issues these limitations would create. 

The way the modern world works, technology limitations badly affect productivity, hampering the growth of your organization and increasing the customer churn rate. With dated technology, your brand cannot use CX as a competitive advantage at its fullest. Apart from data, security issues and the absence of proper IT support due to outdated tech eventually ruins your brand image, pushing away potential customers.  

Solution:- Statista forecasted global spending on customer experience (CX) technology to increase from around 500 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 to over 640 billion by 2022. 

Today's brands recognize the need for the latest CX tech to attract more customers and expand their customer base by offering a great customer experience.

Here are a few tips to overcome technological limitations:-

• Use an outside-in approach for deciding and implementing CX technologies. Understand the customer expectations first, then pick the technologies helping you achieve customer goals.
• Identify the areas where you are missing out on opportunities to better serve your customers because of tech limitations and test several ways to seize those opportunities with the help of advanced technology. 
• Revise the CX tech strategy by involving your tech and CX team in the hows and whys of technology used to retain and acquire customers.

3) Departmental Silos

Different departments put in efforts to fulfill their respective goals that hamper the organizational objective of serving the customer with a top-notch solution at every single point of contact. Poor coordination among departments due to silos ends up in a broken end-to-end CX.

To add more tribulations, it is a fact that customers are impatient concerning receiving solutions for any query. Hubspot research shows when customers have a customer service question, 90% rate an "immediate" response as important or very important. The existence of departmental silos weakens cross-departmental collaboration, preventing your brand from providing speedy solutions to customers. 

With departmental silos, you can witness all metrics numbers moving towards the negative side of the scale. It becomes challenging enough for brands to maintain a good perception in the market.  

Solution:- Delivery of quick solutions is only possible if all the departments coordinate effectively. Every team needs to hold complete knowledge of how badly silos affect CX outcomes and practice sharing information to reduce duplicate work. 

Here are a few pathways to overcome departmental silos for a better customer experience:-

• Unify CX goals and share them with every department so they can align their respective processes respectively.
• Form an action plan and take directed steps to level up your end-to-end customer experience game. 
• Conduct educational and training sessions to update all teams with the future brand CX intents and let them know what part they play in furnishing a pleasing customer experience.

4) Unwillingness To Accept Changes

Changes are difficult to embrace because the existing condition comforts every person. The inertia from employees to accept alterations makes it more difficult at the organizational level to execute some of the CX procedures that have the potential to benefit customers and make them happy. 

To illustrate, you restructure the CX-related proceedings to smoothen the customer journey with a new CX project that your competitor already has in place. The project might require your team to learn new techniques and ways to operate that pushes them out of their comfort zone. The possible reasons behind the disapproval from employees can be fear that they do not have time to upskill or self-doubt if or not they can perform skillfully during and after changes.  

Poor communication from executives, absence of trust, self-interest, and impatience at the employee end also contribute to non-acceptance. 

Solution:- Executives need to create a roadmap for a clear idea of how to enforce the change without much friction. They must keep answers ready for all likely issues that might arise while planning and implementing the changes. Here are a few guidance tips for executives to tackle the unwillingness to change:-

• Proactively communicate the ins and outs of the changes with employees and tell them the advantages of making such modifications.
• Do not shut down employees' questions and use strong-arm to make them accept shifts. Instead, address their confusion so they can readily adopt the changes.
• Form a framework that eases the arrangement for smooth transitions. Build a strategy in such a manner that helps employees to upskill through training sessions without affecting their performance.
• Appreciate employees for their participation and motivate them to add their suggestions and engage actively with the alteration program.

5) Not Employing Customer Insights

In Clootrack's 102 CX Expert report, 1 out of 8 experts says that not tapping into rich customer insights is the biggest challenge. In the same report, Jo Boswell, Director at Sentio-B Ltd, states, "I think many organizations are not tapping into the rich insights that can be gleaned from their own data. This is usually because data is not joined up organisationally at a customer level. Every interaction a customer has with an organization is an opportunity to listen and then tailor the experience according to the customer’s current context, but many do not have the data, systems, and business processes in place to respond and act in this way."

Companies, at times, struggle to keep up with customer engagement activities for longer due to improper setup. Moreover, brands that do not employ customer insights lose customers frequently to competitors as they cannot comprehend what customers expect. Not prioritizing insights builds a gap between customers and the company, lessening customer trust.

Solution:-  Currently, cutting-edge tech like Artificial Intelligence (AI) assists in producing customer insights. And before employing customer insights into the organizational process to get more promising results, it is necessary to hold an in-depth knowledge of how to utilize AI for CX. Top executives should keep every brand characteristic in mind to take measures that make use of customer insights to promote a customer-first mindset. A C-suite leader can:-

• Motivate in-house CX, marketing, and sales teams to employ customer insights wherever possible to assemble customer-driven solutions. Allow them to experiment by trying different routes to find out one that works best for both organization and customers.
• Opt for insights-generating services from customer experiences analytics platforms. These platforms provide detailed CX analytics reports with which leaders can make informed decisions. Further, going for these platforms saves company resources and enables their placing on more complex tasks than this. 

6) Budget Constraints

A Gartner insight states, “While expectations for the importance of CX are rising, CX budgets are not.”

You must not expect to improve the customer experience for buyers with a low budget for CX operations. Customer experience has become a separate entity that no more can be merged with marketing or sales. It is a big mistake if you do not allocate enough funds for CX endeavors in the organization. Why? Because nearly 90% of customers say the experience provided by the company matters as much as products or services.

Solution:- There might be several reasons a brand can be under budget constraints. But, to get the wished CX outputs, leaders must figure out what they must do if the customer experience budget gets cut. Here are a few pieces of advice for you to maintain a reasonable budget strategy for the customer experience program without fail so that you do not run out of funds:-

• Never merge CX efforts with others to avoid financial resource conflict.
• Pre-plan to keep aside the budget for customer experience procedures by analyzing the CX program.
• Keep investors updated and informed about the present and future CX endeavors so that during emergencies, such as fixing any failed CX attempt, they stay ahead to back you with monetary support.

7) Lack Of Awareness

A lack of awareness among internal stakeholders regarding CX and its importance can produce several disadvantages, such as not prioritizing or focusing on the already existing CX program, overlooking customer-centricity, and many more that degrade brand perception. 

Ignorance creates a chaotic situation while designing and managing a CX program because teams don't understand how it should work. In the end, unawareness comes with poor quality CX for consumers, missing opportunities to establish authority in the industry, and waste of CX efforts and resources. And it turns out in hopeless CX and organizational returns.

Solution:- Internal stakeholders need to make efforts to understand why customer experience is so important nowadays. Here are tips for associates to polish up their knowledge about customer experience and stay updated to improve it:-

• Attend talk shows like CX See Why Show that comprise conversations about the potential pain points of customers and its solution thoroughly. 
• Read customer experience blogs or articles to know about what's going on in the CX space. 
• If you are totally unaware of basic CX terminologies, then first learn the fundamentals to stay familiar with customer experience terms. 
• Follow top publications to learn about statistics and best CX practices that successful companies follow to improve customer experience. 

To Wrap Up

Encountering roadblocks while improving customer experience is not a big deal. But what's vital for you is to determine the issues causing the trouble. Often brands fail to pinpoint the exact reason for lagging behind in their CX efforts. And this delays the improvement and impairs the customer experience objectives. These prevailing problems are internal and can be fixed by aligning brand goals and operations with customer-centric approaches. Eventually, solving the existing difficulties can bring desired ROI and growth to the organization. 

Want to know about customer-centric practices that can bring expected profits? Read - 10 Customer-Centric Practices For Greatest Returns on CX Investment.