9 Strategies To Eliminate Risk in Your Customer Experience Program

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Darshan Shah

November 9, 2022

Your company's customer experience (CX) program is a critical piece of your overall business strategy. But like any other important initiative, it's also susceptible to risk. 93% of CX efforts fail during execution.

Although companies firmly believe (86%) that they must compete on customer experience (CX), only 51% of brands used social listening or monitoring in any way.

If an organization is led by management with lesser conviction, lack of attention to detail in work culture, and absence of CX from intra-organizational touchpoints, the overall initiatives will suffer. Moreover, lacking customer centricity in the organizational approach and having siloed structures at functional positions can hamper your CX initiatives.

With many such risk variables out there, it’s the need of the hour to focus on reducing the ones that could imperil your CX program.

In this blog post, we'll explore eight risk mitigation strategies for your CX program. By staying aware of these potential risks and taking steps to mitigate them, you can help ensure the success of your CX initiative. Read on to learn more!

What Are the Risks For Implementing Your CX Program?

The voice of the consumer (VoC) gives crucial information to company leadership about how they need to alter and drive their strategic priorities in a digital environment where organizations must constantly adapt to change and fiercely compete for market share. But how can businesses ensure they pay attention to the VoC and provide the CX that will establish them as leaders?

CX is vulnerable to risk, just like every other aspect of business, whether that risk is brought on by inconsistencies in communication procedures, excessive employee turnover, or weaknesses in data security. Moreover, just as in every other area of business, an honest, objective, organized assessment can assist organizations in aligning their goals, bridging gaps, and making sure that CX is a vital component of their entire strategy.

1. Lack of Top Management Confidence

Establishing a customer culture within the company is one of the initial steps in any CX program. And it can only begin when the board, the CEO, or several other essential stakeholders recognize the need to switch from an internally forced, frequently politically charged culture to a more open, externally oriented one.

There is a case for a strong customer culture to separate itself from the top management group. However, if upper management is off-the-board, a new CEO or business unit leader can quickly erode customer culture by returning to a short-term emphasis driven by financial goals.

Another significant reason to work toward the leaders' involvement and buy-in is so that they can interpret these for the teams and spur change. Clarity and confidence that senior leaders understand what they are doing and why they are doing it are brought about by open communication from the top management.

Strong leadership is still required when a strong culture has already been created. It makes sure it is preserved and strengthened. Any strategic transformation demands a highly committed and cooperative senior leadership team, and customer-centricity is undoubtedly the most important.

2. Limited Data Collection

Due to changing consumer choices and demographic changes within your existing client base, maintaining customer loyalty and retention may become more challenging. It could be challenging for you to recognize and respond to changes in social, environmental, and other customer preferences and expectations on time.

So, to develop robust marketing strategies, improve customer service, and foster innovation, excellent customer data collection improves marketing intelligence. As a result, it enables companies to provide better customer experiences and to stay ahead of the competition by steadily establishing a competitive advantage.

Customer data collection involves using a variety of data collection techniques to gain both quantitative and qualitative information about customers. Data collecting aids businesses in understanding client perceptions of their goods and services from a strategic standpoint. Better decisions are made when data from several primary and secondary sources are gathered.

3. Neglect of People Culture

One department within an organization cannot be solely responsible for enhancing the customer experience. It is more akin to an overhaul of an organization's culture, operations, and procedures, an overhaul of its workforce's mindset.

The culture of your business might not sufficiently promote the prompt identification and escalation of risk issues that could substantially impact your core operations and the accomplishment of your strategic goals.

Therefore, companies need to invest in employee engagement and success in new ways to make their CX initiatives successful as more and more businesses adopt more flexible work arrangements and people these days are less likely to stay in one job for a lengthy period.

A workplace culture that encourages teams to perform at their highest level can be developed by emphasizing empathy, appreciation, acknowledgment, and positivism. And as we are all aware, a company is only as good as its workforce.

4. Not Ingraining CX into Organizational Performance Management

Businesses that aim for excellent CX constantly experiment with many areas. These areas include customer feedback systems, hire-to-retire procedures, training, development, and so on. However, they only sometimes link employee performance to customer experience. Providing excellent customer experiences requires holding people accountable for it. But the majority of businesses fall short.

Only 50% of senior executives, 46% of employees who interact directly with customers, and 23% of back office managers have a portion of their compensation linked to CX metrics. Only a third of companies tie employee incentives to customer metrics and the bottom line.

The following can occur when CX activities are not linked to organizational performance management:

Inconsistent customer service throughout the entire customer journey
Experience quality varies at each touchpoint.
Due to a lack of autonomy and guidelines, there is a delay between client requirements and employee action.

5. Obsolete Business Model and Culture

Without making significant adjustments to your business model, the industry's disruptive innovations and/or new technologies may advance at a rate that exceeds the organization's capacity to compete and manage risk effectively.

Moreover, the culture of your business might not sufficiently promote the prompt identification and escalation of risk issues that could substantially impact your core operations and the accomplishment of your strategic goals.

6. Lack of Customer Analytics Usage

Due to changing consumer choices and demographic changes within your existing client base, maintaining customer loyalty and retention may become more challenging. Your capacity to manage your core operations and strategic plans could be adversely impacted if you cannot use data analytics and big data to gain market intelligence and boost productivity and efficiency.

Moreover, it could be challenging for you to recognize and respond to changes in social, environmental, and other customer preferences and expectations on time. Eventually, your brand, customer relationships, regulatory compliance procedures, and/or how you conduct business may be dramatically impacted. As a result, opportunities for your company's organic growth through customer acquisition and improvement may be severely constrained.

CX Audit to Assess Risks

Most firms know that providing an excellent CX is crucial to their success. Yet, many lack a crucial component in their CX programs: a defined method for assessing the ecosystem of people, processes, and technology that supports the CX. An assessment confirms that the CX program is sensitive to market trends and expectations and supports the broader business plan.

This assessment could be carried out either directly through the VoC program and associated supporting operations or inadvertently through customer touchpoints across the entire business. In any case, the goal is to pinpoint crucial CX components that mesh with the enterprise's overarching strategic goals and contribute to profitable outcomes. The company can then strengthen these components while also fixing any shortcomings.

CX Audit Components

The CX audit process can help organizations handle risks, pinpoint important findings, and create a road map for projects that will assist their CX program match with their strategic aims.

Management will be able to comprehend the relationship between the six essential business areas listed below and the CX and gather customer insights to implement the necessary change by reviewing and evaluating these areas.

6 Essential Components of CX Audit

Vision and Strategy

– Reviewing business procedures and the management of strategic endeavors against the CX and the prevailing vision of the company.

Market Products and Services

– Assessing markets, customers, and facilities related to service and delivery.

Customer Services

– Recognizing customer support and customer operations and studying their across-the-board effectiveness.

Human Capital

– Assessing if employees are working in congruence with formalized CX strategies and procedures.

Technology

– Reviewing the CX technology technique, architecture, security, privacy, and data-protection supervision.

Business Capabilities

– Understanding CX managerial change management and primary business intelligence (BI) procedures.

CX Audit Value Proposition

CX audits add value by giving businesses an unbiased evaluation of all crucial client touchpoints as well as significant and useful insights. Organizations will have the possibility to achieve the following results after a CX audit since they will have a clear set of findings in each of the above-mentioned areas of focus:

Improved alignment of business choices with the overall strategy
Boosted operational efficiency and cut back on administrative expenses
Controls that are tightened up in key CX business processes
Rapid and efficient gap analysis of the CX
Enhanced cooperation in crucial CX functions
Enhanced CX-related BI management enhanced customer data assets protection.

9 Strategies to Eliminate Risks in Your CX Programs

1. Design Core CX Values

Core values can be ingrained and supported by rules that specify how each job and department can carry out its purpose. Courses that mirror the new fundamental values can help achieve this. The employees' understanding of the core principles should be successfully conveyed and reassessed frequently. Encourage the staff members to practice what they preach about CX. They must be given examples and case studies that demonstrate how customer experience may be incorporated into in-person encounters with clients.

2. Obtain Buy-in from the Top Executives

A program where top officials meet directly with customers and report on the input they receive and its implications for the company. Senior executives can learn what it's like to be a consumer by personally utilizing the company's goods or services. Determine the customer culture of the company's benchmark and its strengths and flaws. This identifies consumer culture disciplines that are effective and crucial to the strategy. Senior leadership can now concentrate on enhancing the customer culture throughout the company.

3. Consult with subject-matter experts

Employees should be honored as ambassadors of the customer experience by businesses. It is quite successful to link awards and recognitions to customer experience since it makes it very evident to both staff and customers how vital customers are to the company. Additionally, it serves as a reminder of the value of outstanding customer service for everybody involved. Employees in a company should have the authority to commend one another for remarkable efforts that positively affect consumers' pleasure.

4. Consult and collaborate with stakeholders

Product managers and other key decision-makers frequently use metrics like CSAT and NPS to understand their customers better. These are purposefully kept basic, but they make it difficult to comprehend the motivations behind the actions, which is essential for spotting small-scale changes that have a significant impact. Any discussion involving actual users or clients is monitored by experts, with stakeholders being kept in the dark behind a one-way mirror or receiving their information through a synthesis done after the fact.

Stakeholders can gain a greater insight into user demands by inviting them, but there are practical considerations as observers interact with them in person. To attend without significantly affecting what is happening, an effective observer briefing is crucial. Giving observers the responsibility of recording images and video can benefit everyone involved, as photos and video are instrumental pieces to gather.

5. Utilize Data Analytics

For strategy improvements, marketers—especially CMOs—need current customer information. Without thorough CX insights, marketers and CX specialists would have to make assumptions about the demands of consumers. Your capacity to manage your core operations and strategic plans could be adversely impacted if you cannot use data analytics and big data to gain market intelligence and boost productivity and efficiency.

There are recurring patterns and themes that you will find as you collect data from a variety of people across various platforms and demographics. You can create a customer persona for the goods offered using these recurrent themes. Moreover, marketers can forecast consumer behavior with a high degree of accuracy by using a carefully built user persona and a wide range of essential pain points.

6. Simulate the Obstacle

Use customer journey mapping to simulate the hurdles your customers face or may face. A customer journey map represents the various stages of customer interaction with your brand, website, and product. It includes internal and external touchpoints such as website landing pages, CTAs, signup forms, and onboarding procedures.

Prioritizing website and product changes will help you give users a better experience by helping you identify areas where customers struggle to finish actions, become frustrated, or give up. Changes to your navigation architecture or the placement of CTAs may be necessary to make it simple to access vital information. All stakeholders will be able to see your brand from both the customer and the business perspective if you create a culture of putting yourself in your customers' shoes.

7. Continuously Monitor the Likelihood of any obstacles

The most severe issues with context for action must be highlighted, routed to the appropriate teams, and integrated into routine operations for CX monitoring to be effective at scale. Teams can better give a positive experience when they develop a thorough and intelligent alerting policy.

Make sure to include runbook instructions so that responders know the dangers the alert may pose and how to act accordingly. For quicker resolution, update notification channels and alert contacts to ensure that the alarm is issued to the appropriate team first, depending on which component is impacted.

8. Communicate Contingency Plans

Every business needs a crisis communication plan since crises often occur when least expected. Even though crisis communication can often be quite reactive, it helps to have a crisis communication plan in place in advance to make the process simpler for your team members.

Plans for crisis management center on the organization's response and how it will inform its stakeholders of a crisis. The ability to quickly distribute information and maintain a consistent message across all organizational platforms is the most critical benefit of a crisis communication plan. That message mostly depends on what the crisis entails and how it affects all parties.

9. Implement in CX to the Very Fabric of the Organization

A business leader's first call to action in his efforts to strategically change the company's core values is to create a company culture that gives the utmost importance to positive customer experience. Companies can achieve this with little resistance to change by redesigning the company's core values.

This new core value or mission must be put into action from the top down. Only when staff members exhibit a pervasive and optimistic attitude toward serving customers and growing businesses can a better customer experience be achieved.

The result? Customers receive outstanding service, which encourages them to return.

The Key Takeaway

The bottom line is that you can't afford to take risks with your customer experience program. By identifying the risks and taking action to mitigate them, you'll be able to improve your CX and keep your customers happy. Have you identified the risks in your own customer experience program? What steps are you going to take to address them?

9 Strategies To Eliminate Risk in Your Customer Experience Program

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