6 Biggest Threats to Customer Experience Initiatives

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Harsha Khubwani

October 3, 2022

“You can’t transform something you don’t understand. If you don’t know and understand what the current state of the customer experience is, how can you possibly design the desired future state?” says Annette Franz, founder and Chief Experience Officer of CX Journey Inc.

The struggle to deliver a great customer experience is due to several internal factors that stop top executives and employees from successfully executing CX endeavors. CX leaders need to understand and prepare for the inevitable challenges by identifying and planning the actions to tackle the risks that ruin the CX initiative of an organization.

1) Lack of Support From Stakeholders

The disinterest of stakeholders kills the essence of the CX operation. An organization can achieve customer success only if people associated with it put one hundred percent effort into keeping the products and services active for a longer time.

Stakeholders might have their own reasons for discontent and obstructive outlook toward the CX agenda. But, it is crucial to address their viewpoint to handle this risk.

Here are two possible risks from the edge of stakeholders that block the path of a thriving CX initiative -

i) Unsatisfied External Stakeholders

The consequence of impaired customer service or a drop in customer experience can upset your investors. They start raising questions about the CX endeavors of the company and show disinterest in your way of carrying on CX operations. Even if your brand is on the right path, they might ask you to tweak strategies in the middle of the ongoing project or totally discard the project, which will cause serious issues.

For example, you implement digital transformation to enhance customer experience that does not bring expected results. You plan to make improvements to fix the outcomes, which requires the involvement of more organizational resources.

As a leader, you put forward a proposal for additional resources needed in front of board members and did not get the same because investors disagreed with your idea. As a result, the lack of further action on previous digital transformation activities can hollow your dream of successful digital transformation.

ii) Unsupportive Executives

Executives and managers often don't understand the importance of providing a seamless customer experience because of their different perceptions of generating valuable returns. They see CX operations as 'Extra Work' or a less reasonable investment to gain the predicted ROI.

To illustrate, during the launch of a product's new version, as a leader, you have a lot of things to look into for a smooth launch. In such a chaotic situation, not scrutinizing how the product and its marketing will turn out for customer experience can cause massive damage.

Customers are the sole entity to decide the product's success in the end. Ignoring the CX initiative with any explanation will prove to be harmful to brand health.

Solution:- Leadership Defines The Tone Of Customer Experience Culture.

2) Not Leveraging CX Analytics

It might sound obvious to the companies who want to leave an imprint in their customers' hearts that not leveraging data analytics is going to break your customer experience motives deeply. Many companies are putting great effort to implement CX analytics properly to get their CX game right, but fail due to a lack of required infrastructure.

A 2020 Big Data and AI Executive Survey reveals that firms were still struggling to compete on analytics – only 45.1%, a slight decline from 47.6% in 2019.

To demonstrate, your brand might lack the resources such as advanced and powerful tools and workforce to develop an impactful CX analytics report. To maintain market standards and compete in industry space with top players, you need to leverage customer experience analytics.

Solution:- Data Analytics: The Key To Real-Time Adaptive Customer Experience.

3) Failed CX Attempts

No one can get everything correct in the first go. But, when it comes to money, people are scared to invest in already failed attempts. Both the internal and external stakeholders doubt their resource investment in the brand. Executives can deny investing their time, tools, and labor force, and external stakeholders can deny putting in their time and cash.

To demonstrate, if your brand fails to deliver customers a promised offer and has to carry out a new campaign to fix the fallen ones. And the campaign needs additional staff members, funds, and tools. It gets demanding for stakeholders to sponsor new initiatives as they doubt the outcome of this practice, comparing it to the previous one. At most, they will abandon the idea and will not support it.

Solution:- 13 Actionable Tips to Help You Fulfill Customer Expectations.

4) Financial Issues Degrade CX Initiatives Quality

Undoubtedly, a financial crisis always ends up bringing the worst outcomes for brands as it unfavorably influences organizational operations. For a brand, there are two types of forces that can carry economic problems, affecting the CX initiatives in a negative manner.

i) External Forces Generating Economic Problems

The external forces that can conceivably trouble the CX initiative of an organization include government laws and market regulation policies, competitive space, the brand image in the market, unexpected happenings such as recession, pandemics, etc.

A fine example of this kind of force is the Covid-19 pandemic. Businesses belonging to different types of industries suffered from heavy financial losses. The crisis caused the downfall of the consumer market and unwanted hindrances in business operations.

ii) Internal Forces Generating Economic Problems

Potential internal forces generating economic issues and damaging the CX initiative comprise budget contraction due to low organization financial health, lack of executive support for funds, and belt-tightening brand policies.

For example, due to inaccurate strategies, counterproductive team performance, or any internal issues, your brand experience financial weakness. It might become a reason to make budget cuts in several operations, including customer-oriented initiatives.

Solution:- Customer Experience Analytics to Provide Top-notch CX That Brings Desired ROI.

5) Absence of a Customer-first Mindset

“Despite organizations ‘talking’ about the customer experience more and more over the last ten years, many still struggle to separate what they DO from what the customer actually EXPERIENCES. This represents the difference between organizational processes and the customer journey. Changing the mindset from thinking and acting in the interests of the business, to thinking and acting in the interests of the customer is easier said than done!!” says Ian Golding, CEO, and Founder of Customer Experience Consultancy Ltd in Clootrack's 102 CX Expert report.

Setting up a customer-centric environment in the whole organization is never easy. Several departments lack awareness of their role in serving customers. There is an utter need for every employee to understand that all their efforts can only be counted when they work together to achieve customer success.

For example, the tech unit usually holds a misconception that they have zero roles in serving customers. The technology department integrates the tools that are best for improving customer service and customer-based operations. Also, they are the ones who can quickly fix the bugs in the technology-based business system to keep procedures up and running quickly to support customers' requirements. Similarly, different departments play diverse roles in catering to customer needs but are ignorant about the same fact.

Solution:- Successful Voice of the Customer Program Brings Exponential Business Growth.

6) Inefficient Communication and Collaboration Structure

Feeble communication and collaboration structure does not allow every department of the organization to remain on the same page. One organization and different ideas, beliefs, and ways of operating within the system can hurt brand perception and prevent your brand from obtaining positive outputs.

Two alarming issues behind this type of problem in an organization are as follows -

i) Existence of Organizational Silos

Departments lack unity for several reasons, such as employees with similar roles tend to stick together and fulfill the goal of their department, not caring much about collaborating with others. Different departments lack interaction and do not share information that might help to create a better customer experience. Apart from that, experience level and different office locations are a few situations that give rise to organizational silos.

For instance, the UI/UX team needs to unite with the marketing team to create attractive designs for a marketing campaign. But, the UI and marketing teams might not share their intentions, plans, and processes. Both departments focus on finishing their respective work and accomplishing their departmental goals. UI/UX team finishes the design and provides it to the marketing team to run the campaign. The marketing team run campaigns to attract the audience. The absence of practical alliance might dissemble the success of the campaign.

ii) Inadequate Project Collaboration System

The outdated project collaboration methods are insufficient for the prompt and relevant outcomes organization desires to produce. In this fast-moving world where real-time solutions are promoted and generated for customers' happiness and satisfaction, lag due to imperfect system setup can decline work quality and delay the delivery of the project.

For instance, you use email to share the documents and all appropriate information regarding the project. Although you can send them to all the staff members in a single batch, it is an incompetent way as maintaining and accessing a large number of documents through email become a tedious task. It consumes loads of employees' time, leading to wanted disorganization in the business operation system.

Solution:- Building Bridges To Overcome Departmental Silos For Better Customer Experience.

To Wrap Up

Customer experience initiatives are vital to maintaining an advantageous bond between a customer and brand so both parties can enjoy the profit. But, at times, it becomes hard to keep up with a CX initiative because of a few internally-generated risks. A CX leader must meticulously work on those threats and create trouble-free circumstances to foster successful CX initiatives in the organization.

To summarize, the following are the probable risks your brand might face:-

Risk #1:- Lack of support from stakeholders.

Risk #2:- Not Leveraging CX Analytics.

Risk #3:- Failed CX attempts raise resource investment doubts.

Risk #4:- Financial issues degrade CX initiative quality.

Risk #5:- Absence of customer-first mindset.

Risk #6:- Inefficient communication and collaboration structure.

Addressing these issues on time will get the brand desired customer-focused results, generated from implementing a flourishing CX initiative.