Without Greater Rigor....Rigor Mortis

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Apologies for the imagery here but the CX industry needs to wake up.  If we do not act with urgency, discipline and focus we will likely end up in the same rut that the marketing technology industry has created for itself. Which rut is that?  The one where there are more applications and solutions and service providers on the market than one could possibly count…or make sense of.  This ultra-confusing, fragmented approach to addressing very concrete and often daunting enterprise needs, typically ends up delivering partial solutions and even worse...increasingly dissatisfied customers - all in an era where customers expectations are rising every day.

One of the biggest trends we note is what we like to refer to as the  “Marketing vs. Care Dichotomy.”  The typical conversations usually include statements such as these:

  • “At XYZ company our CX efforts are focused on improving the performance of our call centers.  Marketers?  They focus on acquiring customers."
  • “CX is very important to us and that is why we focus heavily on NPS.  The CXO owns that - not marketing"
  • “If the marketers were more consistent with their messaging we wouldn’t have to spend so much time cleaning up their messes when the customers inevitably reach out to the contact center."
  • “it feels useless to invest more in media and content projects when the customer care people can’t even answer the phone on time."
  • “Social media is marketing’s responsibility."
  • “Social media is our customer care team’s responsibility."

You get it.  The list of these examples could go on and on.  As if the all too frequent lack of holistic thinking within the enterprise were not a big enough problem, the “vendorscape” also contributes to this growing challenge.  In a world where venture capital at times fuels fabulous innovations it also fuels senseless “siloization.”  Time after time we learn of companies that offer nothing more than a series of features that they like to call “products” which in order to truly be of value need to be integrated with numerous other products and services.  It seems that the primary intent of many of the founders of these companies is to get purchased by someone else who is potentially further down the road in building a holistic solution to actually serve the needs of the market.

Our point here is conceptually straightforward yet remains difficult to solve for: Customer Experience simply must be a company-wide mission and we must be disciplined and rigorous in adhering to this principle.  Of course not all departments will play equally important roles but all departments need to know that the customer is at the center of the company's reason for existing.  What some may define as Customer Care other might define as Customer Loyalty; what the contact center sees as its mission so too must the product development people and field service personnel understand as their raison d’être as well.  At the Customer Xperience Company we observe many persistent and value diminishing behaviors all the time.  Perhaps its time we started referring to them for what they are (or at least risk becoming) - Useless.  Just a few examples include:

  • Analytics platforms that uncover insights but can’t import both behavioral and attitudinal date sets: useless
  • CX software solutions that define gaps but don’t enable actionable downstream strategies and execution: useless
  • Customer retention efforts that don’t require dynamic segmentation: useless
  • Marketers who see their mission as pure customer acquisition without concerns about the value and longevity of the customers they acquire: useless
  • Sales people who are not measured and rewarded also based upon customer satisfaction: useless

Maybe we are being overly-critical here but let’s face it, despite the billions of dollars that are being invested in CX, the overall trends in customer satisfaction and churn are not getting better. Getting CX right is downright hard.  The theory is the easy part.  Making the right choices, establishing a single data platform, leveraging insights across the spectrum of customer behaviors AND attitudes, measuring beyond “just” NPS, aligning the organization and creating value based, common standards of measurement, none of these are easy. However the alternative will be declining customer value, declining profits and ultimately failure.

Thinking and acting holistically in the service of one’s customers is our obligation. Without the necessary rigor our customer realtionships will die and so will our businesses.