- March 17, 2021
- 12:14 am
5 Proven Strategies to Achieve Rapid CX ROI
Measuring and communicating the business value of CX initiatives is a top priority. It’s also a challenge for leaders across organisations. There is widespread acknowledgement that customer obsession and improved CX has a direct positive top–line impact on your organisation. But the CX process is still evolving when it comes to elevating and communicating this impact. Without a strategic approach, this can become a beast to manage, especially for larger enterprise organisations.
Behold the five proven strategies we’ve seen work with our enterprise partners. These strategies transcend beyond transforming your CX through award winning products and services – successfully capturing and communicating measurable business impact. When done right, CX reimagination can be a fun and exciting journey with fascinating commercial benefits for the organisation. But beware – the risks can be high if it’s not thoughtfully planned.
01 Who is Your Ultimate Customer?
The first port of call is achieving an intimate understanding of your customer(s). Who are your customers and will you need to target specific segments? Hint: These might be existing in your business as customer segmentation, personas, or customer clusters, but the common pitfall is having multiple definitions of these for the different parts of the business.
Consolidating and reviewing any available analytic insights across the different customer touchpoints (such as digital products, sales interactions, and customer care channels) help form prioritised views on different customer segments. Having insightful optics across all your customer segments goes a long way in knowing optimal CX initiatives to accelerate quality outcomes.
02 Establish Your Unified Customer Voice
One of the key lifecycle artefacts powering the continuity of your CX roadmap is the visualisation of end-to-end business lifecycle (from your customers’ perspective). Methods such as journey maps and service interaction maps help establish a common source of understanding, enabling your entire organisation to appreciate – not just what works well in the current system – but more importantly, map pain points, gaps, and opportunities. When extended to overlay customer feedback, UX metrics such as ‘struggle scores’ and ‘drop off rates’ help prioritise high impact CX initiatives.
In a way, such unified mapping of the current state establishes empathy within the organisation and goes a long way in evolving a customer–centric mindset.
Such collaborative activities reinforce the internal cultural evolution of CX within the organisation. More importantly, it breaks down the silos that may exist across design, engineering and product teams across numerous business units. CX is beyond design, given technology is your direct enabler for any new capabilities you’ll build. And what better way to unite the right people from the cross section of the organisation to define your future!
03 If You’re Not Solving the Right Challenge, Forget ROI
Most organisations have one (or other forms) of customer personas and journey maps, but the real value of the customer research comes to life when you leverage the CX magic word: “alignment”. The true value of CX outcome not realised until we deliver business outcomes. Having a clear grasp of the organisational north star – both tactical and long term – now helps identify and prioritise the right challenge to combat first. Techniques such as JTBD (Jobs To Be Done) help strike this balance between user needs and business goals.
Clarity on CX priorities means a razor-sharp view on the ‘what’. This facilitates the ‘how’ – which is all about creative ways of problem solving. The last decade has seen a good evolution in the space of design thinking methods. With the right lean and iterative techniques, it’s all about finding the right solution fit for purpose for both the business and your customers.
“By identifying core CX challenges needing solutions, and adopting a user-centred design approach, the order fulfilment unit of a retail partner achieved 40% time savings and 20% reduction in call volumes.”
04 Embrace Metrics
CX initiatives without a quantification mindset will result in being at square–one. Quantifying a range of parameters for the product, service, customers, and the business, means you not only get better at prioritising problems to solve, but also better measure and track outcomes, post rollout.
Organisations with growth mindset have successfully adopted methods such as A/B testing frameworks. The result? Empowered teams able to continuously improve and enhance the customer experience across the board. This test–and–learn mindset also means organisations can take data informed decisions for future investments.
“Partnering with a global airline to develop a real-time service health dashboard for a newly launched automated customer connect platform. Providing business teams with valuable insights on the key CX metrics. Enabling ongoing refinements and leading a data informed service decision making.”
05 Design for Business Outcomes
As much as organisations strive to be customer centric, ensuring that we are designing for the success of the business is the single biggest void in the current industry CX workflow. This offers the opportunity for the UX and Design community to evolve from designing just for users (and being the voice of the user in the room) to designing for the needs of both users and the business.
Teams that are able to strike this balance will make all the difference when it comes to successful CX outcomes. The recent rise of UX metrics, design measurement and strategic design roles (beyond UI design and interaction design) are a result of this need. It’s envisaged this space is slated to mature and strengthen in the next two to three years.
To capitalise upon the trend, leaders need to assemble the right CX team to lead the change. Assembling teams with a mix of skills across customer empathy, behavioural science, service, and product design, with strategic business acumen.
“Globally, only 17% of design teams are actively measuring impact.”
Forrester Business Impact of Experience Design 2020
Finally, Tell Better Stories
Results speak for themselves. Show action through iterative roll outs. Have a cadence of CX ROI reporting. Elevate the impact. Demonstrate value. Highlight the business stats. Delight the execs as well as customers. And this will go a long way in advancing the focus on CX.
Read more about how we partner with brands to transform customer experiences by combining the best of design thinking, user centred design and data and analytics:
- Digital channel experience strategy and design: Aware Super
- CX reimagination for a new business line offering: Transurban
Want to lift your game in CX while booking measurable business outcomes?
Let’s talk, or connect with me on LinkedIn
Shriman Kalyan
Director, Digital Experience
ARQ Group
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