5 Essential Ingredients Your CX Recipe Needs
Customer Experience is the new hot topic on marketers' lips, yet our recent Customer Experience research reported that 38% of marketers don't think their organisation can deliver it to a high enough standard.
Customer Experience is the new hot topic on marketers’ lips, yet our recent Customer Experience research reported that 38% of marketers don’t think their organisation can deliver it to a high enough standard.
The concept actually spans a much wider landscape than just a single department, but while marketers try to figure out how much of it they should own and how much of it they can realistically control, here are five essential elements that should comprise any strategy that tries to tame this particularly complex beast:
Leadership
The big debate around Customer Experience is, Who owns it? The ever-increasing number of channels, devices and touch points across which interaction can take place, naturally increases the number of stakeholders involved. As a result, someone needs to step up and take responsibility for the setup, management and delivery of the overall experience. Is it an operational issue, a technological issue or a marketing issue?
Whatever the answer, without a clear set of goals and objectives, the remaining four elements of the customer experience will lack direction and, therefore, effectiveness.
Team
Our recent survey showed that less than 12% of brands surveyed have built a CX team. The number is growing but is still small enough for a focused few to get ahead of the competition and set the trend for organisational structure.
In the absence of a dedicated CX team, the stakeholders involved can still work together to ensure a consistent communication strategy with each and every customer. The team should also be structured with clear objectives for each member.
Culture
The vast majority of problems around customer experience come from the silos of responsibility and activity that each department needs to collectively bring down. Leadership and teamwork are impossible if the people involved are too complacent, myopic or naïve to look at building a cohesive sharing culture that places the customer at the heart of its operation.
Process
The number of stakeholders, departments and technologies involved means that a process needs to be setup that assigns and accounts for each role played by each element. Such processes should be streamlined enough to be efficient, and agile enough to respond to a rapidly changing landscape. New technologies are emerging all the time and an agile set of processes can help to make sense of a noisy environment.
Data
Marketing is increasingly data-oriented, but the very nature of data demands that it be collected, managed and processed properly and effectively. For the modern customer, that means cross-channel and real-time.
The modern customer operates in real time – tweeting, buying online, engaging through a native app. None of these behaviours requires waiting for access to a desktop. Now is everything.
The typical modern customer also owns more than one device, so cross-channel data needs to be accounted for and communications personalised according to the preferred channel and device.
Customer Experience is not a straightforward task for any brand, but having these elements in place can really pave the way to a true competitive advantage. Take a look at our recent survey report, developed in partnership with Digital Doughnut, for more statistics and insights around Customer Experience.
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