Top 5 Challenges Faced when Building a Customer Experience Program 

Building a Customer Experience Program is undeniably rewarding. They help companies improve overall customer experience (CX), differentiate their brands, and ultimately win and retain customers. However, as with any major initiative, they invariably run into challenges.

Here are the five most common issues a CX Program will encounter and why it’s important to face them head on:

1. Your Customer Experience Program lacks a clear vision.

A successful CX Program must begin with a clear vision that is well understood, documented, and socialized by executive leadership across the organization. Yet it is unfortunately very common that the vision remains siloed within a single department and not aligned from the top down to impact the experiences across the enterprise.

Why it’s important:

• Without a well thought out vision of what the customer experience should be or what outcomes it should drive, a CX Program has a hard time impacting business goals, financial outcomes, and improving overall customer experience.
• These efforts establish a clear understanding of where improvements in the customer experience can create value across the organization—financial returns, operational efficiencies, and improved employee engagement and outcomes.
• A strong CX vision then translates into a rigorous framework to ensure your brand promises, values, and desired experiences are aligned to employee metrics, behaviors, language, and compensation. This breathes life into your CX Program.

[Business Insight: Starting a CX Program? First Get Grounded in Your Vision and Goals.]

2. C-Level executive sponsors do not understand their role and responsibilities.

While most executives are clear on the benefits of a CX Program, many don’t understand how critical their role and leadership are in ensuring the programs goals are well socialized, which in turn, impacts the program’s ability to drive change.

Why this is important:

• Ensuring there is an enterprise-wide approach for CX program design, desired experiences, measurement, operational adoption, and communication are critical to its success. Without C-Level sponsors as advocates, these initiatives have a hard time gaining traction.
• Building an executive sponsor communication plan helps align the enterprise on key CX goals and why they’re important. Good communication starts at the top.
• While the CX Program’s manager is its most passionate advocate, ensuring there is a C-Level sponsor driving the adoption of outcomes can help avoid bottlenecks in other departments such as IT, Sales, or Customer Support.

3. Siloed CX initiatives.

Many organizations have a decentralized CX Program run by several departments with multiple vendors, sources of data, and KPIs. This creates a disparate program that lacks confidence in their data and, consequently, their ability to make a meaningful impact on business outcomes. Designing a centralized CX Program improves consistency, efficiency, and reach.

Why it’s important:

• An enterprise-wide approach clarifies what’s truly important, allowing an organization to eliminate unnecessary technologies, vendors, processes, and metrics that don’t support the overall vision.
• The desired customer experiences are mapped out across each journey touchpoint across all departments, which points out potential gaps that had previously gone unidentified.
• Tracking consistent metrics across all departments and CX initiatives drive desired experiences directly.

[Business Insight: Customer Experience Analytics – Novel Insights for the Modern Customer]

4. The Customer Experience Program is missing foundational KPIs.

Often, organizations have a mixed methodology for their internal employee, operational, and customer satisfaction and behavior metrics. The challenge with this approach is that it doesn’t drive consistent employee and customer experiences as different metrics drive different behavior and language.

Why this is important:

• The metrics tracked should support the company’s brand promises, desired employee behaviors, and expected customer journey.
• Once an organization has consistent metrics that support their vision, they can then map out any necessary changes in behaviors, language, or touchpoints along the customer journey.
•  Having aligned metrics enables your employees to execute more effectively and create consistent experiences for your customers.

5. The CX Program is lacking a data and analytics strategy.

A formal Customer Experience Analytics strategy is a critical part of a CX Program. This allows leaders to have confidence in making critical business decisions based on CX data.

Why it’s important:

• The right customer data is often lacking to drive true customer insights.
• The data must be procured from data sources that are statistically valid and robust enough to capture a holistic view of the experiences being measured.
• Frequently, customer data often exists in disparate data sources. Disparate CX data must be aggregated, centralized, and organized to analyze.
• Formal analysis leads to insights which drive action and enable strategic business decisions that ultimately drive key business outcomes.
• Once the right customer data infrastructure is in place, analysis that informs customer-centric decision making can become a continuous, repeatable process.

If these challenges are something you are facing in your CX Program, we are here to help. Our experts are focused on building processes that ensure CX Programs are making the impacts our clients expect. Interested in learning more about RevGen Partners’ approach to customer experience? Visit our site to learn more.