Avoid the CX Quicksand!

Navigating ongoing shifts along the path of today's business jungle is an extraordinary feat! Quicksand is apparent in sinking CX+EX performance (customer & employee experience). Forrester's 2022 CX Index reports a return to 2020 CX quality levels, reversing 2021 gains. 20% of brands have lower CX quality now than a year ago. Only 3% of companies are customer-obsessed, reduced from 10% in 2021. (96,000+ US consumers rated 221 brands in 13 industries.) It's a wake-up call to re-assess popular CX paths and avoid quicksand!

The 6 questions in the Forrester CX Index are basics. These quality/loyalty factors apply universally to employee experience and partner experience, across all sectors and sizes.

Researchers point to Emotion as the stand-out success factor among top performers. "The top 5% of brands in the entire CX index had a 15-point advantage over others in providing emotionally positive experiences for customers. . . . 59% of customers trust the brands they interact with, 2 percentage points higher than 2020."

Beware: over-focus on brand interactions is the quicksand. Everyone knows whatever happens with employees will affect customers. Add this to the equation: whenever customers need to contact your firm for something confusing, frustrating, or broken, the customer experience was already poor. Accordingly, all employees across your firm are helping or hindering CX. What happens with all employees' ownership of CX performance will affect your customers!

If your CX strategy is aimed at personalization, designing journeys, digitalizing service, reducing service effort, listening more, increasing real-time closed loop communication, and/or migrating detractors and passives to promoters, that's necessary, yet insufficient. With this CX strategy, your firm is inclined to fall into the CX quicksand.

How can you avoid CX quicksand? Proper balance is key to navigating CX success!

1. Balance your CX listening between Expectations VoC and Realities VoC. Ask for Realities VoC as often as you make changes to the realities that customers experience. Ask for Expectations VoC as often as conditions change for customers. Make it possible for customers to give you feedback anytime, anywhere, any way. This is your foundation to stellar performance in Effectiveness and Enrichment.
2. Balance performance standards of all groups with emphasis from Expectations VoC. Every group has people standards and budget standards, yet people and budget are made possible through customers funding them. Any group can mess up CX, so ensure a strong 3-legged stool for everyone with people, financial, and CX performance. Do not fall into the trap of using survey scores for CX as performance targets, PLEASE (!). Instead, identify behaviors/deliverables that are prerequisites to great CX, internally and externally, and monitor these. This is your key to Effectiveness stellar performance.
3. Balance acquisition and retention: emphasize relationship strength and lifetime value. By focusing Sales on your ideal customer profile, you'll minimize cost to serve, employee burnout, and churn of all types. This is your key to Retention excellence.
4. Balance listening and acting. Use text/voice/video mining to maximize value of almost-free VoC and ask more interesting questions in surveys, building from almost-free insights. Conduct a read-out for every group across your company, accompanied by an actioning workshop. We did this with 50+ groups globally in our firm, creating 100+ action reports addressing root causes of customer loyalty issues. All 100+ action plans were monitored quarterly by our senior leadership team. Find out more about this in my LinkedIn Live CX Improvement mini webinar! This is the heart of CX ROI! It's your key to Ease, Emotion, and Advocacy stellar performance.
5. Balance Ease of Work and Ease of Business. This is the foundation for your success in all of the above. "Ease" doesn't mean easy. It means preventing negatives. Ease of Work and Business means aligning all you do to run your business toward strengthening relationships with employees, customers, and partners. It means company-wide alignment to expectations of these 3 stakeholders as "the hand that feeds you."

Ease of Work is the equivalent of Employee Experience Excellence. At the root of EX angst are 3 success factors: (1) getting everyone on the same page through aligned motivations, (2) creativity within boundaries by respecting inter-dependencies, and (3) driving commitment through consistency to intentions.

Ease of Business is the equivalent of Experience Excellence for customers, partners, and employees. Ease of Work is its prerequisite, with 3 success factors: (1) getting and keeping customers through lifetime value mindset (and partners and employees), (2) data and metrics that inspire customer-centered action (and partner-centered and employee-centered action), and (3) growth and innovation through enterprise use of CX insights (and PX and EX insights).

"Return to normal" CX practices is business performance quicksand. So much has changed in success criteria for employees and customers! What was sufficient before, is now insufficient. In the 2010s, CX practices were shaped by the global economic downturn of 2009.

In the 2020s, CX, EX, and PX practices must shift to higher standards of balance in how we listen, how we monitor performance, how we acquire and retain, how we act on what we learned, and preventing negatives as the foundation for sustained value creation.

Now it's your turn:

What's causing CX+EX quicksand, and how should CX+EX shift?