Best Practices

Most brands are keenly interested in creating experiences that move their customers on an emotional level—the trick lies in figuring out which factors companies can and should wield to elicit that response from the individuals they seek to serve. 

Experience outcomes have a lot to do with all the usual elements, like brand professionalism, but they also have everything to do with how customers feel before, during, and after an experience. Companies can only do so much to manage customers’ feelings, of course, but that does include evaluating how those individuals feel as they share experiences and using that feedback to make meaningful changes.

Today we’re going to touch on four ways that companies can create more emotionally meaningful experiences:

• Identifying Customers’ Emotional State(s) of Mind
• Evaluating Emotions’ Impact on KPIs
• Shifting Customer Emotions
• Empowering Staff & Processes with New Intelligence

Method #1: Identifying Customers’ Emotional State(s) of Mind

As we mentioned, companies can’t control customers’ emotions, but they can gauge how those individuals feel before and after an experience. Whether it’s via a quick post-purchase survey, social media, or other listening tools, organizations can easily learn not just how their customers are feeling, but also how those feelings inform their decision to come to the brand for a specific need and what their impression is after the interaction.

This information is invaluable for meaningfully changing and/or improving experiences, and gives brands a real shot at better managing customers’ emotions as they interact with the organization. Of course, it should also mean a better experience for all parties involved.

Method #2: Evaluating Emotions’ Impact on KPIs

This one probably goes without saying, but it really can’t be understated how large an impact customer emotion has on KPIs. A customer who’s made to feel angry, for example, probably isn’t going to do wonders for a brand’s retention or cross-sell/upsell KPI. Brands should thus always view KPI improvement through the lens of customer emotion.

This topic connects heavily to the idea of meaningful experience improvement as well. The most transformational process changes can ripple through an entire organization from the bottom up—a better experience occurs, customers become happier, and all the best KPIs light up as a result of the positive emotions that experience improvement instills toward the brand.

Method #3: Shifting Customer Emotions

This point definitely forms a Venn diagram with our first method, but the idea of shifting customer emotions during an experience really deserves its own bullet. Brands shouldn’t restrict their emotional evals to seeing how customers feel before and after an experience—they should also evaluate what can be done to elicit positive emotions (and quash negative ones) in the midst of customer interactions with a brand.

This lens affords customer experience (CX) practitioners a chance to tweak experiences in truly meaningful ways and can be thanked for conventions such as, say, auto dealerships offering customers coffee while they wait for repairs. Likewise, every experience a brand provides should also be thoroughly evaluated for pain points, bottlenecks, and other broken touchpoints that risk upsetting customers. Brands that find and fix these areas will have shifted their customers’ emotions mid-experience, which is powerful.

Method #4: Empowering Staff & Processes with New Intelligence

To expand upon the point made at the end of the last section, knowing how customers feel only really means something if brands execute on those emotions. It also means that companies shouldn’t confine that execution to a CX or customer-facing team. In fact, why not share those learnings throughout the business? Even teams who work far from the frontlines usually have something to do with providing a great experience, and should thus be let in on new learnings.

Finally, as we already talked about, process fixes are a must once companies have learned how experiences make their customers feel. Besides, actual fixes are really the only way that brands can create emotionally moving experiences for their customers in the first place. Using these methods as an improvement taxonomy can help any brand actually reach that goal.

Check out our full report on the importance of customer emotion created by longtime CX expert Simon Fraser.

Unanticipated costs can quickly become the bane of any business project, customer experience (CX) or otherwise, if they’re not carefully considered before pens have been put to paper. It’s thus imperative for CX practitioners who want to pitch their programs to anticipate and prepare for unexpected costs as much as possible.

We’ve listed the three most effective considerations that practitioners can use to anticipate and avoid unexpected experience program costs:

• Vendor Scalability
• Vendor Flexibility
• Nonparticipation Costs

Factor #1: Vendor Scalability

This tip may seem gratuitous, but program scalability actually isn’t considered as often as it should be, and brands can end up paying extra for that mistake. Practitioners can avoid a lot of headaches with their own teams, the C-suite, and the accounting department by selecting an experience partner that can scale programs from the very beginning.

This approach enables brands to select and begin a program that grows alongside both their CX accomplishments and aspirations. It also allows organizations to reduce operating costs from the very beginning, which can result in both a much healthier program and a CX budget that always stays in the black. CX practitioners can use this method to strive for an ambitious program while still avoiding unanticipated costs.

Factor #2: Vendor Flexibility

Though picking an experience partner and implementing its capabilities is no small task, the days of rigid, prepackaged experience programs are drawing to a close. This is great news for businesses because they can now work with vendors to create a versatile experience solution instead of attempting to wrap themselves around an unflinching list of features (many of which a given company may not actually need).

Solution flexibility enables CX practitioners to avoid unanticipated costs by paying only for what they need from a vendor. For example, would your brand benefit from an analytics team or does that capability already exist within your organization? What about a self-service approach versus full management from the vendor? Once practitioners consider these questions, they should select a partner that’s flexible enough to meet their needs without showering them in unneeded extras and—you guessed it—unnecessary costs.

Factor #3: Nonparticipation Costs

There’s another element to cost consideration that often goes, well, unconsidered when brands talk about implementing an experience program, and that’s what happens when companies don’t have such an initiative in place.

Feedback collection, experience improvement, and customer centricity are all more important now than ever before. These ideas are the means by which brands can both create a better experience for customers and use that capability to plant a flag at the top of their vertical. Therefore, brands should consider the very real opportunity cost of not collecting, analyzing, and implementing feedback. An experience program isn’t a luxury anymore—it’s non-negotiable for any company that wants to succeed.

Taken together, these three methods can empower brands and the experience practitioners who work for them to avoid unanticipated costs and keep their programs viable. They can then use their programs to achieve what we just talked about: a meaningfully improved experience for customers and thus a more commanding presence in their marketplace.

It’s not uncommon for organizations to consider customer experience (CX) programs a nicety—something powerful, no doubt, but also just a luxury instead of an essential component of business success. This attitude prevails even as today’s marketplaces become more competitive and the COVID-19 pandemic changes customer wants and needs faster than many brands can keep pace with.

As we outline in our recent paper on this subject, proving experience programs’ worth isn’t easy, but it needn’t be the bane of CX practitioners’ existence. In fact, we’ve discovered three ways to convince the C-suite that experience programs are much more than just a garnish. These three methods are:

• Aligning Capabilities With Strategic Objectives
• Pitching Customer Centricity
• Demonstrating The Power of Real-Time Feedback

Method #1: Aligning Capabilities With Strategic Objectives

As we just mentioned, marketplaces and industries are all becoming more competitive, which means that brands must strive to provide the best customer experience possible if they hope to stand out. The specific goals that businesses put forth to accomplish that vary wildly from industry to industry, but there’s one common denominator here: CX capabilities that enable these goals can take a company all the way to the top.

With that in mind, CX practitioners who want to prove the necessity of their programs need to select software that can enable business objectives. A lot of organizations take this to mean that CX software is useful only for measurement. Measurement is important, of course, but the best technology empowers brands to execute something much more important than measurement: action. A brand’s ability and willingness to take action on CX learnings determines whether that organization is a transformative leader, or a follower that’s content with management.

Method #2: Pitching Customer Centricity

This tip may sound too general, maybe even like it’s a Herculean task, but consider that the organizations that do best within their verticals are the ones that effectively disseminate CX learnings throughout the business rather than leave statistics siloed up with an experience team. CX practitioners can pitch their programs by pointing to this example and encouraging their organizations to follow suit. All it takes to create a culture of customer centricity is desiloing CX intelligence and handing it out to the right departments and stakeholders.

This approach has another advantage in that it can help CX practitioners create grassroots support for their initiatives. Creating customer centricity can help employees become more invested in their work and more strongly feel that it matters. Their own insights and feedback is also an invaluable component of any CX initiative, and collecting it can make them feel heard. With this approach, practitioners can ride a groundswell of bottom-to-top support all the way to the boardroom.

Method #3: Demonstrating The Power of Real-Time Feedback

This tip overlaps somewhat with the first method we talked about, but the power of real-time feedback truly deserves its own special mention. Real-time feedback is the only truly effective way for brands to know which customers are promoters and which are detractors, enabling them to both save at-risk customers and identify the themes common to both groups’ view of the business.

Real-time feedback also empowers brands to achieve four business goals that practitioners can use to further assert their programs’ value. These goals include acquiring customers, retaining existing ones, cross-selling or upselling to established customers, and lowering cost to serve. Practitioners who pitch real-time feedback through this paradigm can both better tie it to financial goals and give the C-suite something more specific to chew on than, say, “becoming more customer-centric.”

These three strategies are effective means of introducing or ensuring the longevity of CX programs at any brand, and can help CX teams make the case that experience initiatives are no mere flight of fancy but rather the key to transformational success in today’s business world.

If you’re a practitioner who won support for your B2B experience program and have since implemented it across your organization, congratulations! Garnering sponsorship for experience programs is not easy, but doing so means that you’ve built trust at and received investment from both the frontline and executive levels.

Now comes the hard part: proving results and justifying ROI.

Tying experience program results to improved outcomes often proves to be the most challenging aspect of running an experience program, especially since stakeholders usually express at least a little skepticism alongside all the buy-in. Luckily, there are several tried-and-true metrics that practitioners can track to justify ROI, and we’re going to hit them all right now:

• Customer Acquisition Growth
• Customer Retention & Recovery
• Upselling Established Customers
• Profitability From Lowered Costs

Metric #1: Customer Acquisition Growth

This is one of the biggest goals that most brands set for their experience programs, which makes it a vital metric for practitioners to keep track of as their initiatives take off. Acquiring new customers is neither simple nor cheap, and if there’s one group of stakeholders who constantly bears this fact in mind, it’s the C-suite.

Tracking customer acquisition is thus a must for any B2B experience program. Doing so demonstrates an experience program’s merit to all stakeholders involved, especially since, as we just mentioned, acquiring new customers is no small task. Experience platforms that can track changes and monitor new growth are especially useful here since they make proving acquisition relatively straightforward.

Metric #2: Customer Retention & Recovery

There are two big reasons why customer retention is a powerful and pertinent B2B experience metric: first, retaining customers is far cheaper than acquiring new ones, and second, most brands begin experience programs to, well, improve experiences for their existing customer base. Experience practitioners can prove their programs’ effectiveness at hitting both goals by tracking customer retention and recovery.

There’s a myriad of ways to demonstrate experience initiatives’ value when it comes to customer recovery. For example, these programs often make it simple for practitioners to survey customers who reach out to contact centers, garner feedback, and turn it into actionable intelligence. That intelligence can then be used to meaningfully improve both call center processes and customer retention along with it. All of those metrics can be tied directly to experience programs.

Method #3: Upselling Established Customers

Retaining existing business is great, but many B2B brands set their sights on a more ambitious goal: increasing their share of wallet with their established customer pool. The tools, improvements, and processes afforded by experience programs make this goal possible, and practitioners can and should tether the improvements brought about by their efforts to any increase in share of wallet.

Practitioners commonly use experience programs to upsell existing customers by honing in on those individuals’ needs and wants. They can also use these programs to call upon a backdrop of operational and financial data, which grants B2B organizations a 360-degree view of who these individuals are. Practitioners and customer experience (CX) teams can then identify and act upon upsell opportunities.

Method #4: Profitability from Lowered Costs

This ROI metric can be less flashy than sporting new customers or increased share of wallet from existing ones, but the C-suite loves it no less.

In addition to providing meaningful experience improvement opportunities, a well-run experience program can help brands identify ways to eliminate waste and save costs. Experience practitioners can establish their programs’ value by showing stakeholders such opportunities as their initiatives reveal them, giving B2B organizations the chance to save money while also being empowered to improve experiences. To put it candidly, nothing screams “value” to an organization quite like increased profitability.

Acquiring sponsorship for an experience program isn’t easy. Harder still is proving that program’s worth. However, practitioners who focus on proving their programs’ worth through these four lenses will have a markedly easier time actually doing so. They can then secure additional resources to expand their programs’ scope and reap additional success for themselves, the B2B brands they serve, and the customers who sustain those organizations.

Learn more about B2B experience programs, proving ROI, and creating continued success here.

It’s important for brands to spend time acquiring and then retaining new customers, but it’s just as (if not more) important to find ways to expand relationships with the customers that they already have. Today’s conversation focuses on that very theme: how can brands deepen relationships with existing customers to drive better experiences and create a positive impact on the bottom line?

The following three strategies can help organizations achieve deeper relationships with customers:

• Creating Support Team Consistency
• Using Formal Relationship Surveys
• Leveraging Loyalty Programs

Strategy #1: Creating Support Team Consistency

It can be nerve-wracking when a customer submits a complaint, but such complaints can be opportunities for deeper relationships if they’re handled correctly. Make no mistake, brands should prioritize fixing whatever went wrong, but they should also seize the opportunity to do so in a way that makes the customer feel endeared to.

This strategy can only truly work, though, if every support team across the organization is consistent in eliciting those emotions from customers. That’s why it’s important for brands to invest the time and resources necessary for ensuring that all support teams endeavor to identify customer needs, create customized value and benefits, and leave customers feeling both listened to and that they are of high value to a brand. This strategy helps deepen the bond between company and customer (and turns the latter into brand advocates, a company’s best marketers).

Strategy #2: Using Formal Relationship Surveys

Surveys are no longer companies’ only means of acquiring feedback from customers, but that doesn’t mean that brands should forget about them. In fact, relationship surveys remain an invaluable means of acquiring insights-rich data from long-term customers.

While relationship surveys are great for seeing how customers are doing and what they think of a brand, their length and format makes them ideal for another purpose: spotting warning signs that are unique to your business. If enough long-term customers opine about the same problem or broken process, brands can take advantage of yet another opportunity to provide a better experience, create a stronger bottom line, and, of course, let customers know just how important they are to an organization. This is why, even in an age of multimedia feedback and multichannel listening, surveys are still a crucial component of any customer experience (CX) strategy.

Strategy #3: Leveraging Loyalty Programs

This is a big one. Though it hopefully goes without saying, organizations must constantly be vigilant for new ways to entice and reward long-term customers. Loyalty programs are a great way to drum up additional business while also deepening relationships with customers who have shopped with that brand for a while.

Loyalty programs vary wildly from company to company, let alone industry to industry, but brands should generally try to find ways to reward long-term customers with recurring benefits and discounts. More importantly, and to the point of this discussion, they should find imaginative, organic ways to just let those customers know that their business and brand advocacy is deeply appreciated. Gratitude keeps long-term customers coming back for more.

Strategies like these are effective for keeping long-term customers enticed and finding new ways to deepen relationships with those individuals. Juggling support consistency, survey design, and loyalty programs is no small balancing act, but the brands that invest in doing so can strengthen their bottom line and create an ever-better experience for the customers that sustain them.

Want to learn more about customer retention and effective customer recovery? Our webinar on this subject with experts Jim Katzman and David Van Brocklin is now available for you to view for free! You can find it here.

Customer retention lies at the heart of everything from customer experience (CX) strategies to contact center tactics. Additionally, retaining and recovering existing customers is far more cost-effective for a brand than focusing solely on acquiring new business. Faced with these and other reasons, most brands see the importance of customer recovery and work hard to turn negative experiences into positive ones.

Today we’re going to touch on three proven strategies that can help organizations quickly and effectively resolve issues and recover at-risk customers. Those tactics are as follows:

• Closed-Loop Programs
• Multichannel Listening
• Empowering Employees

Strategy #1: Closed-Loop Programs

As most CX-minded professionals know, closing the loop is an invaluable component of any customer retention effort.

The term “closing the loop” actually refers to two separate processes. The first, sometimes called closing the inner loop, denotes addressing and resolving individual complaints from customers. It should go without saying that closing the inner loop is vital for not just customer retention in general, but also recovering at-risk customers.

Closing the outer loop, by contrast, refers to engaging the entire organization in a holistic, continuous improvement effort. When every person who works for a brand resolves to do so in a way that creates a better experience for customers, organizations can achieve success that carries them to the top of their respective verticals. This also makes customer recovery simpler and more intuitive.

Strategy #2: Multichannel Listening

There was a time when surveys were considered the apex of customer feedback methods, and while they’re certainly still important, they’re no longer the only means by which customers report insights.

In this day and age, customers expect to be able to give feedback however they’d like, and most of the time, that means via social media or with non-text feedback. That’s why it’s important for brands keen on recovering customers to both enable a platform that combs social media for feedback, and allows feedback submissions via image, video, voice and other multimedia methods. This strategy lets customers know that you’re interested in hearing their feedback on their terms, which makes them more receptive to being recovered when a customer care agent responds.

Strategy #3: Empowering Employees

Many brands risk overlooking employees when considering how best to recover customers. Employees aren’t just invaluable for facilitating the customer recovery process—if they have an excellent experience with a brand, they’ll become much more impassioned advocates for that organization in their own right.

Thus, companies that want to more effectively recover employees must consider employee wants, perspectives, and needs (i.e. the employee experience). Providing an improved experience for employees increases their happiness and the quality of their work. That enthusiasm is infectious, and will come across to the customers that those employees are charged with recovering and caring for. This makes empowering employees a great way to recover at-risk customers.

The Recovery Trifecta

As we mentioned up top, customer recovery is essential to brands’ continued success. Companies that strive to close the inner and outer loops, listen to customers where they are and on their terms, and create an improved employee experience are setting themselves up to not just recover customers, but also to achieve meaningful change.

Want to learn more about customer retention and effective customer recovery? Our webinar on this subject with experts Jim Katzman and David Van Brocklin is now available for you to view for free! You can find it here.

For a brief moment, it looked as though the Coronavirus pandemic might finally be under control, but recent viral surges throughout the country indicate that, unfortunately, this disease and the new way of life accompanying it will be with us for the foreseeable future. 

While this is certainly unwelcome news, especially for the thousands of businesses that are struggling right now, there is a way that these brands can both stay ahead of the competition and create a better experience for customers: empathy.

Empathy enables brands to understand what their customers want, how to reach them, and how to react quickly to any big changes. Empathy is an essential component of a winning customer experience (CX) strategy. 

Today’s discussion focuses on how brands can wield empathy to thrive, not just survive, during this pandemic, especially as it pertains to four key areas:

• External Communications
• Employee Policies
• Employee Behavior
• Taking Action

Key #1: External Communications

How can companies use empathy to meaningfully consider and improve external communications? 

Well, it should surprise no one that most customers are experiencing some kind of COVID-related stress, whether that’s staying put at home all day or coming into any sort of contact with the virus. Brands can build trust with new and existing customers by being empathetic to their concerns and putting that empathy front-and-center in their messaging.

Many brands have found great success by expressing empathy for customers’ uncertainty, then offering relief in the form of concrete action plans. Starbucks, for example, wasted no time reassuring its customers that the chains was taking the pandemic seriously and demonstrated that by instituting stringent cleanliness and social distancing measures. Crucially, the chain also told customers that it cared about employee well-being.

As a result of this messaging, many customers felt that Starbucks earnestly understood their concerns and felt empathized with by the coffee chain, which encouraged them to continue buying their cup of joe there. Companies which employ that one-two punch of empathizing with customers and taking steps to address their concerns will see success in the age of COVID.

Key #2: Employee Policies

As we touched on in the previous section, customers are paying attention now more than ever to how companies treat their employees during this pandemic. Most customers won’t give a brand the time of day if they get the impression that it doesn’t care about its employees’ safety.

Though it hopefully goes without saying, brands need to include empathy as a centerpiece of their employee policies. This means making accommodations wherever possible for employee concerns about COVID, especially when it comes to workplace safety. Brands that invest time and resources into this endeavor will retain more employees, increase those individuals’ passion for their workplace, and signal to customers that these organizations care for the folks who sustain it.

Key #3: Employee Behavior

Expressing empathy toward employees can do more than make them better brand advocates—it can also encourage them to make positive behavior changes in the workplace.

For example, employees who feel that their companies care about them and are invested in their well-being are much more likely to infuse that attitude of care and consideration into their own work, being more proactive about, say, wiping down self-checkout kiosks and even helping customers who have questions. Suffice it to say that empathy can spread quickly.

Key #4: Taking Action

We’ve touched on this a bit already, but the importance of backing up empathetic sentiments with real action really can’t be understated. Think about all of the emails you’ve received these last few months from companies who say that they’re passionately in the fight against COVID… but don’t actually back that up with anything more concrete.

That train of thought has occurred to countless customers, and it’s why taking action is so important. Actions like wider aisle spacing, better storefront cleanliness, social distancing enforcement, and other measures let customers know that a brand wants to fight COVID with more than just a polite message.

Taking action is also the ultimate act of empathy. Verbally expressing that emotion is one thing—turning it into action is quite another. Likewise, brands that take action to craft external communications around empathy, pour it into employee policies, and implement measures that reflect customer concerns are the ones that can thrive even as this pandemic continues to rage.

Want to learn more about how to survive and thrive in the age of COVID-19? Be sure to read our Special Edition CX Trends Report “Your Post-Pandemic Playbook” for additional tips and insights.

Customer experience (CX) programs can usher in meaningful transformation, a more robust bottom line, and a better experience for customers, yet proving all of this ROI can be challenging for the CX teams and practitioners helming such efforts.

Today, we’re going to take a brief look at how to prove that ROI by telling the story of CX—a story of metrics, connections, aspirations, and, yes, hard numbers. The factors that comprise good CX storytelling are as follows:

• Operational Metrics
• Key Drivers
• Key Metrics
• Business Metrics

Operational Metrics

One of the best ways to prove customer experience programs’ worth is pointing to their impact on operational metrics. Of course, it’s equally important to include specific metric improvement as a goal at the outset of any CX initiative. That way, it becomes easier for practitioners to link the two when presenting to the higher-ups.

There are many operational metrics that CX programs can be used to improve. For example, if a given brand wants to decrease customer CPA (cost-per-acquisition), CX initiatives are a great way to lower cost to serve. CX practitioners can tell that story by establishing lowering cost to serve by a specific percentage as a program goal, then keep the mechanics of that program firmly tethered to that goal as they report to stakeholders and the C-suite.

Key Drivers

There are several drivers of customer satisfaction that CX programs can be particularly helpful for boosting—so, it’s also particularly helpful for CX practitioners to bear these drivers in mind as they link their initiatives to business success.

First, practitioners need to be mindful of their initiatives’ impact on trusted brand reputation. Are these CX efforts having a noticeable effect on the organization’s impact with customers? Other important drivers that brands can power with CX programs are better and more innovative advice to customers, as well as more promptness in returning to customers and closing the inner loop. Practitioners who can link customer experience to improvement in these areas will have told the CX story.

Key Metrics

Key metrics are useful tools for assessing and managing CX programs’ impact on an organization as a whole. There are several such metrics that brands can use to help measure CX efforts, including the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Overall Satisfaction (OSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES).

The Net Promoter Score is particularly useful for distilling an organization’s CX efforts down to a single number. CX practitioners can use the Net Promoter Score to gauge how well single and multiple departments are doing in this regard. They can then utilize the Net Promoter System, the philosophy of continuous improvement that underpins the Net Promoter Score, to discern the meaning behind that number.

Metrics like NPS also make it easy to translate CX improvement into hard, specific numbers, which in turn makes practitioners’ job of pitching CX ROI to the boardroom significantly easier. Thus, relying on a key metric to tell the story of customer experience is a must.

Business Metrics

This is a big one. Improving a brand’s provided customer experience is an admirable goal, but CX program stakeholders and the C-suite are also interested in how these programs affect the bottom line.

Similarly to operational metrics, it’s important for CX practitioners to define how their initiative can positively impact several business metrics. A few of these metrics are particularly pertinent here—successfully telling the CX story means spelling out how customer experience increases brand revenue, lowers cost to serve, leads to better profitability, and finally, how it widens a company’s market share.

CX practitioners who can incorporate all four of these elements into their CX storytelling will have successfully made the case for experience initiatives’ positive impact on both a business’s standing and its interactions with customers. They can then be given additional leeway to keep improving those and other business elements through the power of customer experience.

Want to learn more about CX ROI, governance for success and more? Listen in to this latest webinar that includes brand new research from CX Network here!

One of the greatest threats that the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic poses to business owners is, well, the uncertainty of it all. We live in unprecedented times—COVID-19 has thrown a lot of the old world’s rules out and left brands wondering how to best serve customers as a viral disease rages the world over.

Though COVID-19 has changed all the rules, businesses needn’t necessarily change how they approach customer service and customer experience (CX) in these challenging times. Rather, the Coronavirus presents an opportunity to get back to the basics of providing a quality experience, and that’s addressing fundamental customer needs.

Identify, Prioritize, Address

As we discovered and outlined in our recent trends report on this subject, one of the ways that brands can stay afloat and even find continued success amid this pandemic is by identifying customers’ most fundamental needs, prioritizing such needs in business and CX plans, and then addressing them directly.

Though this strategy is nothing new to any company that wants to keep its doors open, much less take its vertical by storm, the pandemic has shined a light on one of customers’ most cherished experience needs: health and safety. If that desire wasn’t pertinent before the pandemic, it’s all the more so now.

According to our research, it’s vital that brands not only institute stringent health and safety measures, but also let customers know that those steps have been taken. This one-two strategy both ensures customer safety and reassures them that brands are taking the COVID-19 threat, and their own health, seriously.

A Serving of Success

As we discussed in our previous article on this topic, the restaurant industry is among the most favorably viewed verticals when it comes to Coronavirus responses. When the pandemic began to ramp up, restaurants made it clear that they took customer health seriously by closing dine-in services to help prevent the disease from spreading.

This action let customers know loud and clear that brands they cared about were reciprocating that emotional investment. Restaurants took things a step further by including social distancing measures in their other strategies, adapting curbside and third-party delivery services into their experiences to let customers keep coming without making them feel at risk.

As a result of taking these steps and emphasizing customer safety, restaurants rapidly became one of the most favorably viewed verticals in the country. Our research indicates that there’s a sizable divide between how favorably restaurants are viewed versus other industries that did not take similar safety measures as quickly, such as certain online-only retailers. Clearly, addressing fundamental customer needs makes all the difference, especially at a time like this.

Back to Basics

The strategy that we laid out at the beginning of this article still holds true even in the age of COVID-19. Brands can still find success in the middle of a pandemic by identifying their customers’ needs and desires, making those a priority in its grander strategy, and continually addressing and re-evaluating them. This strategy can prove successful for a brand come rain or shine, pandemic or none. Additionally, as we established with our restaurant example, can also mean the difference between meaningful success and rapid decline.

Want to learn more about how to survive and thrive in the age of COVID-19? Be sure to read our Special Edition CX Trends Report “Your Post-Pandemic Playbook” for additional tips and insights.

As businesses slowly reopen and some semblance of “normalcy” creeps back into customers’ lives, organizations are faced with an opportunity to define and find success in a post-COVID world. Customer experience (CX) programs are the best means of acquiring new customers, retaining previous ones, cross-selling within existing customer bases, and lowering cost to serve, among other benefits that brands will sorely need as they reestablish business as usual.

Whether companies are new to the CX world or looking to brush up their brand, it never hurts to (re)visit the building blocks of effective CX governance. A well-governed CX program can help brands achieve transformational success, a better bottom line, and an improved experience for their customers.

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at five key elements crucial to effective CX governance:

• Focus
• Alignment
• Visibility
• Accountability
• Management

Key #1: Focus

Seeking to deliver a better experience for customers and achieve meaningful transformation is all well and good, but what does that goal look like for your brand specifically? Brands may be united in their aspiration to deliver those goals, but getting there looks completely different in every industry from construction to coffee.

That’s why it’s important for brands to sit down and define specific, concrete goals that they want to achieve through the power of customer experience. Think about what you want your organization to accomplish—could the company stand to improve its customer retention? What about lowering cost to serve or getting better at closing the loop with customers?

Creating a focus like this enables organizations to build better CX programs and keep their eye on the ball as it grows and delivers results. It also allows brands to track their progress and introduce or subtract program elements as needed.

Key #2: Alignment

The next step companies need to take after defining goals for their CX program is to align the proper stakeholders and resources. For some brands, this might mean creating a CXO position or aligning customer service, operations and financial departments. For others, it could result in creating an entire CX team and enmeshing it alongside customer-facing departments. Either way, it’s important to get all the right players in the same room.

Aligning the right stakeholders also enables organizations to close the outer loop, i.e. adopt a company-wide culture dedicated to customer success and continuous improvement. Metrics like the Net Promoter Score and its underlying philosophy, the Net Promoter System, are also helpful here. 

Stakeholder alignment ultimately prevents customer experience from being relegated to one departmental silo and instills it as a fundamental value of doing business. This can help gear an entire organization toward continuous improvement and, ultimately, success.

Key #3: Visibility

There’s another reason why it pays to make CX an organization-wide effort: visibility. Visibility goes a long way toward inspiring employees and departments to work in concert toward an improved experience.

As we just discussed, keeping CX initiatives cooped up within a single team or department actually makes executing those initiatives harder. Sure, organizations might attain some results, but making initiatives visible across departments enables those other groups to help work toward more ambitious goals and, again, inspires all employees (customer-facing and otherwise) to work toward a better experience and transformative achievement.

Key #4: Accountability

Focus and alignment can help a CX program proliferate—accountability helps ensure that the work actually gets done. This point begs little elaboration, but once brands focus and establish both goals and KPIs for their CX program, the stakeholders involved need to hold each other accountable if they hope to hit those goals.

More specifically, CX teams should establish a regular cadence for meeting, reviewing metrics, and looking for ways to adapt today’s progress to tomorrow’s CX goals. It’s key that stakeholders review KPIs, customer data, and financial and operational metrics at these times.

Key #5: Management

Focus, alignment, visibility, and accountability all feed directly into this fifth and most important element. Effective CX governance means effective management, which means defining a specific focus for a CX program, aligning all of the key players and resources, allowing CX enthusiasm to flourish organization-wide, and keeping those aforementioned players accountable.

All of this is easier said than done, and there’s no silver bullet for the job, but great CX management comes from effectively governing its four preceding elements. Organizations that can pull that off will reap the success they’ll need to (re)establish a foothold in the post-COVID world and beyond.