10 TIPS FOR DELIVERING CX TRANSFORMATION SUCCESS
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Minimising CX failure
Many CX and transformation programs often fail to deliver the step- change and ROI they promise. Research by consulting firm McKinsey estimates that 70% of large-scale change programs fail to reach their stated goals.
This failure rate is not due to a lack of ambition or innovative ideas, but how the programs are executed. Fortunately, many of these challenges can be easily overcome.
Below are my top 10 tips for CX transformation success.
1. Define your project scope from the start
Before you begin a CX transformation program, take the time to understand and define the purpose of the CX program. Some points to consider when planning a CX transformation program:
What the goals and objectives are?
What are the changes you want to see?
What are the critical success factors?
What customer segments are you targeting?
Are you looking at the whole customer journey or a particular aspect moment within it?
Are you looking for a wholesale transformation or optimisation within a specific area?
Discuss these points with stakeholders at the start of a CX project will help align expectations, set boundaries and define what success looks like.
2. Get stakeholder buy-in
CX programs involve bringing together cross-functional teams, changing mindsets and operational practices. Risks include conflicting stakeholder agendas, timelines, differences of opinion and resistance to change.
Having the support and sponsorship of the senior leadership team invested in CX programs is essential in helping overcome these barriers and aids the delivery of a successful CX program.
Additionally, access to and commitment from key stakeholders is critical, not only in terms of gaining access to people with valuable customer insights but also dedicating staff with the right skills and expertise to help implement your CX solutions.
3. Develop a CX vision
To gain endorsement from senior leadership and stakeholder buy-in, you need a compelling vision that people can get excited about, one that adds value to your organisation and helps set direction when it comes to deciding how to improve the customer experience.
A CX vision is an aspirational future state that's just out of reach. It's a statement (and sometimes it's little more than a statement) that should excite the people in your organisation about what's ahead and motivate them to achieve it. For example:
“To be the best quick service restaurant experience”
“To delight and value each guest with the finest airport experience in the world”
4. Help manage the change
Most people aren’t good with change and CX programs often encounter resistance because of it. Fortunately, there are tactics to help overcome these barriers.
Acknowledge that there will be opposition to change. Listen to their concerns and be pro- active in addressing them to provide the best chance for success.
Build a supportive team environment; create a culture of respect, encouragement, discipline, drive & delivery to achieve your goals together. Establish a sense of ownership, not just accountability; involve team members in setting directions and making decisions. Celebrate your successes and learn from your failures.
5. Deliver quick wins early
Look for opportunities that can deliver revenue growth and reduce costs immediately. This helps demonstrate the value of the CX program and will build confidence and momentum within the organisation to tackle medium-term initiatives to innovate and change the trajectory of the customer experience.
Start by addressing customer pain points, reducing negative experiences before going on to design experiences that wow customers and create advocates.
E.G. providing online FAQs to reduce Customer Service calls, reduces costs and may lead to repeat sales, increasing revenue.
6. Focus on creating value
For CX programs to be successful, they need to prove that they delivering business value. Unless this happens, appetite for further CX investment is unlikely to occur.
To prove the value of your CX program, you must first define what “value” looks like to your stakeholders.
Then you can develop a balanced scorecard that measures both the customer and business value derived from your CX initiatives. This allows you to test new ideas, understand which ideas yield the best value and prove the worth of superior customer experience.
7. Prioritise the right CX solutions
When determining which CX solutions to take forwards it can be easy for subjectivity, popularity and individual stakeholder agendas to influence the decision-making process.
To avoid this, employing a decision making framework can help ask the right questions, remove bias and appraise what the right solutions are to implement.
The DVF framework is one such approach which balances the desirability, feasibility and viability of CX ideas to help find the most valuable CX solution.
8. Test, Learn & Iterate
Once a CX solution has been identified, it can be easy to rush straight to implementation. But doing so without prototyping and testing the solution limit's the solutions potential and increases the risk of failure.
Successful CX programs use prototypes to gain feedback, understand the feasibility of your idea, and optimise the value for customers.
A prototype could be as simple as a sketch or description of a user journey which is tested on customers. This iterative process lets you understand the desirability and effectiveness of solutions quickly, with minimal investment. Learnings can be applied and re-tested to help refine your solutions.
9. Consider how you scale CX solutions
While CX transformation needs to be broken up into manageable work efforts, setting up for scale should be the goal from day one. For example, if you have been transforming customer onboarding for a bank’s transaction accounts, what elements could be carried over to their credit card and personal loan onboarding customer journeys too?
By scaling CX solutions (where applicable) you can produce greater value early on and provide the success to build momentum and secure ongoing support from your business.
10. Over communicate
Large CX initiatives often fall short of desired outcomes because of basic miscommunication or misunderstanding around exportations or new concepts that are being introduced.
Consciously over-communicating is an important strategy for sharing insights that may benefit the wider organisation, keeping stakeholders up-to-date on progress and broadcasting success.
Communicating the results back across the business helps make the CX transformation begin to feel more tangible, which in turn builds support and momentum that can help companies reach a tipping point where a new way of doing things becomes the norm.
