Why CX strategy should underpin your business strategy

our customers’ experiences are centred around feelings and emotions, but if not understood properly, CX might be based on your organisation’s internal perceptions.

This problem occurs when decisions are made based purely on what internal stakeholders, directors, managers and employees within your company believe, rather than from an understanding about what your customer actually thinks and feels is important to them. If your business makes CX decisions based on internal influences and biases, the likely result may be a dilution of the solution or design that was intended.

If you are a retailer, for example, you may have a host of different customer touchpoints across your organisation, occurring in high-street stores, call centres, email, mobile, website and your ecommerce platform. Your digital department might have prioritised to invest in an advanced customer marketing platform to increase the business’s ability to drive an increase in targeted communication to customers. They may do this based on commercial pressures and a belief that this technology is the future of retail.

However, doing so might have completely missed the point – customers may have been more frustrated with the search function of the retailer’s website, preventing them from making a purchase in the first place. So, while the organisation is focused on delivering a new solution, the customer issues have not been solved, and the likely impact will be that a poor experience is compounded further.

Customer Insight should be used to inform decision making, prioritisation and improvement activity. Feedback from customers is the only way to truly understand what your customers think, and how they feel.

Customer research can be obtained from a variety of different sources, using different approaches and tools, and can be deployed as an intervention to gain specific insight when needed, or more robustly as part of an ongoing Customer Insights capability.

But thinking in more pragmatic terms, you can prioritise specific elements of your business’s CX and focus on the specific areas in the customer journey that need special attention.

Differentiated digital experiences must look beyond functionality. You can do this by building a CX that is relevant for your organisation, your brand and your customers, all within a context that optimises the experience at every interaction. Building a deeper understanding of customer behaviour, motivations and insight helps you make more informed decisions.

Organisations that get this right are those that adopt best practice approaches combining CX and UX disciplines in a relevant and contextual manner. They deliver a consistent approach for improving CX, delivering differentiated CX intentionally, rather than leaving it to chance.

According to commentary from Forrester, unmet customer expectations are resulting in customer churn. Historically, lack of digital transformation gains translates to loss of market share and traditional mature business models are failing. In contrast, companies with the strongest CX across the multi-channel retain an average of 89% of their customers.

The external environment is constantly evolving, and with increased competition and heightened customer expectations driving the need for ongoing change, organisations must innovate and find ways to improve Customer Experiences with a rapid path to value. To keep pace your organisation must invest in CX and UX to build a design strategy that can be leveraged consistently to improve brand loyalty and commercial returns and deliver CX improvements.

CX is a Darwinian competition where only the fittest brands that evolve beyond their competitors will thrive. Your brand’s survival depends on CX becoming a core element of your marketing and business strategy.