What are the seven biggest paint points for Customer Experience (survey)?
I recently ran a short survey looking for the key pain points for Customer Experience (CX). It was not a statistically significant survey, but hoped the results would be a valuable addition to the conversation about the future of CX.
The just below 30 responses could be categorized into seven categories. There is no order of importance.
Gap 1: Having a high quality strategy including the customer leading to great execution
The feedback indicates a gap both in what the strategy focuses on (the customer is lacking from the business strategy) and the strategy’s ability to give good guidance to the execution.
“My biggest pain points includes having a proper strategy so that I can test, analyze, interpret and learn, and then refine/repeat”
“idealizing the customer and not putting him in touch and involve him/her in the process of marketing strategy”
“Honestly, I feel we do it very well, for a long time. I believe key successful factors are: Top Management knowledge about CX and it’s relevance for business strategy”
Gap 2. Having an aligned organization (around the customer)
Serving the customer is a cross-functional effort, but many organizations are siloed and not designed for work across domains. The customer has the ability to be the connective tissue that connects and aligns the organization.
“Silos: expertise, responsibilities and knowledge dispersed throughout the organization”
“Cross-team collaboration isn’t always as smooth as it could be”“If one issue has the potential to unite the c-suite to act in concert, establishing trust based relationships with customers stands at the top.” - IBM C-Suite Study
Gap 3. Data bias and wrong insights (and how to get good at it)
There is a brewing uncertainty in regard to the quality of the data and insights we are using to base our decisions on. Respondents highlight the lack of qualitative data or the lack of methodologies and processes to capture the right data and make sense of it in the right way.
“The anthropology dimension of CX is missing. In the name of data driven decision making, we use huge dashboards full of figures without trying to conclude insights. Therefore, no decision can be made.”
“We tend to ignore the feedback of the sales force, as now we expect dashboards to provide the necessary information instead of the customer facing employees”
“Methodologies and structure regarding customer insight”
Gap 4. Ability to communicate a unified (across products and marketing etc.) value proposition to customers clearly
The customer interacts with us across several domains and experiences. How can we make sure that we have a consistent, concerted and clear value proposition to the customer across all our connections?
“The pain point is the understanding about how to consistently and quickly let the customers understand the value we can provide.”
“It could be interesting to collaborate with product and understand how to link marketing and product strategies to make them more aligned.”
Gap 5. Delivering on both efficiency gains and new value
Teams are pushed to deliver on higher NPS and CSAT(1) scores while asked at the same time to identify and deliver new value. Especially in projects including Artificial Intelligence the focus is on how to deliver the same outputs cheaper and faster, while the team feels less supported in serving the human at the other end.
“ figuring out how to bring in AI and automation without losing the human touch and empathy that differentiates us from others”
“making sure we stay efficient without sacrificing the quality and care our customers expect.”
Gap 6. Over-saturation of CX, unclear value
Many have experienced projects that are CX in name only. Where the term is used to put a spin on something that its not (e.g. a channel optimization process or sales performance improvement). How can CX more clearly show what good looks like and help distinguish what is not cx?
“Over saturation of the term ‘CX’ and too many stakeholders unwilling to continue to support CX and customer centric thinking based on poor experiences of previous ‘CX initiatives’ that over promised and under delivered.”
“CX is perceived as measuring NPS and CSAT. .. use CX tools for internal evaluation rather than understanding the customer.”
Gap 7. Getting to quality customer and user experience
Serving the customer demands commitment and effort. Sometimes the resources (or the business case) isn’t there to support the investment. How can we get better at proving the return-on-investment?
“often we know what the customer wants but are not willing to “go the extra mile” to give them what they need”
“the amount of creative assets required to deliver quality experiences — little amount of companies set up to implement innovative CX”
