What you need to know

• Executive buy-in and real understanding remains elusive to drive true 'customer-experience-is-king' mentality
• On the flip side, managing leadership expectations and over-enthusiasm is the other side the coin, say CX pros caught between a rock and a hard place.
• Cloud computing, SaaS and data analytics have accelerated the path from insight to action.
• The biggest shift is that companies can now act upon continuous insights, in almost real time.
• Now the challenge is to get the right balance between tumbleweed and overexcitement. 

CX factor

Customer experience professionals are growing increasingly frustrated by a lack of executive buy-in despite the emergence of CX as a product driver and organising principle for many organisations.

That’s the view of Bruce Temkin, co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) and the man often credited with kicking off the CX movement during his time as an analyst at Forrester Research 20 years ago. 

Temkin, also the head of Qualtrics XM Institute, spoke at the recent Qualtrics X4 conference in Salt Lake City. Mi3 tapped the great man (Temkin, not Mi3) to get his read on the evolution of the CX discipline. We also tested his views with brands at the show... lifting the lid on a CX version of Pandora's box.

Sweet shop

Penny Stoker, Talent Leader, executive functions at EY, getting engagement from company leaders isn't the issue, instead it is getting them to drill down on the most impactful issues.

Leaders often want to get their hands onto every single issue they can find, she said. "So it's keeping them focused on what's going to have the biggest impact and using that data, [to demonstrate] if you do this, this is the outcome that you can expect. It's good keeping a focus, because sometimes the data is really overwhelming."

"Do you worry about the one or two people over here who are really struggling? Or do you worry about the 90 people over here, where if you tweak one little thing, [that] is going to have a big impact? And being able to sort through that is probably part of our problem to be honest," per Stoker.

KFC COO, Rob Swain, currently rolling out a global experience management platform to the company's 27,000 frontline staff, is one of the C-suite execs that is entirely focused – because experience puts more money in the till, and franchisees know it. The challenge is making all things equally better.

"From our point of view, [CX] is about growth. We just had our international franchise convention, and there's widespread excitement from our franchisees. The reason is that it's fundamentally linked to growth. And if you think of it from a franchise point of view, what's most important to our franchisees around the world is being part of a global organisation that's in growth".

According to Swain: "There is a really direct correlation between investment in this area, both on the employee side and from a guest experience. We've got widespread support, we're just trying to make sure that we've got good governance and uniformity. That's probably the biggest challenge that we're facing." 

Data driven actions

For executives like Swain and Stoker the rise of marketing technology, as well as sophisticated data analytics, has made the delivery of more sophisticated experiences possible. 

But the biggest shift is the move away from one-off, satisfaction feedback surveys, reckons Temkin. “We have moved from passive feedback where we didn't take action, to the way we characterise a customer program today – which is much more continuous [responses to] actionable insights from customers.”

Acting on that real-time feedback loop, he said, is the difference between talking about CX, and driving top- and bottom line growth.

For years, Temkin says there was a disconnect between what businesses understood about their customer experiences, and what they did with that understanding. Now they have no excuse.

“Early on, a lot of the people who were responsible [for gathering customer insights] were in market research. Structurally, market researchers are tasked with answering questions the other parts of the organisation ask them. But often that’s where the customer feedback loop ended," he said.

“There wasn't a capacity for change management built-in. Market research organisations do not have a change management capacity, function or belief. But customer experience organisations recognise themselves as being in charge of the change.”

Today, he says: “More evolved customer experience organisations recognise that it's their responsibility to drive change and to drive action.”

While CX is now mainstream in businesses, it is only in recent years that companies even started recognising the role of CX professionals says Temkin. He says the growth of the CX discipline over the last five years has been meteoric after two decades in gestation as the "voice of the customer" programs.

“At our first big customer experience event in about 2008 I was asked a question about voice of the customer programs." He answered that there are "five core elements," but acknowledges now he was ad-libbing a bit.

"I'll never forget it. I've never seen everyone in an audience take up their pens and start writing answers. And that's in that moment. I realised just how powerful the CX movement was going to be because there was such a desire to understand the customer.”

Those five points have proven remarkably resilient, per Temkin, so here they are:

• Relationship tracking
• Interaction monitoring
• Continuous listening
• Project infusion
• Periodic immersion. 

Nail those today, said Temkin, and action the insights, and growth will follow: "It’s amazing how much of it still holds true."

Game-changing

Fifteen years on the emergence of technologies such as cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and data analytics have brought the customer experience philosophy to life – giving those committed to CX an increasing array of grunt work short cuts unavailable to the pioneers.

“The availability of data, the ability to use data to communicate insights and to trigger action has been game changing in terms of embedding customer experience in the operations of organisation," per Temkin. "On top of that, we now talk about XM (experience management) operating frameworks. It's technology, competency and culture."

There is a lot of talk at board level about organisations being customer-centric... but talk is just that.

"The core to me is in the competencies that matter," says Temkin. These include the development of personas, journey mapping and experience design. "Twenty years ago, no one even knew what those words were.”

No guarantees

The gains of the last decade, however, are not locked in. Temkin's alma mater at Forrester Research identified some serious backsliding last year, particularly in the US.

According to firm's 2022 Customer Experience Index (CX Index) rankings, CX quality fell for 19 per cent of brands — the worst performance since the inception of the survey. "In 2022, only 3 per cent of US companies are customer-obsessed — putting customers at the centre of their leadership, strategy, and operations — a decrease of 7 percentage points from the prior year," per the report.

The analysts said CX quality has fallen back to early 2020 levels, reversing gains made in 2021, and that the drop stems from companies’ waning focus on customers – even though customers expect more from digital and hybrid experiences.