7 steps to navigate the changing CX landscape

The pandemic is forcing businesses to rethink how they approach and invest in CX

Business leaders have been turning to technology to improve customer interactions for years now, but the pandemic has put customer experience (CX) transformation into overdrive. CX leaders are being forced to rethink how they approach and invest in CX.

CX is critical to every business, but before the benefits of a successful CX strategy can be felt, business leaders must be capable of quantifying and measuring CX. Customer satisfaction (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS) and customer effort score (CES) are important KPIs, but because they do not directly translate to cost savings, these metrics often do not resonate with executives outside of their organization.

There are three primary areas to measure to demonstrate how CX drives business results: 

1. Revenue generation
2. Cost avoidance
3. Cost savings

The third area—cost savings—is where the ebook How to Prioritize CX in a Cost-Cutting Environment places its focus. CX leaders must be able to draw a clear line between CX initiatives and cost savings in order to succeed in a cost-cutting environment.

Building a business case for CX

To successfully navigate the changing CX landscape, there are several steps you should take to build an effective business case. This starts with developing an understanding of “customer costs” and how to use them to build a simple benefit and ROI model that drives your business:

• Step 1: Understand interaction trends.
  Interactions between customers and agents generate rich data that is stored in the contact center. Analyze and develop an understanding of these trends.
• Step 2: Assign costs to these trends.
  Assign a cost to each of these interaction types by multiplying the number of calls by the cost per call.
  
• Step 3: Get to the “why.”
  Once common trends or themes for calls have been identified (step 1), it’s important to understand the root cause of why they persist.
  
• Step 4: Design an action plan.
  When you’ve identified the root causes of common customer issues, create an action plan to address them.
  
• Step 5: Make reasonable assumptions.
  After developing a bird’s eye view of common customer problems and identifying the root cause for each, prepare a reasonable assumption as to how many of these problems can be solved (thereby reducing the total amount of calls coming in).
  
• Step 6: Establish the projections.
  Now, it’s time to calculate the potential benefit of solving these common customer problems by reducing the frequency of incoming calls related to them.
  
• Step 7: Measure the impact.
  Finally, measure the impact after putting this plan in place.

While doubling down on the benefits of CX and tying it to measurable ROI are the first steps in building a compelling and justifiable business case for continued CX investment, they can only take an organization so far without the right technology in place.

If you want to learn more about each of these steps and how to build a quantifiable business case for CX—as well as how to identify and adopt the right technologies to execute on it—download the How to prioritize CX in a cost-cutting environment ebook.