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How to demonstrate a measurable CX impact

Businesses are battling with buy-in to fix CX because ROI isn’t understood and leaders are not sure what's involved and where to start.
Kirsten Doyle
By Kirsten Doyle, ITWeb contributor.
Johannesburg, 08 Oct 2020
Yugeshree Frylinck.
Yugeshree Frylinck.

When it comes to customer experience (CX) issues, product development defers to marketing, and both tend to focus on features and specifications. Similarly, operations concerns itself mainly with quality timeliness and costs, as well as customer experience personnel.

“Businesses tend to concentrate on unfolding transactions, but not on connecting the proceeding, or the issues following them,” says Yugeshree Frylinck, customer experience officer, founder and managing consultant of The CX Group, speaking at the ITWeb CX Summit this week. “They don't generally connect the entire journey, which is one of the big obstructions that businesses have not overcome.”

At the same time, she says executives have huge aspirations when it comes to customer experience. “Everybody wants to be a leader, but some companies don't understand why they should worry about customer experience and think it should organically happen within the organisation.”

"You have to start with the meaningful impact opportunities, and then the measurables."

Others, says Frylinck, collect and quantify data, but they don't circulate the findings, and then still others do the measuring and the distribution but they fail to make anyone responsible for putting the information to use and make the necessary differences at the customer's moments of truth.

“We are also battling with buy-in to fix CX because ROI isn’t understood and leaders are not sure what's involved and don't know where to start. Leaders are not willing to take the risk and don't trust CX programmes. If we could prove an ROI it would make it easier.”

Business case for CX

Her advice to the CX professional is not to be afraid of putting a business case together. 

"It is your responsibility, and you will heighten the chance of success at getting a seat at the table to present your programme with a solid business case and if you are able to prove the ROI."

Frylinck says there are two things that make a good business case in terms of demonstrating the ROI of CX initiatives. 

“You need to demonstrate a measurable impact and it needs to be meaningful for the decision makers. We all tempted to start with the numbers, the measurables first, but what we found is that you have to start with the meaningful impact opportunities, and then the measurables.”

Her first recommendation is to find the anchors that matter to the executives. Second is to identify the business life stages, which will help define key goals depending where the business is in its natural growth progression. The last recommendation is to identify the passions that drive the CEO.

As much as executives claim that CX is important, there is always something that is more burning.

“A start-up business would have different goals than a mature business, and might want to start looking at things such as the number of customers and reducing acquisition costs, because getting people in the door is what is important at this point.”

She says once you have focused on the goals and understood where your business is from a maturity perspective and a life cycle perspective, then you can also identify the key goals that are going to matter to your executive team.

“And lastly, it’s important to understand what matters the most, and what is most meaningful to executives. When dealing with senior executives we often forget that they are still human beings, and understanding what makes them tick will also help anchor the business case in a much more meaningful way.”

As much as executives claim that CX is important, there is always something that is more important, and more burning. “You need to shout from the highest possible levels or highest balconies in your business, using business metrics to drive urgency to change CX.”

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