How to engage your organization around the customer experience

Published by Forsta

February 9, 2022January 27, 2023

To be successful, a CX program needs engagement from all sides and all levels of the business. It requires the careful selection of cross-functional champions who can rally up the troops around the customer experience in their respective departments. Crucially, it relies on executive buy-in, preferably from the start, as well as mid-management and frontline engagement.

Easy, right? For some organizations, it can be. Particularly those that have customer centricity at the core to their company culture. These organizations have many of the pre-requisites for delivering positive customer experiences such as a shared vision or coordinated efforts. In many others though, it feels instead like the proverbial herding of cats.

So how do you ensure engagement across the organization?

It’s relatively straightforward for a CX professional to understand the economic value of increasing or decreasing a particular CX metric, otherwise known as financial linkage. What’s critical here is to interpret movement in this metric vis a vis different business KPIs. For example, if you use Net Promoter Score as your core CX metric, and you know the customer lifetime value (CLV) of a promoter or a detractor, it’s not that hard to correlate a higher NPS with increased CLV across your business. What’s harder is to operationalize this process on an on-going basis, and across all key functions. A higher NPS generally means lower cost to serve, but a specific correlation can be worked out by the fact that detractors are much more likely to make a complaint. This logic can also be applied to customer acquisition as promoters’ positive word-of-mouth praise can generate more revenue.

The first recommendation is to understand what business KPIs are already in place, and work out the right way to correlate CX metrics with them. You’ll find it much easier to grab the attention of key stakeholders when you speak their language, and help them reach their objectives. And they’re much more likely to get involved in your improvement plans, since at the end of the day, it’s all about taking action and measuring the results of these actions.