How to Obtain Executive Buy-In for Added CX Initiatives
Whether you haven’t done much to change your customer experience (CX) programme in a while and you’re ready to take it to another level or you are just at the outset of building one, you’re going to need buy-in from executive management before you take the steps to improve your CX programme. This will require you to convey the value and advantage of evolving your CX programme overtime. This can prove difficult when making your case to busy executives with other priorities on their minds. Below, we outline tips that can enable you to be better equipped to get executive buy-in and bring them into a mindset of being customer-centric too.
1. Tell a CX story
While you could just prepare a slideshow showing statistics and metrics that don’t do much to set you apart from other departments, you have much more interesting data to hand if you are painting a picture of the value of CX initiatives. Through storytelling, you can demonstrate the importance of CX programmes and the impact it has had on your business operations and customer experience. Highlight specific customer experiences as case studies to show the value of collecting feedback and how customers are interacting with your business. Also do your best to showcase how teams and employees benefit from your CX initiatives. This will make your argument all the more compelling and memorable and really bring forward the importance of customer-centricity to your exec team.
2. Show quantifiable results
While the prospect of improving CX may be all that you need to leverage some executives, many are driven by returns and profitability. Speaking to them in a language they understand can be the best way to convince them that your CX programme is worthy of further investment. Track your metrics and performance and compare your business to that of competitors. Better yet, while calculating the ROI of your CX programme can be a tricky task to master, it is a really useful method for proving the value of your programme to your executive team and why further investment is worthwhile. We did some research into calculating the ROI of a voice of the customer programme which you may find useful as you try to obtain more executive buy-in.
3. Share the good and the bad
Be honest with your team and show them both positive and negative feedback. When presenting to executives, it might be tempting to sugarcoat feedback so that it seems like all programmes are running smoothly and CX measurements are on the right track. Alternatively, it might be tempting to show them a lot of negative feedback so that they understand the urgency of further investment into your CX programme.
Best practice would be to show them a balanced, holistic view of your customer experience performance. Show them where you are doing your best and where you need to improve. Help them to understand the value of the data you are presenting them with and how an investment will help you to tip the scales to bring about more positive experiences or allow you to do more analysis to understand the driving forces behind customer experiences in your business.
4. Connect your exec team with realtime customer feedback
Rather than just sharing weekly reports with updates on performance, show your executive team what customers are saying in realtime if you can. Give them direct access to your voice of the customer tool and teach them how to use the dashboards. They will be able to track performance daily and can become a part of their routine. This will also equip them with a greater understanding of the value of your CX programme and they will be motivated to make it even better. Having feedback at their fingertips will help them to become customer-obsessed and be driven to improve your NPS, CSAT and other metrics. They’ll be hooked! Trust us :)