The Top Five Reasons CX Programmes Can Fail

Introducing a CX programme to a business is a huge commitment requiring ample financial backing and effort. The failure rate of IT-enabled business initiatives is 60%, but if you consider the following points, your CX programme doesn’t need to be part of this statistic.

1. Not aligning with other stakeholders in your business – There needs to be a company-wide buy-in for a CX programme to be successful. From executives who are looking for a financial return from the programme to the IT team who will help implement the programme and to the employees who determine the customer experience from ground level. Your financial team must also be on board to help you measure how your programme is bringing value to the business. Everyone must be invested in the programme’s success so that you can reach a common goal of improving upon CX in your business.

2. Ignoring the employee experience – Of course a CX programme is primarily about the customer, but you must consider those engaging with the customer when deciding on how to implement your programme. It shouldn’t be a burden to your employees, and when your employees feel empowered and happy your customers will too.

3. Focussing too much on metrics – The singular goal of your CX programme should not be to improve your NPS, CSAT or CES scores. Higher scores should be considered the result of a successful CX programme, but they do not necessarily translate to improved customer experience or benefit your business. Intimidating your employees or gaming the system to get better scores isn’t going to improve the customer’s journey with your business and will render your programme useless.

4. Not integrating data – Looking at feedback in isolation from the other data you have about your customers isn’t going to give you nearly as much information about your customer experience as it would if you integrated your CRM and other business systems into your CX programme. Customer feedback can be useful on its own, but there’s only so much insight that you can gain from a survey. To accomplish a more robust analysis of your customers’ experiences, you need to have the capability to readily and easily analyse it in conjunction with other valuable data sources (transaction data, demographic data, contact information, etc.).

5. Not taking action – There is no point in asking your customers for feedback and collecting all the data that comes with the implementation of a CX programme if you aren’t going to do something with this information. You have a treasure trove of data at your disposal with which you can innovate change. Don’t just use the information to make comparisons about staff members or locations – use it to change your system and business model to improve CX and profitability. If you don’t use the data productively, the CX endeavour is futile.

There’s no reason you can’t have a successful CX programme, but you should consider these factors at the outset of your initiative to maximise and guarantee success.