Why a Customer Experience Program?

Companies invest billions each year in customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), financial, operational, market research and other technology and services programs. 

Yet, these investments, although still valuable for many reasons, fall short in revealing the overall impact of the customer experience (CX), and then helping companies to managing the customer experience as a formal process, and like a formal asset. 

According to analyst firm Gartner, 89% of CEO's believe customer experience will be their primary basis for competition in the future. Research from MaritzCX reveals that 87% of companies are in the lower stages of CX maturity, yet those companies that have invested in CX processes and aligned their businesses around CX achieve 3X greater financial performance and customer retention results than those of lower ranked companies. (MaritzCX CXEvolution study, 2016) 

Many companies use the customer experience as a primary tool to influence key business outcomes. 

• A leading medical diagnostics company used it’s CX programs to discover that nearly one quarter of its top 200 accounts were not likely to renew, representing $85 million dollars at risk. It quickly implemented actions to reach out and recover these accounts. 

• A top healthcare company was suffering due to a lack of any partner and patient feedback company wide. Once they implemented a system-wide program, they discovered many areas that needed immediate improvement – and that could impact millions in annual revenue. They improved their promoter scores by 40 percent – over 85 percent of clients said they would recommend the company – and changed the internal processes so staff and sales would ‘swarm’ negative feedback instead of never even seeing it. 

• A leading software provider used their CX program to adjust pricing companywide. New pricing had been rolled out and their channel didn’t like it. Yet, management was not aware of the magnitude of the backlash until the CX program results started rolling in. Changes were swiftly made – with impacts potentially in the hundreds of millions of dollars if no action was taken – and their loyal reseller based loved the fact that they listened; they gave a standing ovation at their global conference just weeks after the pricing changes had been rolled out. 

Managing the customer experience like a formal asset is a powerful way to improve the outcomes for retention and growth goals. Regardless of your industry, it's important to have a full CX program with data collection, feedback collection and analytics all providing the fuel that creates insights and actions. Once you get taste of watching all of this highly-relevant CX data flowing in real-time, you won't want to go back to the way thing used to be.

NOTE: who buys CX? Typically it's people with the title of CX, or voice of the customer or market research. But, more and more, it's people with the title of operations, services, support, marketing and sales.