in recent years,organizations across sectors have been forced to overhaul many of their processes as the importance of CX has taken center stage. largely due to the rise in “CX native” companies, customers’ expectations across areas like getting immediate help, maintaining control, and personalization have grown. meanwhile, privacy concerns have increased, social media has enabled a direct platform to voice experiences, and the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way customers want to interact with companies.

for companies to succeed—and outperform their peers—in this environment of constant change, a culture of customer-centricity is critical. to upgrade your CX you can start prioritizing around these 6 areas –

1. failure to link CX to value

many customer-experience transformations stall because senior leaders fail to directly link the efforts with strategic priorities, such as revenue growth by product or geography. without clearly showing how a better experience will drive increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and attraction, and thereby better business results, the effort is likely to seem frivolous and to lose executive sponsorship.

2. fragmentation

some customer experience leaders lose precious time by trying to fix everything at once. a proliferation of small, siloed initiatives that lack focus dilutes impact, resulting in incremental change, at best.

3. solving for touchpoints

many companies fall into the trap of solving issues around individual touchpoints—a call to customer care or a marketing email—instead of considering customer experience the way customers do, that is, looking across the entire journey a customer takes to achieve a goal, such as solving a billing issue. addressing touchpoint-level customer pain points without understanding how the pieces fit together often leads to incremental CX changes that don’t get to the root of the problem.

4. limited creativity

many companies struggle to systematically come up with bold, innovative solutions for customer challenges and to bolster a culture that encourages such creative thinking. It’s not uncommon for a business to reject new ideas because “we have tried that before,” or “that’s not how we do things,” or “we’ll never get the funding for that.” that kind of thinking causes employees to limit their creativity to safe, incremental improvements. to truly transform, a different way of thinking is needed.

5. sidelining customers upfront

failure to seek feedback out of a desire to save time can keep companies from testing solutions with customers, and seeking it too late to make real changes can lead to inferior products and lackluster financial results.

6. CX on its own island

ensuring an excellent customer experience requires a cross-functional mindset and a customer-centric culture. it is not just the CX team that drives customer experience, nor is it just the customer-facing front line. looking deeply at a customer journey reveals that many employees, even those who will never see a customer, affect it.

the opportunities to transform customer experience—and thereby improve profits, customer loyalty, and employee engagement—are numerous and can be revolutionary for an organization. identifying and grasping those opportunities requires an organization’s leadership to clearly articulate the value of CX, encourage agility and design thinking, and empower every employee to contribute to a better customer experience.

this is an extract from the article from

https://www.mckinsey.com/