Getting stakeholder support in your CX initiatives: measuring bad CX – Part 2/3

Great CX drives great metrics across the whole customer journey – creating excitement, word of mouth promotions, and repeat use. However, a study by Forrester, commissioned by Capgemini Invent, found that although 86%¹ of customers are willing to pay more for brands that understand them, many organizations are not making the right investments to deliver valuable experiences to their customers. Stakeholders and executives faced with making investment decisions in a new world of online reviews, multiple product options, and low barriers to switching, must be able to understand the ability of their brand to predict, personalize, and deliver against the wants and needs of their customers. Creating a framework for that level of detailed, top-down analysis is essential.

Measuring bad CX

Though research proves that the repercussions of bad CX are a great motivator to gain stakeholder support, the metrics to measure the cost are often lacking or misplaced, causing a rift in perception and management.

Neary 50% of companies do not have the right measurement tools or were unable to accurately measure the metrics of their chief concern relating to bad CX. For example, 73% of companies noted damage to brand image as the foremost downside of bad CX, but only 56% were able to accurately measure it.

Customer satisfaction scores, such as CSAT or NPS, will tell you how your clients value the product, service or brand. However, it won’t give you the insights into the specific experiences that your customers find valuable. “First, you must understand in what moments across their journey does the experience you are delivering exceed or fail to meet your customer’s expectations. Understanding where customer experiences do not support the brand promise is critical, and being able to bring accuracy in such metrics is crucial to drive a sense of urgency into CX investments. Capgemini’s Engagement Blueprint ties in the brand promise, customer journey, and employee journey with business capabilities, platforms, data, and technologies. This unique approach provides a dynamic, quantitative measurement of bad CX and how bad CX damages the brand. It shows where in the journey and across the organization improvements are necessary and should be prioritized.”

Engaging the stakeholders

The fear of the cost of bad CX is a motivator. However, the incentives gained from the positive impact of great CX cannot be ignored. In fact, they need to be presented side by side to be truly effective. The best strategy to obtain the support of management and stakeholders is to use the cost of bad CX as the primary motivator. Highlight the potential impact, such as reduced share of wallet, higher customer acquisition costs, and increased churn, as a key tactic to get executives’ attention and create urgency around CX improvements. Once you have their attention, follow with the positive outcomes of delivering great CX, specifically around the impact on primary business objectives, such as improved customer loyalty, brand perception, and competitive differentiation.

Understanding the big picture

Capgemini’s Engagement Blueprint facilitates and drives stakeholder support and approval in CX initiatives. “Its visual representation allows stakeholders to easily understand where in the customer’s journey the touchpoint or moment is negatively impacting the brand, highlights priority areas for focused CX programs, and provides metrics to benchmark success,” stated Daniel Davenport, Senior Director, Capgemini Invent. “And, the Engagement Blueprint combines a view of how the brand, customer, partners, and employees interact to deliver a product or service. It maps how data, applications, and networks support those journeys.” An Engagement Blueprint creates a current-state snapshot of a business process so that executives can identify and prioritize the most impactful opportunities to drive better CX.

Once those opportunities have consensus support, KPIs can be assigned, roadmaps can be developed, and a future-state blueprint can be created that aligns interests around a common goal, with shared CX objectives that have numerically defined impacts on sales and revenue growth.

Getting stakeholder buy-in requires being able to measure complex brand interactions across multiple inputs that all contribute to the overall CX of a company’s products and services. It is critical for those responsible for garnering executive support to be well prepared to paint a full picture of the company’s product delivery experience that ties prioritized opportunities for improvement to sales and revenue impact. The Engagement Blueprint is a key tool Capgemini Invent uses with its clients to uncover and understand those drivers and create roadmaps and a future state vision to realize greater profitability through better CX.

Capgemini Invent, a marketing and technology partner to industry-leading organizations, helps assess CX shortfalls, and then strategizes, devises and transforms customer engagement. Connect with Suzanne Lentz to learn more.

In the next post, discover how to receive full executive support to be able to transform your CX.

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¹All statistics are derived from the Capgemini Invent–Forrester thought-leadership paper, The Cost of Bad CX.
² Forrester report “Improving CX Through Business Discipline Drives Growth.”
³Loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains. Loss aversion was first demonstrated by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Source: D. Kahneman and A.
Tversky, “Choices, Values, and Frames,” American Psychologist. 39 (4): 341–350. doi:10.1037/0003-
066x.39.4.341, 1984.