Why Customer Experience Transformations Fail

Do you feel like you’re not making the progress in your customer experience (CX) transformation efforts that you thought or hoped you would by now?

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You started years (not months—it’s a journey) ago, but you don't think your organization has evolved.

What’s the reason for that?

I’ve seen several posts lately about CX being all talk and no action—that it’s a lot of effort to pull off a customer experience transformation (and no doubt, it is!) with little to no return.

Nothing has changed. Lots of effort has been put forth to improve the customer experience, with no apparent improvements. Companies are still treating customers poorly. And customers are still complaining.

In other words, customer experience improvement efforts are failing.

I have a couple of thoughts on what’s causing this. We advocate, as customer experience professionals, getting to the root cause of issues. That’s the only way we can address this issue. So here goes. Here’s where I think the root causes lie.

Executives aren’t aligned

Executives aren’t aligned with the customer experience transformation journey—or amongst themselves, i.e., with each other.

Unfortunately, most executive teams are not in alignment; they don’t work as a team. Instead, they function more as a “working group” or as a “committee” than as a team. If they’re in alignment, they make a decision, support it and each other, and champion the decision down into their organizations.

Worse yet, they aren’t aligned about customer experience transformation efforts and what that means for their employees, their customers, and their business. I’ve seen it. If they’re not all on board, if they don’t all agree that the purpose of the business is create and to nurture customers, then there’s a lot of short-term thinking that focuses on the numbers rather than a long-term vision to transform the culture and the business.

I’m sure some folks will say that’s all fluff. But executive alignment alone is not the problem. It’s definitely one of the problems. One big problem.

CX is not a standalone effort

Listen: It’s all CX! When I continue to hear people ask questions like, “Doesn’t more customer focus mean less focus on products?” then I know we are in trouble. These are not conflicting priorities. Customers and the voice of the customer need to be woven into all you do. Isn’t it all about the customer experience? Isn’t all you do in business for the customer?

Instead, customers aren’t considered when executives and employees are making decisions, creating new products, designing new policies and processes, and developing messaging and communications. They’re an after-thought. It happens all the time.

When we get to the state of “What the Hell Is Customer Experience?” then we know we won’t be answering questions any more about how a customer focus conflicts with the product focus.

Money is being spent by businesses every day to make changes or improvements, and yet they don’t factor in the needs of the customer? Weird, no?

This is not about creating more work or adding more to your plate. You’re already doing these things: enhancing the product, changing processes, updating the website, revising policies, hiring new people, developing new training programs. All I ask is that, while you’re doing your day job, you think about your customers, the impact of what you’re doing or creating for your customers, how customers would feel about changes you want to make, and so forth.

It’s about the employee experience first

Certainly not last or least is the employee. In all of the posts about why CX transformation efforts are failing, I don’t recall anyone mentioning the fact that the most important component in the equation is the employee.

I’ve been talking about the importance of employees to the customer experience since my days at J. D. Power and Associates 25 years ago; sadly, in the heat of CX design efforts, employees are still forgotten. Company executives say: “We’ll collect feedback from employees later. We’ll incorporate employee input after we hear how our customers feel. We’ll do something for employees next year. We’ll think about our culture at another time. Let’s start with customers.” This is not in any way, shape, or form acceptable. Without your employees, you have no customer experience.

The transformation must begin with the employee experience. Solve the employee experience challenges and create a culture in which employees thrive, and you’re more than halfway into your customer experience improvement efforts. The transformation becomes much easier.

Are there more reasons?

Those aren’t the only reasons your customer experience transformation efforts fail, but they are three key reasons. To recap: First, executives must all be on board, aligned, and walking the same walk, talking the same talk, modeling the behaviors they want to see. Second, employees must be first; focus on the employee experience. Get the employee experience right, and employees will deliver the experience your customers want. And third, the customer voice must be infused into all you do; the customer experience cannot be viewed separately from what the business is already doing.

The bottom line is that we need to get the basics right. If you’re committing any of The 7 Deadly Sins of Customer Experience, you’re definitely not getting the basics right. If you believe that technology will solve people problems or that it’s the fix for CX challenges, you’re wrong; technology—any and all of it—is a tool to facilitate the customer experience, not to fix it.

What do you think? Why are customer experience transformation efforts failing?

“My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”
—Abraham Lincoln

First published on the CX Journey blog.

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