A CX tech workforce is the secret sauce for smart business decisions. When tech teams understand the importance of capturing and acting on the customers’ voice, your company engages the customer in co-creating innovative products and service solutions.
How important is CX to overall corporate performance, growth, expansion and sustainability? The 2015 CXROI study conducted by Watermark Research based on the S&P 500 Index demonstrated that “leaders are generating a return that is 35 points higher than the S&P 500 Index while laggards are posting returns that are 45 points lower.”
Recent Gartner research showcased a 53% increase in competitive utilization of customer experience (CX) information to make business decisions: from 36% in 2011 to 89% in 2016. Furthermore, by 2018, over 50% of organizations polled plan on changing their business models in order to improve customer experience.
Customer experience is measured both qualitatively and quantitatively. Move beyond using technology to capture statistics. Humanize those stats. Then plan on taking action from data, analytics and insights.
When your CX tech workforce is empowered to engage in Voice of the Customer conversations, your organization captures rich insights impacting collaboration and decision making.
The real business value of customer experience is created by the quality of how your workforce engages, beyond the technology, with your customers.
Does your CX tech workforce currently capture Customer Experience insights?
The crown jewel in most CX strategies is The Survey. Customer experience surveys are conducted at various post-sale intervals. Their primary role is to assure your company reassurance that All Is Well. Managers, rather than end users, tend to be the individuals rating your CX tech workforce on transactional service impressions.
There is more involved to CX than rating service calls.
First, consider which of these scenarios sounds like your CX initiative.
- Do you limit capturing CX to survey instruments only? Then what happens with the information?
- Are your surveys primarily focused on asking relational questions like “So, how are we doing?”
- Alternatively, is your CX initiative focused on becoming translational partners, moving beyond “how are we doing” towards “how can we partner to make your business more successful”?
Also, ask yourself whether your organization only reacts to CX dashboards when the dashboard lights are red. If so, how engaged can you really be with that customer?
Consider the one-two punch of a CX tech workforce which continuously captures the Voice of the Customer before, during and after service calls. Allow your CX tech workforce to learn how, when, where and why to engage various customer tiers in qualitative conversations impacting their success.
Become proactive, rather than reactive, in using CX data to help your customers make better business decisions.
A CX focused tech workforce casts tech teams in the role of strategic assets.
Consider the dynamics of how your current tech workforce interacts with their customers (internal and external). Are they truly a CX tech workforce or do they function as break-fix tactical teams?
Far too many tech teams are deployed on a transactional basis, to fix reported problems once they occur rather than proactively preventing them from happening in the first place. By the time the team works with the customer, that customer is not happy. Customer productivity has been disrupted and they want to get back to work.
When a CX tech workforce strategy deploys tech teams as strategic assets, they work with customers when there are no problems at all. The tech team focuses on:
- Creating strategic value for lines of business;
- Making the customer’s workplace more productive; and
- Increasing rate of utilization of solution portfolios when creating and analyzing data sets used in business decision making.
A CX focused Tech workforce impacts customer decision making.
The longer the lifecycle of your product or service, the greater the opportunity CX tech workforce has to impact not only customer experience, but the overall success of your customers. After all, the more invested your tech workforce becomes in your customers, the greater the impact your organization has on customer growth, expansion and sustainability in their respective marketplaces.
Developing a CX focused tech workforce engages these valuable strategic assets in playing critical roles for key clients, rather than simply fixing what is broken or extending the lifecycle of your equipment. The CX tech workforce teams become go-to resources impacting customer experience, both strategically as well as tactically.
When the goal is CX over the long haul, a tech workforce becomes intrapreneurs within your organization. They continuously do something about CX and are actively engaged in telling the customer that they are taking action on key areas impacting CX.
Capturing Voice of the Customer qualitatively and situationally complements CX survey research. To become more competitive and distinct, round out your CX perspective beyond the survey. Develop a CX tech workforce composed of teams focused on capturing and acting on the Voice of the Customer.
Engage customers in identifying areas for process improvement and product innovation. Impact innovation in your own organization and within your customers’ organizations as well. That one-two combination impacts customer success.
Babette Ten Haken is a management consultant, strategist, speaker and coach focused on customer success for customer retention. She traverses the interface between human capital strategy for hiring and developing collaborative technical and non-technical teams. She serves manufacturing, IT and engineering intensive companies. Babette’s playbook of technical / non-technical collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. Visit the Free Resources section of her website for more tools.
Image author: Marek. Image source: Fotolia.
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