Customer experience foresight requires a deep dive into organizational hindsight. The result? Providing 20-20 strategic insights.
Start looking for patterns in current as well as legacy data. Make decisions on how to better serve customers today and in the future.
However, to successfully execute this strategy, an organization must collaborate across departmental silos and legacy mindset. How realistic is executing this strategy within your organization?
Deploying company-wide actions from historical customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) insights takes guts. Uncovering root causes responsible for creating today’s customer experiences sets the stage and strategy for tomorrow’s customer experiences.
Is your organization still doing the same CX things the same way by collecting the same types of information via the same types of CX surveys?
Customer experience foresight frees the data from data kingdoms to uncover past insights influencing the present.
Your organization has troves of unstructured CX data. These data are stored, post transaction. They represent nothing more than negative CX ratings.
And then what happens?
Poor CX scores catalyze reactions rather than identify opportunities. Bad scores are cues for product-related sales and services teams focused on placating customers. Once resolved, these data return back to a departmental data kingdom. So do these teams.
This strategy confines customer experience to a single incident, an isolated conversation, a resolution and a survey response. That process keeps your teams eternally spinning their wheels, taking tactical actions to win back dissatisfied customers.
How can you achieve customer experience foresight when your current CX strategy keeps data mining gold hidden and undiscoverable within departmental data kingdoms?
Before you can move CX strategy forward with customers, figure out what is holding your own organization back.
A SAS-sponsored Forbes Insights study polled 357 senior-level executives across a variety of job functions and industries. Among other questions, executives were asked about the most profound challenges to improving the CX within their own organizations. Major factors included (p9):
- Service requests require lots of follow-up activities (34%)
- Processes not fully covered by IT systems (29%)
- Integrating channel experiences (27%)
- Most of CX information sent manually via Outlook (26%)
- Lack of real-time operating reporting (25%)
- Supporting consistent experience across key channels (23%)
- Achieving a single view of the customer (22%)
- Difficulty turning isolated insights into repeatable processes that benefit the whole enterprise (20%)
- Lack of control on regulated communications (18%)
- Lack of collaborative environment and systems (17%)
- Not enough communication between analysts, business users and other stakeholders (17%)
Are your people, processes, systems and data still isolated in departmental silos characterized by legacy Us versus Them mindset? Perhaps the root cause to customer experience foresight starts by cleaning up internal CX within your own house. Otherwise, it will be difficult to collaborate with each other, let alone provide customers with extraordinary customer experiences.
Only 14% of executives are able to report that their data is structured on a cross-functional, synchronized basis. And 45% say their data is focused on specific areas and processes, but not yet fully integrated. Another 41% say their data is still siloed by departments. Even the Leaders in the survey, who are further along in their data-driven CX initiatives, indicate that they have not yet achieved a large measure of data integration. (p16)
Clean up your own house to better serve your customers.
Develop greater customer experience foresight by breaking down barriers to communication, data accessibility and multi-disciplinary collaboration within your own organization. Big data collaboration platforms can help catalyze your organization.
Then identify one of your first beta team projects as mining the unstructured legacy customer experience data. Determine how these data contribute to the customer behavior you are observing today.
Root causes can have some really big contexts. Are you being forensic about determining them?
Organizational collaboration allows your company to gain customer experience foresight. Your outcome? Creating extraordinary current and future customer experiences.
Babette Ten Haken is a management consultant, strategist, speaker and coach focused on customer success for customer retention in the industrial Internet of Things ecosystem. She traverses the interface between human capital strategy for hiring, developing and implementing teams of collaborative technical, engineering, sales and business professionals. She serves manufacturing- and engineering- intensive companies, catalyzing teams to create enduring business outcomes. 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: laufer. Image source: Fotolia
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