THE STATE OF CX: Time to get real

THE STATE OF CX:

Time to get real

www.ebm.media NOVEMBER 2017

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THE STATE OF CX:

Time to get real

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INTRODUCTION

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Introduction The aim of this survey was not only to get a sense of the current state of the CX nation, but to understand how Customer Experience professionals feel about their own programmes. From the barriers preventing progress, to what they are most proud of – and what they would do with a CX magic wand.

In this report, we have tried to identify what the most successful companies are doing, what we can learn from them, and what you need to do to deliver similar results. The findings show there are four key focus areas that people need to consider, and these are exemplified by some of the responses we received to the question “What would you wish for if you had a CX magic wand?”.

1. How do we measure success?

Having a vague sense that CX is helping, or that it’s the right thing to do will only get us so far. Businesses need to be able to point to real change, and most importantly, financial data to prove the programme is driving value.

2. Are we listening to the right people?

The customer is critical to CX, but there are more voices that we must listen to.

Employees, partners and the wider market all have an impact on the business and bringing their insight into the CX mix is critical to completing that holistic picture.

3. Silos are killing our business Capturing data across the business is great, but unless all these data sources can be brought together in a meaningful way, insight will be lost. This remains a challenge for many companies, inhibiting the potential for CX expansion and success.

4. Are we getting the right buy in?

Support from the senior leadership team for a CX programme is vital to its longterm future. And that is just the beginning, you need buy-in from across the organisation to ensure that the change you need to make can be implemented.

Understanding the state of CX today means defining what success looks like which we address in section one of this report. Subsequently we consider three further areas; are we listening to the right people, the dangers of silos and business-wide buy-in.

Finally, we also provide some thoughts in what will drive the future of Customer Experience in our fifth and final theme.

Key takeaways Short on time? What have we learned? Well, there’s a lot of information, both anecdotal and statistical in the following pages, but broadly: • Return on Investment is still elusive. This thorny issue remains something that far too many businesses have yet to achieve.

• Senior engagement is critical. Investment and support from the executive team is fundamental to success.

• Text, social and predictive analytics are the next big steps. While we all love to hear the stories of robots and AI taking over and making our lives easier, it’s not going to become reality for more CX team in the near future. Most businesses are looking at more established technologies and methodologies that they can make a business case for today. Robots will have to wait.

• B2B is in better shape than B2C. While the complexity of the typical B2B relationship can make delving into the Customer Experience a challenge, those companies operating in this space have make greater strides forward in integration, capturing data from multiple sources, and covering key moments in the customer journey.

Steve Hurst, Editorial Director – Engage Business Media Claire Sporton, VP Customer Experience – Confirmit

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WITH MY CX MAGIC WAND I WOULD…

“Ensure that all staff know the outcome of their surveys” “Get the CEO to truly commit and invest in the CX programme and become personally involved” “Put all our data in one place!”

“Get commitment to prioritising tackling any root causes of poor CX” “Have leaders fully appreciate the value in a CX programme.

We have a wealth of this insight, if we just spent the time and focused on what matters to our customers”

INTRODUCTION

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Methodology This survey was conducted in October 2017 with over 250 responses gathered primarily from the UK and the US, and additional responses received from other European countries, as well as Australia.

27% RELATIVE BEGINNERS

Experience We had a solid representation of different levels of experience. Half of respondents have been working in the CX space for four years or more, with another 21% working in that role for 2-3 years. The others considered themselves to be relative beginners.

There was also a spread of respondents with differing CX roles. Half were CX managers, but it was great to see that 20% of responses came from the Exec level – a promising sign for the future?

21% 2-3 YEARS

30% 4-10 YEARS

B2B Vs. B2C Customer Experience is often seen as the preserve of B2C organisations, which isn’t surprising given the huge number of surveys we all seem to receive now. Industries such as retail, hospitality, travel and financial services are often fairly well established but there is an increasing trend towards B2B organisations focusing on CX as well.

The relationships that B2B businesses have with their clients can be complex, with a one-to-many or even many-to-many relationship that means building a clear view of the customer experience can be a challenge. However, it’s a challenge well worth taking on as unlike B2C companies, the B2B world is highly dependent on a relatively small number of high value clients. And a clear understanding of the relationship well ahead of a significant contract renewal is vital.

In the survey, just over a third of respondents were from purely B2B companies, with 20% from entirely B2C businesses. The remainder (half) work for organisations who cover both markets, so the views gathered cover all bases.

Industries

22% 10 YEARS +

Respondents came from a range of industries, with a mix of B2B and B2C companies involved (see below). Industries represented in greater numbers were: • business services, • financial services, • insurance, • telecoms • retail.

From the results, we’ve identified some key themes which capture the main areas that we asked about, and which respondents raised in their answers.

1 2 3

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HOW DO WE MEASURE SUCCESS?

ARE WE LISTENING TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE?

SILOS ARE KILLING OUR BUSINESS

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CONTENTS

4 5 ARE WE GETTING THE RIGHT BUY IN?

WHAT HAPPENS NOW? LOOKING TO THE FUTURE WITH ANALYTICS AND AI

NUMBER ONE

How do we measure success?

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1

HOW DO WE MEASURE SUCCESS?

Demonstrable ROI is generally a huge challenge for most CX programmes and the survey results certainly tell us the same story with a large spread across the range. While many businesses are able to share anecdotal evidence of their successes, whether by making process changes, or pushing up key metrics such as NPS®, making the connection between a CX programme and true financial results still appears on the “to do” list.

We have used increased future investment as our indicator of successful programmes, this is a great metric as only programmes who have delivered true business value will be able to secure additional funding particularly in current economic times. So if this is the outcome we are looking for what are the key drivers that correlate to an expected increase in CX investment?

SETTING CX GOALS The best: Retail, Hardware/Software, Media & Advertising The worst: Automotive

Innovation: If your CX programme is driving innovation you are much more likely to see higher investment. And programmes already using the VoC feedback to drive innovation are more likely to see investment in the programme remain the same or even increase over the next 12 months.

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NUMBER ONE

ON COLLECTING CUSTOMER FEEDBACK…

“Most touchpoints are covered separately but no one team pulls them together to form a comprehensive view.”

“We need to do better at joining up all the feedback we receive from customers, and turning this into positive action.”

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NUMBER ONE

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“Several touchpoints are covered, but in silos. There is no holistic view” “We are missing the full customer journey view”

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HOW DO WE MEASURE SUCCESS?

USING VOC TO DRIVE INNOVATION The best: Hardware/Software, Media and Advertising, Business Services and Consultancy The worst: Telecoms, Automotive

Identification of achievable goals: Everyone is better at setting CX goals, than goals for the employee or, even rarer, those for the supplier/partner experience. Considering the importance of third party organisations on the supply chain, this is potentially a big weakness. As an example, at a recent conference one presenter from an enlightened organisation in the travel and tourism sector stated that warning flags go up for them if they are successful, but if their suppliers are struggling. This enables them to raise questions about the longevity and sustainability of the relationship.

Return on Investment: Overall this is the biggest area of failure. Only 20% of companies scored 9-10 for seeing a Return on Investment, with a significant 14% of companies scoring 0-2. This suggests a huge proportion of companies doing almost nothing in terms of proving the value of their programme.

DEMONSTRATING ROI The best: Media and Advertising (best), Education, Hardware/Software The worst: Automotive, Telecoms, Health and Public organisations

Connected to this was the question we asked about what made people proud of their programme – while ROI featured, what was clear was that it’s people who are at the heart of CX initiatives. A significant proportion of comments were around overall engagement with the programme and a sense that corporate culture was evolving to become more customercentric. These are softer areas of success but shouldn’t be underestimated, particularly in the earlier stages of a programme.

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NUMBER TWO

Are we listening to the right people?

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Most compelling, the more sources of feedback, the higher the ROI.

37% 1 SOURCE

34% 2 SOURCES

16% 3 SOURCE S

12% 4 SOURCES

Those with four sources scored ROI a whopping 31% higher than those with only 1 source of feedback.

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ARE WE LISTENING TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE?

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There is often a strong focus on the “C” in CX – the customer. This is fine and makes sense, but bringing in voices from other key stakeholders, such as partners, employees and the wider market is vital to uncovering deeper insights into the overall health of a company. As you might expect, 88% of our respondents are capturing feedback from customers, with only a quarter adding supplier or partner feedback to the mix.

From the employees’ perspective only Slightly over half of respondents collect employee engagement feedback, dramatically lower than those listening to customers and, based on the comments provided, many of those who do capture employee feedback are still at the traditional annual employee engagement survey phase.

It’s good to see that almost a third of businesses are using employees to report back on the Customer Experience. Often employees, particularly frontline staff such as contact centre agents and retail staff can provide unbeatable insight into recurring issues and can help drive change in areas where direct customer feedback is lacking.

We could also note that 1% of respondents are not capturing feedback from ANY sources. Either a sign that some companies are still not taking CX seriously, or that AI has taken greater strides forward than anyone of us imagined!

What is clear is that great CX programmes don’t just capture feedback from one source. As we can see from the graph below the majoring of programmes still only collect data from one or two sources, but there is a growing trend to capture feedback from more.

NUMBER TWO

ON COLLECTING CUSTOMER FEEDBACK…

“We do not have a structured programme for the employee journey” “Moving towards this, but still much to do in the customer journey which takes priority at the moment”

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NUMBER TWO

“Those with four sources scored ROI a whopping 31% higher than those with only 1 source of feedback.”

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ARE WE LISTENING TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE?

Most compelling, the more sources of feedback, the higher the ROI. Those with four sources scored ROI a whopping 31% higher than those with only 1 source of feedback.

Of course, as well as looking at how many sources companies are collecting data from, we need to consider when in the journey we collect feedback. Are we listening at the right times? When we drill down and ask if we are covering the key moments, the majority of CX professionals are not confident that they are listening across the whole of the journey.

On the customer side, 26% strongly agree that they were covering the key moments in the journey. Notably, this was significantly higher in B2B than B2C. The employee journey lags behind quite significantly, with only 14% comprehensively covering the whole lifecycle. This is supported anecdotally from the many comments, most employee engagement feedback still focuses on the annual (or dare we say it? Biannual) research survey rather than true focus on the moments that matter across the full employee experience. Again, results were better for B2B businesses than for B2C. Finally, we note that this is not a result of maturity of the CX professional involved in the programme – all programmes from relative beginners to those running for 10 years plus had similar results.

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NUMBER THREE

Silos are killing our business

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SILOS ARE KILLING OUR BUSINESS

The ability to bring together customer feedback with other data from across the business is vital to uncovering insight that will drive change. Not only does it add context and colour to your programme, but it can also help to engage customers better with the feedback process because you can often dramatically reduce the number of survey questions required by harnessing data from CRM platforms and contact centre records, to name just two.

The direct question we asked about whether customer feedback was currently integrated with financial and operational data showed a very broad picture. Over a third of respondents selected 8-10 (where 10 was “absolutely”) which suggests that this is a hurdle that is being overcome.

However, in the open text question where we asked about missing customer touchpoints within CX programmes, a significant number of people stated that while they collected feedback at most touchpoints, they weren’t integrating that data to capture the full customer journey.

DATA INTEGRATION The best: automotive, travel and transport, telco, retail The worst: media and advertising, education

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NUMBER FIVE

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NUMBER THREE

“Individuals who stated investment would decrease reported exceptionally poor integration of feedback with financial and operational data.”

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SILOS ARE KILLING OUR BUSINESS

You might expect different feedback channels to be integrated before external data such as CRM or financial information is brought into the mix. However, this relies on the assumption that a comprehensive CX programme has been built from scratch with a clear roll-out plan and common objectives. This is, of course, often not the case, with a range of ad-hoc survey programmes springing up all around the company.

In these situations, it is easier to tie individual touchpoints to background data than it is to tie all the touchpoints together given their disparate approaches, purposes and, in many cases, ownership.

Overall, integration got the lowest scores and correlates with lower future investment and low ROI performance. Those individuals who stated investment would decrease reported exceptionally poor integration of feedback with financial and operational data, as well as lower scores for use of ROI calculations across the business.

While 19% of companies feel they’re doing well at data integration across silos (score 9 or 10 out of 10), significantly 16% only score between 0-2. This shows a significant disparity between the best and worst and certainly correlates with much of what is being discussed at CX conferences around the world!

This whole area of integration remains one of the most talked about whenever people come together. During meetings and conferences, it’s one of the things we’re asked about most often. There is no ‘silver bullet’ for making this happen – only a willingness for silos to come together in pursuit of a common, company-wide, commercial goal. This is where a strong leader or sponsor can make a real difference, encouraging a greater level of data integration and cooperation across the silos.

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NUMBER FOUR

Are we getting the right buy in?

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ARE WE GETTING THE RIGHT BUY IN?

Stakeholder investment, particularly at the executive level, is vital to the long-term success and survival of a programme.

Without this support, it’s too easy for CX activities to be regarded as a niche activity that has no real impact on the overall organisation. This is something that’s becoming more widely understood and accepted and CX professionals are starting to become more adept at building the broad support they need.

Many of the comments we received were directly about the role of senior support – either that it has made a huge difference to a programme’s success, or that it is lacking and that they would use their CX magic wand to produce that support! Only 30% of respondents agreed that key stakeholders are truly invested in the goals of the programme. This is a big issue as the research shows a strong correlation of executive buy-in and the setting of achievable goals and future investment.

Without engagement businesses cannot set the right goals for the organisation and secure the investment they need.

Achievable CX goals

Increasing Investment

Strong Buy in

80%

62%

Poor Buy in

0%

13%

NUMBER FOUR

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE SOMEONE STARTING A CX PROGRAMME?

“Bring a vision and be collaborative” “Determine what you are going to do with the CX results”

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NUMBER FOUR

“Do not start without the C‐Level support” “Start small, act fast, don’t stop”

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ARE WE GETTING THE RIGHT BUY IN?

However, this is not just about support from the top. CX teams need to engage with every levels within the organisation in order to drive true change. Unfortunately, the pattern with executive team is repeated when we look at those organisations that agree that they have a strong communications plan to inform employees across the organisation, with only 28% agreeing.

Interestingly the importance of a strong comms plan is something that CX practitioners learn as they get more experienced. This means we’d expect to see improvements in this area as programmes and their managers expand their expertise and, in some cases, learn things the hard way!

Some of these figures are somewhat concerning. Is anyone doing this right? Who can we look to for examples of best practice in action? Whilst there is no difference in key stakeholders being invested in the goals across different industries, B2B organisations are better at communicating across the organisation. In interesting situation given we’ve seen B2B companies performing better in a number of areas.

As noted above, automotive businesses are struggling in this area closely followed by financial services, telcos and travel/transport players.

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NUMBER FIVE

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What happens now? Looking to the future with analytics and AI

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WHAT HAPPENS NOW? LOOKING TO THE FUTURE WITH ANALYTICS AND AI

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As well as the requirement to use technology to better integrate data and drive stronger insights, it’s clear that newer and evolving technologies are being either seriously considered or implemented. But only where a business case can be made.

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Text Analysis is about understanding the customer especially for B2C audiences who are dealing in huge volumes of customer data. In many instances, organisations are already drowning in text with far too much manual effort going into reading and summarising the sheer volume of comments received. There are so many sources for open-text, and surveys are only one element to deal with. The challenge only increases as more sources are added – contact centre transcripts, emails, webchat histories – not to mention anything from social media (a huge impact on the B2C world).

What’s more, customers are more inclined to respond in their own words – and increasingly less inclined to compete long-winded, tickbox surveys that don’t really allow them the chance to say what they want. Text analysis is an enabling technology, freeing up the CX Manager from tonnes of manual work while also allowing the customer to use their own voice more readily.

NUMBER FIVE

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NUMBER FIVE

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5 = 0-10

WHAT HAPPENS NOW? LOOKING TO THE FUTURE WITH ANALYTICS AND AI

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Our organisation will use VoC/ Employee to drive and innovation in the future

Customer feedback data is integrated with financial and operational data

My company has demonstrated ROI for our experience and engagement programmes

My company sets achievable but challenging goals

Our programme covers key decision moments and touchpoints for a full view of the customer journey

Key stakeholders are invested in the goals of our programme

= 0-2

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Predictive Analytics is about managing risk and return. Few organisations aren’t risk averse to some extent. But the trick is in increasing the chances of making the right decision based on insight buries within all this data. Companies want to know what to do next.

Which options will give them the best commercial return? And they need to know this ahead of making expensive changes within their business. Many see Predictive Analytics as the answer to this. “if I feed in all this data, I want the answer to leap out at me”. But it all hinges on the one area where everyone is weakest – integrating the data across the silos – joining together the opinions with the operational data and the financials. Without these links, the predictions become less robust.

There’s a lot more work to be done before this can become a serious reality.

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Social Analytics continues to be important but interesting to see that AI is lagging behind the other three. Similarly to how discussed in the benefits of text analysis, social analysis is another way to better understand the mountain of customer opinion that’s already out there – AND enable the customer to talk about the parts of the experience that matter most to them.

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Artificial Intelligence stands aside from all these other elements.

While it’s the area that garners the least support/interest, there are undoubted benefits for the customer and the business when AI is developed as a supporting part of the customer experience. Webchat is a prime example. It’s costly for a business to have real people answer every question received through webchat, especially when a proportion of the questions can be predicted with some certainty in advance. So, why not use AI handle the basics, leaving the more complex scenarios for the agent? The trick is getting the balance right, as well as the handover to a real human – so the customer is none the wiser as to who has helped them and, critically, they have had the support they need to complete the task in hand.

Fundamentally, most CX practitioners are still getting to grips with the other issues we’ve raised – integration, demonstrating ROI and breaking down silos. While the shiny new things in the future will become useful and will deliver value, at this point the priority for most CX teams is on dealing with the issues they face now to secure the future of their programmes.

ABOUT US

Engage Business Media (EBM) is a global media company designed to help its community of 80,000-plus leaders in the customer and employee engagement space to devise and implement sustainable, winning business strategies.

Our mantra is that organisations need to cut across their own internal silos, take a more holistic view of their customers, both internal and external, and deliver a consistent and appropriate customer and employee experience.

In support of this EBM runs a series of highly respected, CPDaccredited, Worldclass thought leadership events for its community throughout the year—including our annual flagship Customer Engagement and Employee Engagement Summits and our Engage Awards.

All of these face-to-face activities are underpinned by our websites, as well as weekly newsletter alerts, webinars, and ground-breaking research reports.

Visit www.ebm.media for more information.

Confirmit is the world’s leading SaaS vendor for multi-channel Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, and Market Research solutions. The company has offices in Oslo (headquarters), Grimstad, London, Moscow, New York, San Francisco, Sydney, Vancouver, and Yaroslavl. Confirmit’s software is also distributed through partner resellers in Madrid, Milan, Salvador, and Tokyo.

Confirmit powers Global 5000 companies and Market Research agencies worldwide with a wide range of software products for feedback / data collection, panel management, data processing, analysis, and reporting.

Customers include Aurora, British Airways, British Standards Institution, Copart, Cross-Tab, Dow Chemical, GfK, GlaxoSmithKline, GMO Research, KeepFactor, Morehead Associates, Nielsen, Research Now, RS Components, QRS, SSI, Sony Mobile Communications, and Swisscom.

Visit www.confirmit.com for more information.

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