Customer Experience: Conversation & Action

More than just metrics

Customer Experience Management is getting talked about more than it ever has been; whether it’s considered a set of guiding principles or a hurdle to overcome, there's no denying that it’s on the minds of business people everywhere. Year over year, the frequency with which the term “customer experience” is googled increases upon itself (see graph below).

Many of the entries on this blog have been dedicated to highlighting the positive business outcomes that can be achieved when an organization centers Customer Experience Management at the heart of their operational practices. It’s true that our contributions to the discussion about customer experience have largely revolved around business outcomes, but they’re not merely facile ones (for instance, implement strategy Y to decrease operational costs by X points).

We’d be remiss if we were to only focus on metrics that are clear and realized months after onboarding a CXM  platform. The fact of the matter is that Customer Experience Management (CXM) means so much more than those three words would suggest. CXM is about making sure that organizations are ready to face unexpected challenges. It’s a philosophy that places an organization’s ability to be agile and responsive to change (whatever form that may take) at the highest levels of strategic importance. That means responding to technological advancements, regulations that are enacted in response to those advancements, and consumer demand for processes that are as efficient and advanced as the most sophisticated technologies.

Agility = Action

Conversations aside, action is what matters. Consumer demand that has evolved with the pace of technology has left banks, companies, and other organizations facing a tough realization: their existing infrastructure, which already exhausted massive amounts of capital to implement, is becoming out of data. Rigid, siloed structures and fragmented information flows have resulted in operational inefficiencies that are hard to understate. On top of that, governments the world over are cracking down by means of regulation and response. 

Inflexible infrastructure doesn't make it easy to respond to the tasks that demand and regulation place on companies and financial institutions. If one is to take the perspective of a growth mindset, overcoming hurdles to an agile response means reconsidering one’s digital approach. Those who succeed will implement technological solutions that turn data into actionable insights. They will then use those insights to provide better customer experiences, while simultaneously being able to foresee and hedge against any governmental regulations or hurdles that may arise down the road. The best way to do that is to overlay existing technologies with newer ones to provide those insights.