Mastering the art of end-to-end CX strategy

Customer experience programs can deliver big challenges at implementation, especially considering how mature your organization is. How can you build a strategy that works? A panel at the Interactive Customer Experience Summit held from Sept. 11 to 13 in Charlotte, North Carolina examined this topic.

Eric Healy, CEO of Stratifyd, moderated the panel with Sean Albertson, founder and CXO of CX4ROCKS, Josh Halpern, CEO of Big Chicken, Winston Kelly, executive director and VP of the NASCAR Hall of Fame and Jason Mariasis, VP of digital products and CX at Credit One Bank.

What is CX?

When asked how they defined customer experience, Albertson said, "the real question is what is experience not? It's more about the entire package than one activity."

Halpern said because Big Chicken is owned by NBA player Shaquille O'Neal, his reputation is on the line.

"If we get bad reviews, someone's gotta tell Shaq that," Halpern said. He said they have to "ensure that reputation and legacy of Shaquille O'Neal stays pristine."

Kelly said that NASCAR driver Richard Petty is his north star. He keeps a picture on his desk of Richard Petty giving an autograph to an 8-year-old.

"If he can be nice to everybody, we can," Kelly said.

Mariasis said that customer experience encompasses everything from everyone who touches your brand including their "attitudes, behaviors, impressions and perceptions."

How do you improve it?

Looking at specific ways to handle customer experience efforts, Halpern said that Big Chicken uses gamification to address flaws with customer service, such as if employees are forgetting to put BBQ sauce in the bags, the platform can feature that as a game to train employees. Big Chicken takes a close look at metrics to determine problems to address.

Mariasis said that Credit One used net-promoter score software to measure customer experience networks.

"We correlate each incremental NPS point to lift in revenue. Is it perfect? No, but it's good enough to have a conversation," Mariasis said. He also pointed out it's important to have a close relationship with your data analytics team to understand the data.

NPS in particular offers scores ranging from -100 to 100. However, Kelley said that businesses shouldn't be satisfied just because they have a high score.

"If you ever think you've reached the end of the journey you're in the wrong business," Kelley said.

Loyalty

Albertson said that businesses shouldn't just rely on NPS or other platforms like that, but instead should check that data against loyalty data, especially disloyal customers.

"It's hard to delight customers at scale. It is absolutely very easy to make a client disloyal by things being hard. Higher effort leads to more churn," Albertson said. "It's five times more likely to lead to disloyalty."

Halpern said when it comes to restaurants, all problems ultimately come back to one thing: loyalty among both employees and customers.

"There should be one thing that keeps you up at night: loyalty," Halpern said.

Exec buy-in

However, how can companies drive these efforts? The panelists agreed that executive buy-in is necessary, but not necessarily the CEO.

"You need a champion at senior level to drive right kind of experience work. It takes everyone. You gotta have someone bridging the gap across the organization," Albertson said. He also discussed that only 23% of Fortune 500 companies have a chief experience officer, so middle managers can fill that role.

Mariasis said it doesn't have to be the CEO leading the way. Instead, they should make the bet for customer experience and invest more as they see success.

When asked about the role of technology, Halpern said he uses technology to meet customer friction points. For example, Big Chicken uses a geofencing solution to tell when a car is three minutes away so they can fry the chicken and have it ready in time.

Albertson said companies should also use technology for analytics to take a look at all forms of customer feedback in mass.

"Technology is an enabler," Mariasis said. "It's meant to drive efficiency and build better, faster and more differentiated experiences."