Customer experience is what drives successful brands to grow, differentiate, and stand out. Success can be achieved by empowering the teams and stakeholders who drive customer experience to collaborate and pursue success with confidence. This means bridging the gap between IT leaders and business outcome-focused leaders like the CEO and board of directors. As a technology CEO who regularly meets with customers and sits on the board, I know this is a key issue that can derail even the best-laid CX plans.
Here’s why this boundary exists: The concept of customer experience means different things to different people. You can Google “CX” and find out what it is, but not “how.” It’s debatable – if CX was that important, we would all completely agree – but we need to get to a place where IT and business leaders speak the same language.
What does this mean? The IT team’s priorities are focused on tactical and technical things like moving to the cloud, managing disparate systems, vendor consolidation, etc. Meanwhile, the CEO and the Board of Directors are focused on business priorities and strategy, brand vision, customer retention, growth, and of course, customer experience.
If you close your eyes and draw a Venn diagram, it’s easy to see where the needs and goals of these two groups overlap, but there’s a huge gap in communication. When this gap is effectively bridged, leaders and their companies can work together to drive optimal customer experiences. The opportunities to innovate customer experiences and increase profits are endless.
3 ways to create the language of success
1. A common standard for business performance
Anyone in the IT world knows how full of jargon and buzzwords it is. In fact, while researching the websites of several technology companies, I collected words from their description section. Some words that stood out were: blind spot, orchestration, all-in-one, robust, AI-based, operational, cohesive, framework, transformation, modernization, etc. These words are commonly found in the IT space.
So what are CEOs and boards thinking? If you could sneak into a corporate boardroom, you’d hear words like growth, acceleration, brand, return on investment (ROI), and shareholder returns. Ultimately, it all boils down to business performance. This is what business-outcome-focused leaders are thinking about, and it resonates with IT leaders. Can you see the middle point of the Venn diagram becoming clear?
If you want your board to understand, talk about business performance. Better business performance means better business outcomes: better customer retention, customer satisfaction, agent satisfaction, productivity, engagement. “Business performance” sums up all the things that matter most in a way that everyone can understand.
2. Establish key business metrics
We have established “business performance” as the common ground for effective communication between IT and business leaders. We also need to think about metrics that map to and accurately reflect business performance. In the customer service world, it’s common to focus on efficiency metrics like average handle time and first call resolution. While these are necessary, they’re not the best way to understand customer experience in terms of business performance metrics.
IT and business leaders need to answer the question: “What metrics will help me understand how CX is contributing to improved business performance?” Once metrics are established, every leader should set specific, defensible goals for their teams and be prepared for questions from investors and analysts. To achieve outcomes that directly translate to improved business performance, a measurement framework must be built that connects CX to business outcomes.
3. Drive innovation without disrupting business
You can’t improve CX without innovating across digital platforms, but too often the IT industry creates innovations that demand innovation at the expense of disrupting the business. We hear this directly from CIOs and CEOs: they have to literally slow down their business because transformation projects take years and millions, or even tens of millions, of dollars to deliver the promised value. This is why we see so many statistics about projects being canceled because the end goal isn’t achieved fast enough.
It’s a bit of a strange thought, but innovation doesn’t have to be inherently disruptive. You don’t have to drag your business into it and risk disruption. Invite innovation to come to you. Specifically, use your existing solution platform (also known as your core CX platform) as an integration point for innovation. Keep what you have and leverage partners who can deliver integrated experiences that allow you to pursue and leverage innovation in ways that make sense for your business.
To create a common language for success, IT and business leaders must align their approach to innovation. If “innovation without disruption” is not your approach, ask yourself why it isn’t.
