Customer Experience Analytics: The Importance of CX Governance

Author: Michelle Despres

The final step of a Customer Experience (CX) strategy is ensuring top-down buy-in and building out a comprehensive CX governance process. What does that have to do with CX Analytics?

Everything.

In the second CX Analytics article in our three-part series, we provided a glimpse into the practical and unique approach we use at RevGen with our five-step process.

1. Customer Listening Posts: The process starts with establishing customer listening posts and making the effort to understand the direct feedback customers provide. Listening posts are the foundation of your analytics program.

2. Data Strategy: This next step optimizes the data captured through listening posts for analysis. In its initial state, the data is disconnected, making it difficult to trend, to draw data-driven conclusions, and to make strong decisions. Organizing and synthesizing the data helps make it useful.

3. Analytics: In this step, we analyze the consolidated data to expose trends and  discover specific, nuanced insights that are the root of your challenges and opportunities.

4. Informed Action: Acting with precision to target what’s driving problems and opportunities is the next step. It’s vital to ensure we’re fixing the right problems.

5. Business Value: In this final step we clearly see the business value achieved from the investments made in collecting, synthesizing, analyzing, and acting on customer data. We are able to measure it, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and to use that data to deepen our CX efforts.

Modern customer experience has evolved well beyond customer service and cost-center thinking. This evolution requires us to deepen our understanding of data, to drive targeted, optimized experiences that customers find valuable, and to seed advanced predictive analytics efforts.

It also demands not just buy-in, but top-down sponsorship. Because achievement of targeted outcomes requires investments across the organization, active leadership and a well-defined governance model are essential.

One of the biggest challenges in optimizing customer experience is prioritizing, managing, and understanding CX investments and their ROI. To meet that challenge, organizations should create a process that encompasses the alignment, governance, and culture around CX across the enterprise.

Customer experience governance includes the framework used by companies to establish CX strategy and priorities, along with empowerment and accountability for the way CX programs, resources, and budgets are coordinated. Without the structure and support provided by CX governance processes, it’s difficult for a company to enable CX excellence. Without alignment of effort and investment across the organization, it’s nearly impossible to drive customer loyalty, and, in turn, drive value for the company.

Though CX governance is often centralized and led by the Customer Officer, tactics will need to be dispersed and localized for the various departments executing on them. This allows for better customer segmentation and more personalized delivery, as well as increased accountability. Overall CX key performance metrics can be shared across departments and by functional leaders to help foster collaboration, cooperation, and dissolve the silos that frequently hinder delivery of CX outcomes.

As this process matures, the company culture around CX will evolve too. While CX strategy is generally a top-down initiative, employees at all levels see its impact. Which organizational behaviors are emphasized, which segments are prioritized, and how customers are treated are all key indicators to employees that a company is serious about creating a customer-first culture. Employee buy-in is critical to the success of CX strategy, and part of overall CX governance.

At RevGen, we believe the alignment of Customer Experience and company-wide governance is a large part of what drives brand trust and customer loyalty. Our comprehensive approach to CX Analytics combines the practical with the strategic to search out novel insights and targeted actions that create business value for both our clients and their customers.

Thank you for reading our three-part series on CX Analytics and please join us in the evolution of organization backed customer experience! To chat more about RevGen’s unique approach to CX, contact us for a complimentary 30-minute assessment.

Michelle Despres is a Manager who specializes in CX program creation, implementation, and management.