Tag Archives: CX

Ten Signs You Need a Customer Experience Audit

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

The Silent Churn: Why Business-Centric Operations Blind Us to Customer Reality

The silent killer of modern businesses isn’t a flawed product; it’s a friction-filled experience that slowly alienates customers without management ever realizing it. Companies often pour millions into product development, marketing campaigns, and sales pipelines, only to watch customer loyalty bleed out through a thousand unmapped micro-frictions. When metrics begin to slip, the instinct is often to look inward — to optimize processes, cut costs, or push harder sales targets. However, fixing an experience problem with operational pressure only accelerates the decline.

Shifting the Lens: From Internal Systems to Human-Centered Design

The core vulnerability for most organizations lies in their viewpoint. It is natural to look through the company’s lens, evaluating success based on internal milestones, department-specific KPIs, and system efficiencies. But your customers do not care about your organizational chart, your legacy software limitations, or your internal workflows. They care about their own time, their own goals, and how effortlessly your business helps them achieve them. True human-centered design requires shifting from an inside-out mentality to an outside-in perspective, evaluating every touchpoint based on human behavior, emotion, and cognitive load rather than operational convenience.

The Purpose of an Audit: Diagnosis, Empathy, and Alignment

This is where a Customer Experience (CX) Audit becomes vital. Far from a finger-pointing exercise or a bureaucratic compliance check, a CX audit is a rigorous, empathetic diagnostic tool. It is designed to dismantle assumptions, expose the gaps between what a company *thinks* it delivers versus what the customer *actually* experiences, and align the entire organization around a unified journey. Identifying whether your business is suffering from these hidden friction points is the first step toward building sustainable, customer-led growth.

Ten Signs You Need a Customer Experience Audit

Recognizing when an organization’s internal processes have decoupled from customer expectations is critical. The following ten warning signs indicate that systemic friction is eroding value and that a comprehensive customer experience diagnostic is required.

1. The “Metric Paradox” (High CSAT, Dropping Retention)

Operational dashboards show excellent customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores or high Net Promoter Scores (NPS), yet contract renewals, repeat purchases, or customer lifetime value (LTV) are steadily declining. This paradox occurs when metrics evaluate isolated, transactional touchpoints rather than the cumulative, end-to-end journey. Customers may be satisfied with a specific support interaction but entirely frustrated by the overall relationship.

2. Cross-Departmental Finger Pointing (The Silo Effect)

When customer satisfaction drops or friction surfaces, internal teams retreat into functional silos. Marketing blames Sales for setting improper expectations, Sales blames Product for missing capabilities, and operations blames Customer Support for failing to retain accounts. When an organization’s internal structure dictates the customer journey, the customer is forced to act as the integrator, piecing together a fragmented, inconsistent relationship.

3. Rapidly Escalating Customer Support Costs

Customer support ticket volumes, live chat queues, and operational costs are outstripping overall customer acquisition or revenue growth. When frontline teams are consistently overwhelmed by repetitive, basic procedural questions, it signals a systemic failure in proactive communication, self-service infrastructure, or initial onboarding design.

4. The “Feature-Rich, Adoption-Poor” Product

The organization continuously ships highly requested product features, digital enhancements, or service updates, yet product telemetry and usage data reveal that customers utilize only a minor fraction of the ecosystem. This indicates a gap between what customers *say* they want during isolated feedback loops and how they actually behave within their day-to-day context.

5. Onboarding is a “Black Box”

A significant percentage of customer churn or user drop-off occurs within the critical first 30 to 90 days following initial conversion. When post-sale momentum stalls, it reveals a lack of structural alignment between the initial marketing promise and the operational reality of delivery, leaving customers without a clear path to achieving their first milestone of value.

6. Your Customer Journey Map Hasn’t Been Updated in Years

The organization relies on historical customer personas, idealized flowcharts, or journey maps developed years ago. In rapidly evolving markets, customer behaviors, environmental pressures, and digital expectations shift continuously. Relying on outdated assumptions ensures that operational models remain optimized for a customer base that no longer exists.

7. Over-Reliance on “Discounting” to Win Back Customers

The primary mechanism for retaining accounts, securing contract renewals, or winning back lapsed customers relies heavily on price concessions, promotions, or fee waivers. When financial discounting becomes the default retention strategy, it demonstrates that the experience itself has failed to provide a meaningful, non-commodity differentiator.

8. “Ghosting” After the Initial Touchpoint

Marketing funnels successfully generate high digital traffic, inbound inquiries, or initial sign-ups, but conversion rates to the next meaningful milestone are low. This drop-off indicates that micro-frictions—such as confusing interface copy, excessive form fields, or slow operational response times — are killing engagement before trust can be established.

9. Customer Feedback is Reactive, Not Proactive

Customer insights are derived exclusively from trailing indicators, such as public reviews, escalation tickets, or formal cancellation notices. Lacking continuous, human-centered listening posts across key milestones leaves an organization permanently reactive, fixing broken experiences after damage to customer sentiment is already permanent.

10. Employees are Burned Out and Disengaged

Frontline customer success, account management, and support teams experience high turnover, low morale, or systematic disengagement. Because employee experience (EX) mirrors customer experience, a team that lacks adequate tools, clear data pathways, or operational autonomy will inherently project that frustration directly onto the customer base.

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Demystifying the Process: What Happens During a Customer Experience Audit?

A human-centered customer experience audit is not a theoretical exercise; it is an active, cross-functional diagnostic designed to uncover operational friction and hidden human insights. By combining behavioral observations with systemic data, the audit establishes an objective reality of how your organization interfaces with the market. The methodology focuses on three primary pillars:

1. Heuristic Evaluation and Journey Walkthroughs

This phase requires shedding internal assumptions and experiencing the organization exactly as a customer does. Auditors conduct meticulous journey walkthroughs — often utilizing mystery shopping methodologies across both digital and physical touchpoints. Every step of the lifecycle is evaluated, from the initial search and purchasing process to onboarding, billing, support, and account renewal. This captures the micro-frictions, confusing interfaces, and inconsistent messaging that traditional internal reporting fails to catch.

2. Data Triangulation: Quantitative Metrics Meet Qualitative Insights

Data without context leads to false assumptions, while feedback without data leads to unscalable solutions. A rigorous audit triangulates multiple data streams to find the ground truth:

Quantitative Operational Data: Analyzing product telemetry, support ticket trends, drop-off rates, behavioral analytics, and time-to-value metrics.
Qualitative Human Insights: Conducting deep-dive user interviews, direct ethnographic observations, and empathy-mapping sessions with actual customers.
Internal Stakeholder Feedback: Interviewing frontline employees to uncover the broken back-end tools and siloed processes that directly impact customer delivery.

3. The Friction Inventory and Strategic Prioritization

The ultimate deliverable of a customer experience audit is a comprehensive Friction Inventory. Rather than a simple list of problems, identified gaps are categorized and mapped against a matrix of operational effort and customer impact. This ensures leadership walks away with an actionable, phased roadmap: prioritizing immediate “quick wins” that relieve acute pressure on the customer, while outlining the structural, cross-departmental redesigns required for sustainable, long-term growth.

Beyond Diagnosis: Activating the Audit with Proven Innovation Frameworks

Identifying the ten signs of customer experience decay is only half the battle. A successful audit does not just live in a static PDF report; it must serve as a catalyst for human-centered change. To transform these audit insights into sustained operational reality, organizations must cross-pollinate CX diagnostics with structured innovation and change management frameworks.

1. Mobilizing the Right Talent: The Nine Innovation Roles

Fixing systemic journey friction requires cross-functional collaboration. Once the audit exposes key gaps, teams can utilize the Nine Innovation Roles framework to assemble the right transformation task force. By intentionally balancing roles—such as the Revolutionary to challenge legacy processes, the Conductor to manage cross-departmental dependencies, and the Empath to safeguard the customer’s emotional reality—organizations ensure that the remediation phase isn’t derailed by traditional corporate inertia.

2. Designing the Solution: The Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation

Resolving complex, deep-seated friction points is an act of continuous creation. The Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation provides the repeatable lifecycle needed to scale audit findings. Teams move systematically from Intent and Insight (fully realized during the audit) into Ideation, Evaluation, and Investigation of potential journey fixes. This prevents organizations from rushing into superficial “band-aid” fixes and instead drives them toward deep, human-centered architectural improvements.

3. Overcoming Internal Resistance: The Change Planning Toolkit

The greatest barrier to fixing a broken customer experience isn’t technology; it is internal human resistance to changing legacy workflows. If employees are comfortable with the old, siloed way of working, a new CX strategy will fail. Utilizing visual collaboration tools like the Change Planning Toolkit allows cross-functional teams to co-create the blueprint for new customer-centric processes. Moving away from top-down mandates toward participatory innovation drastically reduces internal friction, aligning employee behaviors directly with the desired customer outcomes.

The Path Forward: From Diagnosis to Customer-Led Growth

A customer experience audit is not a confession of organizational failure; it is an active investment in sustainable, customer-led growth. In highly competitive markets, the experience a company delivers becomes its ultimate competitive advantage or its greatest point of failure. Continuing to view customer friction as isolated support tickets or occasional operational anomalies guarantees that your business will continue to bleed value to more agile, human-centered competitors.

Take the First Step

Uncovering systemic friction requires the willingness to look closely at uncomfortable operational truths. You do not need to overhaul your entire enterprise overnight. To begin, gather your leadership team this week and evaluate your performance against just one or two of the ten signs outlined above. Challenge your assumptions, listen deeply to your frontline employees, and commit to looking at your organization through the eyes of the people who matter most—your customers.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should an organization conduct a customer experience audit?

A comprehensive, deep-dive customer experience audit should be conducted every 12 to 18 months, or immediately following major business inflection points such as a product pivot, a merger, or a significant shift in market dynamics. However, organizations should maintain continuous, lightweight qualitative and quantitative monitoring loops between these formal deep dives to catch micro-frictions early.

What is the difference between a traditional business audit and a CX audit?

A traditional business audit is inside-out, focusing on financial compliance, internal operational efficiency, and system metrics. A customer experience (CX) audit is outside-in and human-centered. It evaluates the organization strictly through the customer’s behavioral and emotional reality, diagnosing gaps where internal operational convenience is actively harming customer retention and value delivery.

How long does a human-centered CX audit typically take to complete?

A standard human-centered customer experience audit typically takes between 4 to 8 weeks, depending on the scale of the organization and the complexity of the customer journey ecosystems. This timeframe allows for thorough journey walkthroughs, data triangulation from operational telemetry, deep-dive customer interviews, and the prioritization of an actionable friction inventory.

1. Why is an independent CX audit better than an internal one?

Internal teams often suffer from the “Curse of Knowledge” — they are so familiar with how things should work that they miss how they actually work for the customer. An independent auditor brings unbiased clarity and the courage to name the structural issues that internal politics might keep hidden.

2. How does Braden Kelley’s approach differ from others?

Most audits look for bugs; Braden Kelley looks for breakthroughs. By applying a human-centered innovation lens, Braden identifies not just where you are failing the customer, but where the customer is signaling a need for a new solution you haven’t built yet.

3. What is the main outcome of this audit?

The primary outcome is Actionable Velocity. You won’t receive a static report; you’ll get a prioritized roadmap that balances immediate experience “quick wins” with long-term strategic innovation goals, ensuring your CX is a driver of growth, not just a line item.

Click here to learn more or to book your CX Audit

Image credits: Gemini

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Google Gemini to clean up the article and add citations.

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Samsung is Turning Customer Service into a Competitive Advantage

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Samsung is Turning Customer Service into a Competitive Advantage

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

In the 1980s, Jan Carlzon was tasked with turning around Scandinavian Airlines, which had been losing money, and making it profitable. He achieved this by getting everyone to buy into a concept he called “The Moment of Truth.” The definition of this phrase was so straightforward that all Scandinavian Airlines employees could understand it and act accordingly. He defined The Moment of Truth as any time a customer (passenger) came into contact with the company, they had the opportunity to form an impression. All employees were tasked with managing these moments and creating positive impressions. That concept is every bit as valid today as it was over 40 years ago.

This idea is the same, and probably more so, for customer support, the “department” that handles complaints and problems. However, I’d like to paraphrase Carlzon’s timeless wisdom: Any time a customer comes into contact with the company’s customer support department, it is an opportunity to create loyalty.

When you create loyalty through a positive customer experience (CX), especially with customer support, several things happen. First, customers come back. Second, they spend more. Third, they trust the company more. And fourth, they become your best advertising in the form of word of mouth.

Mark Williams, the head of customer care at Samsung Electronics America, has been tasked with turning customer support into a loyalty machine. In a recent interview, he shared several important and powerful points that apply to any business:

Customer Service/Support Shouldn’t Be Just About Fixing Problems

A customer may reach out to the company about a problem, and when they finally finish with the interaction, they have a sense of confidence in the company. Every interaction, even when it starts with a complaint or problem, is an opportunity to turn the customer into a loyal customer and brand ambassador.

Customer Service can be Proactive, Not Just Reactive

This is a powerful concept: proactive customer service. Using technology, a company can anticipate problems. Technology is now being integrated into items to help identify problems, often before customers are even aware of them. For example, Samsung’s “smart appliances” can alert customers that the refrigerator is getting warm and help schedule a repair before all the food in the refrigerator and freezer spoils. Williams says, “Get to customers quicker and solve their problems before they even know they have a problem.”

AI Should Not Replace Humans

The more I talk to CX leaders, the more I hear that companies are not reducing their customer support teams because of AI. If anything, they recognize that AI is a tool that helps people, not replaces them. Williams says, “AI is not a replacement. It is an enhancement to make the experience better and let our agents focus on the customers so they can solve problems quicker and more accurately.” Furthermore, when AI is used internally to assist employees, it delivers the right information in a timely manner and empowers them to create a better customer experience. For complicated issues, AI supports the agent while they resolve customer issues and work on rebuilding the customer’s trust in the brand.

The Three S’s of an Amazing Customer Experience

Williams shared his three core principles for delivering an experience that creates loyalty:

Speed: Reduce the time it takes to resolve a customer’s issue. The sooner, the better. Williams is proud that Samsung’s repair network for consumer electronics covers 99% of the U.S. Eight out of 10 Americans (81%) are within 30 minutes of getting their products serviced. That’s actually convenience combined with speed, a powerful combination.
Simplicity: Make it easy for customers to do business with you. Remove confusing policies and anything else that is inconvenient for the customer. Listen to your front-line employees who are actively listening to your customers to get ideas on how to create a simpler and more convenient experience.
Service: Design experiences that put your customers first. When you put yourself in your customers’ shoes, you’ll find opportunities to improve customer service and the overall customer experience. Service includes friendly employees who are knowledgeable and deliver an experience that builds confidence and trust, even when things go wrong, because customers know they can count on you.

Final Words

For those in leadership who still view customer support as a cost center, think again. The people on the front line, along with the people designing digital self-service — an AI-fueled experience — are the extension of your sales and marketing departments. Loyalty can be built by turning around a customer with a complaint. In short, customer service can be an income-generating department. Reliable products are a given, but it’s the way a company handles a customer during a contentious or disappointing moment that makes them say, “I’ll be back!”

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Image credits: Pexels

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Are You Getting Your Fair Share of $860 Billion?

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Are You Getting Your Fair Share of $860 Billion?

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

According to Qualtrics, there is an estimated $860 billion worth of revenue and cost savings available for companies that figure out how to create an improved Customer Experience (CX) using AI to better understand and serve their customers. (That includes $420 billion for B2B and $440 billion for B2C.) Qualtrics recently released these figures in a report/eBook titled Unlock the Potential through AI-Enabled CX.

I had a chance to interview Isabelle Zdatny, head of thought leadership at Qualtrics Experience Management Institute, for Amazing Business Radio. She shared insights from the report, including ways in which AI is reshaping how organizations measure, understand and improve their relationships with customers. These ideas are what will help you get more customers, keep existing customers and improve your processes, giving you a share of the $860 billion that is up for grabs. Here are some of the top takeaways from our interview.

AI-Enabled CX Represents a Financial Opportunity

The way AI is used in customer experience is much more than just a way to deflect customers’ questions and complaints to an AI-fueled chatbot or other self-service solution. Qualtrics’ report findings show that the value comes through increased employee productivity, process improvement and revenue growth. Zdatny notes a gap between leadership’s recognition of AI’s potential and their readiness to lead and make a change. Early adopters will likely capture “compounding advantages,” as every customer interaction makes their systems smarter and their advantage more difficult for competitors to overcome. My response to this is that if you aren’t on board with AI for the many opportunities it creates, you’re not only going to be playing catch-up with your competitors, but also having to catch up with the market share you’re losing.

Customers Want Convenience

While overall CX quality is improving, thanks to innovation, today’s customers have less tolerance for friction and mistakes. A single bad experience can cause customers to defect. My customer experience research says an average customer will give you two chances. Zdatny says, “Customers are less tolerant of friction these days. … Deliver one bad experience, and that sends the relationship down a bad path more quickly than it used to.”

AI Takes Us Beyond Surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys can frustrate customers. AI collects the data from interactions between customers and the company and analyzes it using natural language processing and sentiment. It can predict churn and tension. It analyzes customer behavior, and while it doesn’t look at a specific customer (although it can), it is able to spot trends in problems, opportunities and more. The company that uses this information the right way can reap huge financial rewards by creating a better customer experience.

Agentic AI

Agentic AI takes customer interactions to a new level. As a customer interacts with AI-fueled self-service support, the system can do more than give customers information and analyze the interaction. It can also take appropriate action. This is a huge opportunity to make it easier on the workforce as AI processes action items that employees might otherwise handle manually. Think about the dollars saved (part of the $860 billion) by having AI support part of the process so people don’t have to.

Customer Loyalty is at Risk

To wrap this up, Zdatny and I talked about the concept of customer loyalty and how vulnerable companies are to losing their most loyal customers. According to Zdatny, a key reason is the number of options available to consumers. (While there may be fewer options in the B2B world, the concern should still be the same.) Switching brands is easy, and customers are more finicky than ever. Our CX research finds that typical customers give you a second chance before they switch. A loyal customer will give you a third chance — but to put it in baseball terms, “Three strikes and you’re out!” Manage the experience right the first time, and keep in mind that whatever interaction you’re having at that moment is the reason customers will come back—or not—to buy whatever you sell.

Image Credits: Pexels

This article was originally published on Forbes.com

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Why CIOs Should Co-Lead Customer Experience

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GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Forrester recently gathered top Customer Experience (CX) professionals from around the world for the Forrester CX Forum in New York. For the uninitiated, CX is the discipline of defining the step-by-step customer journey from marketing through sales and service. It defines the key capabilities, content, and interfaces that need to be present at each customer touchpoint and how those touchpoints work together to form a cohesive experience.

At the conference, extensive data was presented to support the argument that delivering a seamless customer experience is more important than ever. In fact, it’s the primary way digital disruptors, like Uber and Amazon, are taking share from more traditional brands.

Forrester found that from 2011 to 2015, revenues for companies that scored near the top of the Forrester CX Index™ outgrew that from a group of companies who scored poorly (CX laggards in Forrester’s terminology) by more than five to one.

But who is actually in charge of CX, and who should be? Many CIOs classically would respond that these types of matters―the design of the website, its features, and generally how we interact with the customer―is the responsibility of marketing or other areas of “the business.” Once “business” decides what they want, IT will build and support it – that’s the breakdown of responsibilities. For the CIO, this may seem to be the most efficient arrangement, as they have plenty to worry about and sometimes it’s nice to be able to identify something they don’t have to focus on.

But in testing this classic mindset through conversations with many of the CX experts at the Forrester Summit, I heard a strong, unanimous dissent with this traditional view. The view of the CX community is that to deliver great results in customer experience, senior IT leadership must be intensively involved in the full CX lifecycle, not merely a recipient of requirements when it’s time to write some code, and not merely kept apprised in an “FYI” type fashion. For example, Ori Soen, General Manager of Medallia Digital, a leading provider of CX software, offered, “We clearly see that when CIOs and their IT teams are customer-centric and focused on CX, the organization is able to generate much better business outcomes from its CX investment.”

These experts point to successful CX companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Airbnb, where the development teams and business teams are working as one unit, making decisions about the experience, and implementing it together.

As Daniel Davenport, Managing Director of Liquid Hub, an agency that focuses on customer engagement, articulated, “I think it is important for the CIO to have a voice at the table and co-create the ultimate solution.”

But as busy as enterprise CIOs and their key lieutenants are, I pressed the CX experts at the Forrester Forum as to exactly why it’s truly essential that the CIO be so aggressively involved in CX and what the specific areas of value are. After speaking with some CX professionals, I derived five key areas of significant value that are derived from CIO involvement in the CX process.

1. Art of the Possible

CX innovation sits at the intersection of customer need and the ever-changing landscape of what is technically possible. It’s too abstract for CX professionals to define requirements and ask IT to figure out how to make them work if the CX teams don’t have a good sense of what they have to work with. New technologies from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Virtual Reality to In-memory computing make it possible to do things today that were impractical just a year or two ago. But IT can’t be expected to “brief” CX professionals on every technology in the world. Instead, the process needs to be a collaboration of those studying what customers need and those studying what technology is newly enabling so that they can pool their knowledge and find new intersections where value can be created for the customer and the company. That only happens when IT is intimately involved in the ongoing process of considering the next generation CX.

2. Understanding Level of Effort and Dependencies for Prioritization and Planning

In an enterprise, there are typically many systems and many simultaneous programs going on that impact what can be implemented, when it can be implemented and with what level of effort. CX teams need to be constantly considering how their visions intersect with the technical reality of enterprise IT to develop CX roadmaps that aggressively bring new capabilities to market, but don’t crash headlong into other initiatives, system upgrades, or compliance issues.

Furthermore, CX design requires the continuous balancing of the customer’s optimal experience and various business considerations, including the cost of implementing new capabilities and the cost of supporting them. A significant component of these cost factors is IT. Therefore, there is a constant and ongoing need to both understand from IT what the level of effort might be for any given enhancement, and perhaps even more importantly, IT should be a creative collaborator in thinking about how to optimize technical approaches so that great CX ideas can be implemented with a sensible value equation. To do this effectively, IT can’t just “cost out” requirements provided by the business, but needs to be “on the inside” to understand what is really trying to be accomplished. Sometimes the answer that works economically relies on a different set of requirements than that which was initially envisioned, and an engaged senior IT partner can get creative with their colleagues to search for the best value equation.

3. Measuring CX

Measurement is a huge component of CX. The goal of CX is to move the customer through a journey from awareness to consideration to purchase to advocacy and loyalty. Many discreet components make up this journey across various touchpoints: the emails sent to customers, individual features of an app, the information available to call center representatives, and the way returns are handled. The constant obsession of CX professionals is, “How do we make this process better so the customer is more delighted and the business outcome is even more robust?” But to do so, it is essential to constantly measure the impact of each individual component of the customer’s mindset and behavior. Measuring these many interactions is often complex because it requires collecting data across many different touchpoints and then being able to correlate it so as to figure out the puzzle of causality. That requires understanding enterprise data and how to connect it across very diverse systems ― an expertise that IT needs to bring to the table.

In addition to the enterprise systems themselves, there are many excellent and deeply technical tools that support the CX measurement process. CIOs need to be deeply involved in these systems just as they would in finance or HR systems. I spoke with David McBride, a CX expert and Director of Product Management at IBM who argued, “CIOs have long been focused on creating technology to help businesses operate; when they participate in the CX process, they get to see data or even videos of customers and how they may be struggling to move through the current customer journey.” IBM’s Behavioral Analytics tool (formerly known as Tealeaf), for example, offers tools that record user sessions for analytical purposes. McBride notes, “There is nothing like seeing a session replayed to illustrate the extent of a particular struggle.”

4. True End-to-End Perspective

Lastly, in enterprises very often there isn’t just one CX initiative, but many, focused on different products, channels, touchpoints, or customer segments. The office of the CIO can often make sure that the ultimate customer experience is achieved by making sure that there is cohesion to both the technology and also the management of data across these different initiatives.

I spoke with Angela Wells, Senior Director, CX at Oracle about this, “At Oracle, what we have seen is that the CIO can and should be essential to CX decisions. What has happened at a lot of bigger companies is that they have made many ‘one-off’ decisions about what they thought were best-in-breed solutions in separate [areas of the business], and then the data didn’t talk to each other. It all got pretty sporadic and expensive, and it didn’t really deliver the customer experience [desired]. So, what we have found is that CIOs have become a centralized source for thinking about what’s going to happen to that data. They are thinking more of an umbrella; what’s best for the whole company, not just what’s best for my little niche?”

As small steps in customer experience grow into a larger program, you run the risk of chaos if there isn’t someone with the broader perspective. Dimitry Grenader, VP Product Marketing at Luminoso, a leading player in the AI arena, expressed this passionately, “In this day and age, CX should not just be left to marketers. Software is eating the world, and being able to put together the right platform will ultimately determine the success or failure of the efforts. Everything in today’s world starts as a feature, then becomes a product, which in turn becomes a platform, and finally becomes the operating system. If you don’t have the right operating system, you are building a castle on the sand.”

“I believe that a CIO must at the very least be a strong stakeholder, if not the driver of the CX process.”

Oracle’s Wells summed up this shift in terms of the evolving role of the CIO in our new digitally transformed world, “If you are thinking of the CIO as that straight tech-minded person, you are going to miss out on that more modern CIO that is a Chief Innovation Officer who takes responsibility to figure out how we make the most of what we are spending on technology to deliver the best customer experience.”

5. Changing the Way IT Operates

Finally, the level of transformation required to enable enterprises to deliver on their customer’s digital expectations may require a significant transformation in many facets of how IT operates, so it’s important for the CIO to deeply understand this difference.

As Forrester Vice President and Research Group Director Sharyn Leaver summed it up, “Compelling experiences, delivered digitally, separate CX winners from laggards. Firms that lead their industries to customer experience aggressively embrace business technologies to help win, serve, and retain customers — and they do so at rapid pace. This requires intense involvement from CIOs and their teams. Not at an arm’s length. But through ongoing collaboration and innovation.

“CX brings new prominence to technology’s role, but also new pressures on CIOs. The pervasive need for digital experiences exposes old systems, static organizations, and especially outmoded cultures that cannot deliver at the speed of the customer. For the CIO, this is much more daunting than merely spinning up a digital or mobile team. For many, success will require an overhaul of their organization – the people, processes, governance, and technology itself.”

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Unsplash

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Free Customer Experience Maturity Assessment

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Free Customer Experience Maturity Assessment

HCL Digital & Analytics Customer Experience (CX) Strategy practice lead Danyel LaGow recently published a new white paper titled:

5 Practical Strategies to Boost Your CX Success

“Driving a seamless customer experience alongside fundamental business decision-making is indispensable for business profitability. In this constantly evolving customer expectation landscape, how you cultivate your relationships will speak for your brand.

Danyel LaGow The tectonic shift in how consumers engage with brands demand attention to new ways to enthuse customers with the intent to deliver next gen customer experience. Having an end-to-end customer journey roadmap in place is the first and foremost step towards creating a serious customer experience strategy. A customer journey map not only showcases the end-to-end customer interactions but also enable the visibility of every touch point. This further reveals internal bottlenecks and customer pain points – primary identifications to work on a customer experience management program.

It is important to assess your current CX to realize where your company stands in CX maturity, before you outline your strategy. This paper will help you dig deep and understand the five key components of successful CX, which are paramount to promoting customer success across organizations.”

Download the whitepaper to know more

Included with the white paper is a free Customer Experience (CX) Maturity Assessment.

“While many organizations have an idea about their customer experience (CX) maturity, a thoughtful assessment gives you a frame of reference to help develop a strategic roadmap. Regular assessments, as part of your annual activities, help measure the progress of your CX efforts.

This assessment is divided into six key CX components that are critical in fostering customer success in customer-centric organizations. There are three questions for each CX component, amounting to a total of 18 questions.”

The survey should not take you more than five minutes to complete.

Take the FREE CX Maturity Assessment

Image credit: Pixabay

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Why Your Digital Transformation May Be Doomed to Fail

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Why Your Digital Transformation May Be Doomed to Fail

Digital Transformation, like Innovation, has become an overused buzzword that is losing its meaning. Whoever created the Wikipedia page for Digital Transformation defines it this way:

“Digital Transformation (DT or DX) is the adoption of digital technology to transform services or businesses, through replacing non-digital or manual processes with digital processes or replacing older digital technology with newer digital technology. Digital solutions may enable – in addition to efficiency via automation – new types of innovation and creativity, rather than simply enhancing and supporting traditional methods.” — Wikipedia

This definition is too focused on technology as the source of the transformation instead of the transformation being driven by the needs of customers and employees. In my view, technology should always be seen simply as a tool to help achieve the desired human-centered transformation.

Too often the SaaS and Cloud vendors co-opt the true practice of digital transformation by trying to claim that a shifting from on-premise software to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is somehow a digital transformation or that going to the Cloud is the secret to everything that troubles your organization.

None of this of course is true in and of itself.

This definition of digital transformation from EnterprisersProject is a bit closer to the truth:

“Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers. It’s also a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure.”

But, even this definition doesn’t go far enough…

Number One Reason Your Digital Transformation May Be Doomed to Fail

The primary reason your digital transformation will fail or take much longer than you expect, or possibly even than you can fund, is the failure of the organization to put the customer and the employee at the center of its data model and to be able to construct a fully-linked and coherent picture of every customer and employee’s body of interactions/transactions/experiences across the enterprise.

When you lack this ‘single source of truth’ and this ability to connect everything together, you greatly increase the chances that your well-intentioned digital transformation will fail or will be abandoned when you run out money.

Defining What Successful Digital Transformations Look and Sound Like

Successful digital transformations are human-centered transformations empowered and accelerated by the proper use of technology in support of the desired experiences and outcomes. You can’t have a human-centered transformation without a human-centered data model. You also can’t have a human-centered transformation without a holistic understand of what information customers and employees are looking for, what information you have, what they want to do using your digital infrastructure, what they can do with your digital infrastructure, and where the gaps are.

One of the many tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™ is a series of worksheets that help you explore these foundational questions for a successful human-centered digital transformation.

While you can improve the organization through a judicious use of technology in absence of a consciously designed human-centered data model, you cannot digitally transform the organization without doing this difficult work.

The disruption that many startups attempt against the incumbents is achieved because they start with a human-centered data model. Their approach leverages technology where appropriate to add value and remove friction from the human-centered design of their customer experience instead of trying to force customers to use new and often disparate technology experiences. It is a subtle but important distinction. We must be careful not to let the servant become the master.

So, what is driving your digital transformation?

Do you need help creating a human-centered design?

If so, contact me.