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In a New Year, Don't Lose the Customer for the CX

By Amanda Hanson, CCXP posted 01-06-2025 02:39 PM

  
The beginning of the year is a great time to sit and reflect, and in my first attempt at a CXPA blog contribution, I'd like to call on all of us as a community to do so. One thing I've noticed lately is that there is a lot of content out there about the ins and outs of building a formal CX program.  What's the most important first step?  The most frequent suggestions seem to be creating a journey map, or doing a CX maturity evaluation. These are great steps as are many others, but I'd argue they're not the most important first step at all, and maybe the path to build a formal program is the wrong first focus entirely. Are we losing the forest for the trees, or in this case, the Customer for the CX?
Let's break down just some of the activities that might be involved in these examples, and the time potentially involved.  For a CX maturity evaluation, someone new to the position or company may take weeks to start getting the footing of the organizational culture, an important step (or they may miss this step entirely, making their next moves very difficult). Beyond that, it could take weeks to months to get the assessment to a place where you feel confident and can begin mapping out the next steps to increase your organization's maturity.  Building a journey map is wonderful, but you may be in a complex organization where you first need to determine your customer personas and decide which part of the journey to begin mapping.  Perhaps you've seen that a common trouble area in your particular industry is in customer onboarding - but do you know if this applies directly to your company? 
Maybe you don't have a formal CX program or the given authority to start one but you work in an area heavily focused on the customer experience.  It can be tempting to pick up the CX buzzword torch, and start knocking down walls to build the value proposition of the creation of a CX program. You could be gathering stakeholder buy-in for the importance of this, delivering case studies, and mapping out staffing plans to pitch to executives. This work may all be incredibly successful, and you could have something great up and running in 2026. 
As you are doing all of this work, however, there's one critically important thing to remember: Your customers are still actively having an experience.  Right now, as we speak.
While you are doing all of this great strategic preparation for a better future, who is tending to that experience?  Maybe there's a team in place, already doing a great job at this effort, and you can discard everything I am saying.  If not, though, I would argue that the first priority should be to pick up your staff and think of yourself as a shepherd of that experience your customers are already having.  Priority one should always be tending to your flock, so to speak.
Formalizing CX program activities is a noble goal, but it can be achieved as a secondary priority to always having a listening and active ear to the experience both your employees and customers are having today, in this moment.  I'd like to suggest a simple framework to ensuring that this is always top of mind.  This framework assumes that like most companies, you have some form of customer listening set up today.  This could be something industry standard like an NPS survey, app or web reviews, or other systematized surveys. If you don't have any of these, but you have employees that interact with customers in any type of support capacity, you already have a resource that can be used to share customer feedback.  If these categories don't feel sufficient, I would suggest setting up some quick win additional listening post using technology you already have.
From here, my suggestion would be to make the following steps a part of your routine: 
1) Review customer feedback frequently: Outline the listening posts you'd like to focus on, choose a cadence, and review feedback on that cadence. This should be an ongoing step even once you've established that big and beautiful CX program because this keeps us lock step with our customers' needs and feelings as time goes by.
2) Set a goal for quick wins: Even as you work on crafting the perfect journey map, setting a goal for achieving a certain number of quick wins will help to keep you focused on improvement and will give you some proving ground should you need to seek additional resources.  This could be as simple as 1-2 quick win enhancements for customers per quarter to processes or software, based on evolving feedback.
3) Set up a prioritization system: Customers will give a lot of feedback, but how much of the same feedback do you need to be able to quickly determine if taking action on this feedback will move the needle for your entire customer base or critical parts of your customer base tied to your growth strategy? Do you have a quick back of the napkin level system for determining cost and value? Some larger projects require a more complicated Return on Investment analysis, but how can you quickly judge between three quick wins with small costs?  A helpful component of this system could be to assign points based on things like number of customers helped, cost and resource involvement, and alignment with the company's strategic plan.
Once this is set up, when done properly, your customers will notice that you are listening, and you will begin to develop trust and customer loyalty. You won't want to stop there, and I believe this is when the formal CX program items can come in and provide a lot of value, but isn't that trust and customer loyalty what we are all seeking at the end of the day?


#2025
#VOCCustomerInsightUnderstanding

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