As technology makes much of good CX table stakes, every interaction becomes an opportunity to build or lose customers’ loyalty, and all parts of the business will need to get on board for good CX.
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AI and other technologies are making it easier for companies to deliver the nuts and bolts of what customers say they’re looking for when interacting with a brand.
Customers expect baseline CX capabilities such as order confirmations and shipping updates, proactive service, a “just right” amount of personalization, loyalty and rewards programs, seamless movement among channels when calling support and not having to repeat oneself when doing so.
The various technologies enabling these CX capabilities are raising the operational floor for everyone head of thought leadership with the Qualtrics XM Institute, speaking during a recent Qualtrics webinar
For the report that accompanied the webinar, Qualtrics surveyed 1,000 business leaders. More than two-thirds of these executives said that seamless experiences across all channels and fast response times will become table stakes by 2030.
As baseline CX expectations rise and companies, and their competitors, execute on those table stakes, customers are unlikely to tolerate poor CX. That puts a critical eye on customer experience — and requires CX leaders to make the case for experience across the broader business.
“Your real competitive advantage, your last moat is really the experience you can give your customers or employees,” Ken Coleman, SVP of marketing at Qualtrics, said during the webinar. “That’s the only thing a competitor cannot come in and copy or steal, and that’s where you make your mark.”
Switching brands is becoming simpler, particularly given consumers’ increasing use of AI assistants to find and compare products. Nearly 4 out of 5 of executives surveyed by Qualtrics anticipate customers will become more demanding over the next five years and more than half believe it will be easier for customers to switch to a competitor by 2030.
And, nearly 3 in 5 customers will leave a brand after two or fewer bad service experiences, recent Metrigy research found.
“Trust isn’t something you can earn through one impressive capability or a hero customer service agent or single great interaction,” Zdatny said. “It is going to build up over time as people learn two things about you: Can I count on you to keep your promises, and are you going to treat me fairly?”
Qualtrics XM Institute looks at experiences on two dimensions: functional and emotional. Functional is simply how well the company performed: Did the transaction work, and did it arrive in the promised timespan? These are baseline expectations and meeting them, or not, teaches the customer whether the brand does what it says it will do, Zdatny said.
The emotional dimension is about how the customer feels about the interaction: Were they respected or otherwise cared for? For example, if the package was delayed, how did the company handle the complaint?
“As functional performance becomes more commonplace, I think that emotional dimension is becoming more important as the way to differentiate your organization and earn that lasting loyalty,” Zdatny said. “You’re building it interaction by interaction. Other companies can’t copy how you make your customers or employees feel.”
Citing more than a decade of research, and a recent U.S. consumer study, Zdatny said that customers who reported having a strong emotional experience with a brand are 5.6 times as likely to trust that organization. They are 4.5 times more likely to purchase more, and they are 4.5 times more likely to forgive if the brand makes a mistake.
Yet building trust and delivering a consistently good customer experience is a team sport spanning every individual contributor, team, department and division within an organization.
Making the case for CX internally
For CX leaders, it’s critical to surface and circulate information about the impacts of emotional and functional customer experience within their organizations and show how it impacts the business overall. Doing so requires partnering with, or sponsorship by, an executive who can help bridge the gaps among the different internal stakeholders like sales, service, product, operations, finance and logistics.
“It is, of course, on CX and EX teams to help the business understand people’s experiences across different functions, so work with your partners on turning that into action,” Zdatny said. “We often confuse responsibility for managing experiences with the authority over making cross-functional decisions that improve it.”
Executive leadership has that cross-functional responsibility. Organizations can also be successful with small centers of CX excellence or experience management that report directly to an executive sponsor, Zdatny said.
“That centralized team can bring customer insights together with their expertise, and then they’re partnering with lines of business in those different areas of the company to make sure that they are delivering that cohesive, consistent experience,” Zdatny said.
Just as the organization might strive to meet their customers where they are, so too might CX teams try to do the same with their colleagues.
“Don’t come to other teams and tell them, ‘Hey, the experience needs to be better,’” Zdatny said. “Go to other teams and say, ‘Here’s what you’re trying to achieve, here’s what you’re being measured against, and here’s how poor experiences are affecting the outcomes that you care about.’”
To bridge those departmental silos, CX teams should focus on helping other teams make smart trade-offs that improve their decisions and performance. That involves translating experience metrics into outcomes they understand.
“How is this affecting revenue and costs and your most valuable customers and employees?” Zdatny said. “Meet them where they are. Don’t try to push out experience metrics and measurements.”
