As we are on the verge, grappling with the newer changes surfacing our lives, we are looking forward to faster recovery, especially from the COVID phase. Now that we are expecting normalcy to come sooner than later, focusing on the customer experience segment is the need of the hour. Therefore, here we discuss the top 10 Customer Experience Challenges and how best to tackle them in these testing times. Let us dig in.

1. Developing a CX Culture and Customer-first Mindset
2. Ensure Deep Enough Customer Understanding
3. Defining Great CX
4. Prioritizing CX Initiatives
5. Ensuring CX ROI
6. Delivering Demonstrable and Measurable Experience Improvements
7. Ensuring the Right, Meaningful CX Metrics aligned with Operational and Financial Metrics
8. Maximize CX Centric Customer Care and Customer Success
9. Addressing Employee Experience (EX) and the Employee Voice
10. Sufficient CX Discipline and Techniques Understanding

Before we dive right in, it is essential to know what is Customer Experience? Simply put, CX is the holistic perception of their experience with your product and services. A world-class CX is the one where the customers wish to revert, do more business, and not churn away. Look at some of the toughest Customer Experience challenges according to a recent survey by Customer Results. 

#1 Challenge – Developing a CX Culture and Customer-first Mindset 

The best way to excel at and imbue a customer-first mindset is by seeing your job through the eyes of your customer. As long as you do not place yourself in the shoes of your customer, you would not be able to understand their pain points, to begin with. Also, try to consider objectives like going digital or sprinkling experiences that are digitally-enabled for the millennials’ customer base.

#2 Challenge – Ensure Deep Enough Customer Understanding

To truly understand your customer, you should prioritize communications with proper effectiveness. To straighten the process further, you can delve into customer understanding tools like personas, audiences, and customer intelligence strategies that showcase how different sorts of personas interact to complete a journey. This will help you systematize customer research and understand your customer better.

#3 Challenge – Defining Great CX 

To define great CX, you should collage stellar CX sketches based on the voice of the customer, business, employee, and partner. Collecting real-world CX anecdotes can prove to be a standard element in the initial charting process. Aside from this, it can become an increasingly standard part of team and company meetings as well.

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#4 Challenge – Prioritizing CX Initiatives

To best prioritize the CX initiatives, implement a robust audience-centric prioritization methodology and tools as a part of your CX enterprise program – one that improves and evolves with time. Ensure that you define the customer experience and business drivers to assist in balancing the customer needs and internal needs in prioritization decisions. Additionally, you may enhance the cross-functional stakeholder teams to engage in these prioritization decisions as well.

#5 Challenge – Ensuring CX ROI 

For calculating and forecasting the CX ROI, you should make sure that every CX project or a project with a CX element has a metric hypothesis linked with it before you start those factors in experience, operational and financial success. As you do that, never forget to track the measurable feedback for every initiative as and when required. And then, transfer CX (experience and operational) return on investment into personal performance plans.

#6 Challenge – Delivering Demonstrable and Measurable Experience Improvements 

To deliver measurable experience improvements, you should check that an operational and financial customer experience improvement case is included in your charter for every such CX project and that the ongoing measurement of these achievements is activated. On that note, prioritize initiatives with clear customer benefits. For this, you will have to delve into considering both customer experience and business drivers and see how well they align with each other.

#7 Challenge – Ensuring the Right, Meaningful CX Metrics aligned with Operational and Financial Metrics

Elevate your metrics framework beyond NPS and CSAT to measure experience, finance, and even competitive measurements. Assess your current metrics system hovering around people, process, tech, data against your aspirations. Confirm that they align with the best practices. Whatever, it is, adapt an agile approach and get better every day.

#8 Challenge – Maximize CX Centric Customer Care and Customer Success 

Place CX initiatives appropriately. Elevate the importance of Customer Care and Customer Success in this “digital-first and not digital-only multichannel world”. Put up a framework that clearly balances value marketing, sales, service, product, partners, and other contributors, such as fulfillment, regulatory, etc. Leverage the systems, process excellence, and customer-centric people. There could come a time when the customer care department supercharges your CX movement.

#9 Challenge – Addressing Employee Experience (EX) and the Employee Voice 

Identify some initial EX opportunities and apply CX/EX techniques to prove the value. Activate employee voice measurement and EX measurement that aligns with the measurement systems. Engage HR and talent leaders to understand how they might be motivated to adopt a different way of handling employee and talent management.

#10 Challenge – Sufficient CX Discipline and Techniques Understanding 

Develop systematic skills and way of operating, not just for CX practitioners but also for CX stakeholders and team members. Create a prioritized skills requirement, development and fulfillment talent plan based on the key CX / EX / XM capabilities. Ensure a flexible balanced resource portfolio of employees and partners leveraging outsourced providers where appropriate.

That’s a Wrap

The world of customers is slowly gearing up for the best of experiences only. There, the challenges and difficulties too have their own say. Perhaps, a right blend of working out the concerns whilst giving the customer nothing short of perfection is what is needed right now. Note that a stellar customer experience is here to stay and that is what will rule the Customer Success niche in the future to come.

WRITTEN BYSwati Somineni

An implementation engineer with six years of experience is a seasoned professional specialising in implementing and integrating complex systems and technologies for businesses. Possessing a diverse skill set that combines technical expertise, and project management capabilities.

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