Setting Clear and Actionable Customer Experience Goals

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready, set, action. One, two, three, four.

It's the Experience Action Podcast. I'm Jeannie Walters and I'm here to answer your questions about customer experience. So if you don't already know this, we're also on YouTube. So if you are listening, please search for Jeannie Walters on YouTube to find our playlist for our podcast and much, much more. For today we have another great question that I'm hearing from not just this person who left the message, but many, many leaders just like you.

Hi, I'm Shawn Dan, team member here at Experience Investigators. I wanted to share a question that was submitted from a participant at a recent webinar. Is there an example of a good CX goal?

It seems so simple. We know what a goal is. We know what Customer Experience is. We know that we're trying to do the right thing for our customers, to create better experiences for them. That should be a big enough goal, but really we are in business, we have to show up as business people, and what I see the most often is that we have a lot of unintentional consequences around how we write our customer experience goals. So if you are a CX leader, if you are on a customer experience team or if you are out there as a CX change agent trying to do the right thing for your customers and your organization, I hope you'll listen up today because I want you to be successful. So let's first of all talk about why we might not be successful when we're using goals today. Well, here's what I hear a lot, we develop goals that are way too vague, that are very reactive or that simply don't have enough intention for success. Many of the things that I see are really focused on customer feedback as the end goal, but we have to remember collecting feedback, both quantitative feedback, like net promoter scores or customer satisfaction rates or that type of thing, as well as qualitative feedback, it's a necessary step in the process, but it's not the goal. The goal is what we do with that feedback to make sure that we're driving our business forward so that we're delivering the right things for our customers, so that they will continue to be customers, so they will spend more money with us, so they will buy more products, have a longer lifetime as a customer with us, tell their friends and provide more referrals for us. Those are the goals that we really need to focus on. What are the goals that will help the business? So some of the downfalls that I see around defining goals. Number one is we create a goal that really is a limited goal, something around customer feedback alone. Now, that does not create meaningful change. We could collect all the feedback in the world, and if we're not turning that into insights that drive the right actions for our organization, then we're really not having any impact at all. So we need to have a clear understanding of what to do with the insights gathered. We want to make sure that we are making customer experience part of how we do business, and part of how we do business is showing results.

I also see ill-defined goals, vague customer experience goals are everywhere. So think about what is it that you talk about when you're talking about customer experience in your organization. If it's things like we're going to deliver a world-class customer experience for every customer every time, I'm going to challenge you to ask what does that really mean? That's a vague goal that you know what people can't get their arms around. How do we know if we're successful? Teams can also interpret things very differently. So if you have goals around we want to be superior at customer experience or we want to be customer-centric those really aren't goals. They're not defined. You and I might have very different interpretations about what being customer-centric means. If we don't take the time to define what success looks like and define these goals in real terms, then we're basically just wishing. We have strong aspirations, but those aren't goals.

And then the other thing I see that really limits our success around defining customer experience goals is really just a short-term focus. We have lots of projects or initiatives. They're all kind of ad hoc. They're all out there. But we're not focused around a singular centralized strategy that guides us. That makes sure that we are prioritizing the right efforts. That we can have conversations with different teams throughout the organization and say we're all prioritizing these things because this is part of our bigger strategy and everybody understands what that is. Because otherwise, if I'm in product, I might think you know what if somebody has a complaint about our products, that should be a priority. But if I'm in delivery and we're having supply chain issues, maybe we want to prioritize proactive communication with the customer. We are all coming at this from different angles

if we don't have that centralized strategy that really helps us move from that reactive space to proactive leadership around customer experience, we need to get clear on our desired outcomes, what success looks like and how to measure that. This intentionality is what's missing from most customer experience programs and initiatives. This is what I see everywhere and, unfortunately, a lot of the information out there, a lot of the books, a lot of the things that you see for inspiration. They are there for inspiration, but they don't talk about how to define success. We can't all say that we want to be the Amazon of our industry. We can't all just say that we want to provide wonderful, meaningful customer experiences and expect everybody to get what that means and expect our leaders to understand what that means for the organization. This is why we developed the Customer Experience Strategy Success Statement, because we saw this gap everywhere.

So the way you write your success statement is really a goal-defining exercise for you, and I want you to start with your organizational goals. What is important to your business? Are there cost-savings efforts going on right now? Are there efforts around becoming a more efficient workplace? What are the most important goals around your organization? So the first thing is to understand your organizational goals and look for where you can have the impact. So, for example, you might have some vague organizational goals as well. One company might be talking about being the number one choice for their industry. Another might talk about delivering exceptional service, earning loyal customers and long-term growth. Those are, again, aspirations, wishes, visions, but they're not necessarily goals. But you can take the idea of that and say, okay, if we're focused on long-term growth, what does that mean for me in customer experience? How can we support that specific goal? But really, you want to get to what that means. Is that more market share? Is that more share of wallet? Is that higher customer lifetime value or higher retention rates? Think about how you can actually have the impact on the organizational goals.

But don't just stop there. We want to think about the leaders that are looking to what we're doing in customer experience and make sure we're thinking about what they care about. Your chief marketing officer, your chief operating officer and your chief financial officer, while they all want to support those organizational goals, they all have their own individual goals as well. Your chief financial officer is going to be looking for how are we increasing revenue? How are we decreasing expenses? How are we increasing profitability? Whatever that looks like in your organization. Your chief marketing officer might be looking at how can we increase demand for our products? How can we expand our reach? And your chief operations officer they might be looking for how can we be more efficient? How can we make sure that we don't have to add headcount every time we want to scale a little bit? How can we get more efficient with what we're doing inside our organization? So think about are they motivated by cutting costs? Are they looking to beat the competition? Maybe they're just really earnestly looking for how to be better at their role.

We want to really work with our leaders, look for how can we work with our financial team to understand the financial impact of the choices that we make and make sure that we are speaking their language. What does your C-suite care about? And then you want to take your organizational goals, your leadership goals, and look for those specific outcomes that will drive progress and success for your organization. This is where we have to look for the connections and the correlations and really pull the thread a little bit about you know, we're collecting all this feedback, we're getting these insights, we're not investing in the right places.

We have to make that business case as part of the goal. So, for example, if an organizational goal is to earn 10% more of the market and we know that as a leadership goal, our CEO is often heard saying one customer at a time because they refer more customers to us, then we want to balance the formula for the specific outcome. So in this example, we might say okay, if we increase customer happiness, we know that will increase the likelihood of referrals. If we correlate existing metrics that we're already tracking, like net promoter score, then we might be able to say if we can improve net promoter score, we know that will help us with our goal of increasing referrals. We know increasing referrals will allow us to expand our reach, to make sure that we are increasing revenue, that we are not adding headcount, all of the things that our leaders talked about.

So what we want to do is figure out what are the metrics, what are the measurements to see if we're successful? Customer churn rate might be a great thing to start tracking. Let's look at how, when we make improvements to the customer journey, our churn rate goes down, our retention rate goes up, our referrals go up. There are so many different ways to look at this and customer feedback is just one piece. So we really want to look at the metrics to measure our success, and they don't necessarily all have to come out of your department. You can look at things like you know what we want to understand what's happening with the conversion of this part, the conversion rate of this part of the journey. We want to look at customer reviews and see if the sentiment is changing. We want to actually look at the value of the relationship between the employee experience and employee morale and the customer experience that we're delivering. That will help us with our employee goals, with our workplace goals, with our hiring and recruiting goals.

So really, there is no one way to write a CX goal, but there are many, many ways to write a bad one. So, as you think about your own goals, challenge yourself to think is this too vague? How do I know if I'm successful? And when I ask that question, a lot of people say, well, we'll know because our customers will be happy, we'll have more sales, etc. And I say, okay, when? When will we know that? When should we check on that? How do we know if we're successful in a year, in three years, in five years? Get real about this. We need to define success based on reality. So as you start developing these things, it's easy, it's exciting, to be kind of wooed into writing these huge, massive, amazing goals. And when you do that, I encourage you to take a step back and ask yourself is the goal attainable and realistic? Because you know what, sometimes we have to take baby steps.

One customer experience goal might be we have to get our data in the right place. That's the only way we can centralize things in order to make improvements. So that has to be a goal. Now will that immediately impact those organizational goals? Maybe not, but you have to build the business case for why it's important. We believe that if we centralize our data into this customer data platform, we will be able to deliver on our goals long term. It's a step in the process. You can also start defining success around that by saying, by the end of the year or in two years, we expect that 80% of our customer data will be accessible, visible and in the right place according to our requirements.

So let's stop talking in vague terms. Let's stop basically inviting our leaders to say things like well, customer experience is nice to have, but it's not a must-have. We matter, you matter, and it's not just because of the customers, it's because this is what drives success for the organization. But we have to make that case. So, as you write your customer experience goals, do whatever you can to attach them to your organizational success. That's how you will earn the respect, the resources, the investment, the headcount, everything else that you need to be successful. So I really encourage you if you haven't already check out all the resources we have around developing your Customer Experience Strategy Success Statement. Going through this process will really help you get clearer on your goals so you can understand how to make that business case in the absolute strongest way possible. This is a great question.

I love hearing from you. We do webinars and LinkedIn Lives and people submit questions there, but, of course, you can also leave me a voicemail directly. Go to askjeannie. vip and, if you haven't already, we love your ratings and reviews for this podcast. It helps others find us. So thank you for those and please keep them coming. And if you want us to cover something, the best way to do that is to leave us a voicemail at AskJeannie. VIP. I hope to see you soon on a webinar or at our LinkedIn Lives, or maybe you'll check out one of my LinkedIn Learning Courses. Let us know what you think. We are here for you and I just love to see what you're doing. So keep up the great work. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigators. com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.