Experience Action
How do we do this customer experience thing anyway? Join award-winning customer experience (CX) expert Jeannie Walters as she answers real questions from overwhelmed leaders! Let's turn ideas into ACTION! From company culture to employee experience (EX) to customer service, Jeannie wants to help you demystify the process for enriching the customer experience. With over 20 years investigating the best and worst in CX, this international keynote speaker has heard it all... and now she's here to give you the answers you need! You won't want to miss an episode! Do you have a question? Visit askjeannie.vip to leave Jeannie a voicemail!
Experience Action
No One Cares About Your CX Metrics—Let's Fix That
Customer experience pros often face a common challenge: robust metrics like NPS or CSAT fall flat outside the CX team. Why? Because other departments don't see how those numbers connect to their goals.
This episode explores how to bridge that gap by translating CX data into the language of IT, Operations, and Finance. It's not about dumbing down the data. It's about building context. When CX metrics highlight inefficiencies or opportunities for cross-functional wins, they become powerful tools for collaboration.
You'll hear how to align CX insights with departmental priorities so the data speaks to what each team cares about most. We also explore using behavioral and operational data, like service calls, churn rates, or purchase frequency, to demonstrate real business impact. Plus, we introduce the Customer Experience Success Blueprint, a framework designed to help CX initiatives integrate seamlessly with broader organizational goals.
Want your CX initiatives to gain real traction? Start by making the metrics matter to everyone.
Resources Mentioned:
CX Mission Statement Workbook -- https://bit.ly/cx-mission-workbook
CX Success Statement Workbook -- https://bit.ly/cx-success-workbook
Experience Investigators Website -- https://experienceinvestigators.com
Want to ask a question? Visit askjeannie.vip to leave Jeannie a voicemail! (And don't forget to follow Jeannie on LinkedIn! www.linkedin.com/in/jeanniewalters/)
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, jeanne 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.
Jeannie Walters:Do you ever feel like you're the only one who really gets it? That's what this next question is all about.
Listener Question:We track a bunch of CX metrics but honestly, I don't even think most of our internal teams know what they mean. So my question is how can we make those metrics actually matter to folks who don't work directly with the customers, like those in IT or operations or finance?
Jeannie Walters:This is something we hear all the time. I have so much empathy for the leader who reached out and asked this question, but I also bet that many of you can relate. I just had a coaching call today with a leader and we were talking about this very thing. How can we get the others to really care? Because without others, without those other leaders from finance, from IT, from digital, from all these different places then it's really hard to execute on the things that we need to do in order to improve the customer experience. So take heart, we can do this. This is one of the biggest challenges we have and it's one of the things I see as a missed opportunity for CX.
Jeannie Walters:We don't talk about the metrics in the right way. We don't help our organization really understand that this is a win for everyone. It's a really common challenge because we talk about metrics like NPS and CSAT and CES and churn rate maybe, but we don't give them context. We don't talk about the why and, frankly, metrics only matter if people can see how they connect to their goals. So let's take a cue from another part of the business. When we talk about sales metrics, everybody in the business clearly understands what it means when we say we've closed a deal. Well, we've closed a deal. That means more revenue, it means bonuses, it means business growth. We connect those dots, maybe even without knowing we're doing so, but with customer experience we have to provide that connection, that context every time we talk about these metrics and measurements, that context every time we talk about these metrics and measurements. So here are a few ideas on how to make these metrics matter to more leaders throughout your organization.
Jeannie Walters:Number one start with empathy for those internal teams. Internal teams are juggling their own goals, they have systems, they have priorities and sometimes we just don't give them a reason to care. So let's make sure that whenever we are thinking about communicating with those teams, we are connecting the dots between their work, their efforts, their goals and the customer experience. For example, we can say something about hey, you know what, our net promoter score went up this month partially because our digital experience improved. That's all thanks to IT. We have to help them understand that the efforts that they're putting in are showing up in these metrics. Now, if we show them the positive, we can also indicate the negative. When things are happening. We can say things like, you know, we've heard that the reason our recommendation rate is going down is because people don't find the experience easy. People don't find it convenient. People are finding that it takes too many steps to get to what they need. The more that you can show that this isn't just something we're talking about. This is tied to the action, the priorities and the measurements that we have as an organization. And then the other part of this is let's not just dictate customer experience based on customer feedback scores. Customer experience is about the experience. It's about the whole thing. It's holistic.
Jeannie Walters:When we are only talking about the feedback metrics that we're getting from customers, we are missing opportunities to really talk about how are they behaving? What does that tell us? What are the operational metrics that matter? What will it mean to our organization if we can speed up service just a little bit? What will that mean to the entire organization? We need to make them mean something. We need to tie things together with that metric.
Jeannie Walters:I would also say look for shared victories. Look for shared victories between their goals and our goals. So, for example, if you are talking to operations, they are going to be really excited about anything that brings organizational efficiency. So if you could improve service, if you could reduce service calls, if you could make sure that people are getting what they need the first time, so you don't have to send out those repairs, you don't have to do those refunds. All of those things add up to operational efficiency. Now that same thought process can be assigned to finance or marketing or sales. Think about what's in it for them.
Jeannie Walters:Now we have a tool we used called the Customer Experience Success Blueprint, and the first step in this is defining what are your organizational goals and what are your leadership goals. We have to understand these leaders. What do they care about? Because then we can determine where should we invest and prioritize in the customer experience so that we can deliver on those goals. Let's face it when we are asking for feedback metrics, when we are talking about net promoter score or customer satisfaction rate, those are nice to know. Those give us some information, but they don't give us all the information.
Jeannie Walters:We have to make sure that we are connecting these dots so that people really understand that it's not just about what they're telling us. What they're telling us is a reflection on what we're delivering, on how they feel about the experience, about what they'll do next time. Are they going to buy more with us? Are they going to leave us? Are they going to badmouth us on social media? That's the connection.
Jeannie Walters:It's not really about an outcome of NPS. NPS and CSAT and all of those things are metrics. They are not outcomes. We have to stop treating them like they are outcomes. The outcomes are for the business, are for organizational results. What do our leaders care about? So when you break down how you really define success and that's what the customer experience success blueprint is all about when you define what success looks like and how to measure it, that's when you start connecting the dots for everybody. You show people that this is a win. This is a win for the organization, this is a win for our employees, this is a win for our customers, and if we're speaking directly to a leader or team, we want to make it a win for them and their team as well.
Jeannie Walters:So let's make sure, when we are talking about customer experience metrics, we are actually talking about business outcomes. We are building that business case for why they should care about this. That's on us. We have to own it and we have to just keep doing it. Keep up the rhythm and the cadence of communication around this, but make sure it's meaningful. I've heard from a lot of leaders who say things like yeah, I see the dashboard, but nothing changes, so what do I care? Because these changes take time. So make sure you're looking for what is one win you can celebrate every month, every quarter. What is something that you learned from that? Because of the information, because of the feedback that customers gave us, we're changing something. Share that.
Jeannie Walters:This is a business cycle. This is a building of a relationship with our customers to get business results, and that's the part we have to talk about a lot more. So some specific takeaways for you. Don't assume everyone knows what these things mean. We have to give them context. We have to translate it into team relevant language. We want to use those CX metrics to apply to our cross-functional KPIs. We have to make sure we're talking about efficiency, churn, revenue, profit, all of those things. And I want you to use those tools like the customer experience mission statement and the customer experience success blueprint to really define where you're going, because if you're only reporting out and you don't have a vision, you don't have a plan, how do you know if you're getting there?
Jeannie Walters:And we wanna make this part of the regular rhythm of business life. We wanna report in these numbers in a way that people want to hear them, because it helps them do their jobs better. Better experience means better outcomes. Better outcomes means wins for our organization, our customers and our employees. Let's keep talking about it. Great question, as always, I'm here for you. Ask your question at askJeannie VIP. Thanks for being here. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience. Check out free resources at experienceinvestigatorscom, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.
