How NICE “Walks the CX Talk”
NICE believes that the customer experience (CX) and the customer’s satisfaction are critical to the long-term success of our business. After all, the entire foundation behind NICE and our solutions is to help contact centers transform their customers’ experiences! We genuinely believe in the power of customer experiences and take steps every day to prove our commitment to our customers.
NICE certainly feels an ethical responsibility to drive excellent customer experiences. But, there is an additional benefit: our bottom line shows that CX investments are worthwhile from a financial perspective.
How are YOU faring at showing the link between great customer experience and revenue gains?
In its report, “Drive Revenue With Great Customer Experience, 2017”, experts from Forrester have studied the financial impact of investing in activities designed to enhance the customer experience. Thirteen industries have been highlighted, revealing the potential economic gains per industry. You’ll likely find yours listed in some form or fashion and be able to draw convincing conclusions as to why customer experience makes for a pretty important investment for your company, too.
More than a year ago, NICE hired me to build a team of dedicated CX professionals, focused on an in-depth understanding of the NICE customer’s needs. I joined NICE to accelerate those efforts after having spent well over a decade in the customer experience and marketing research industries. Fast-forward to today and I am pleased to report that my team of 10 fulltime employees is working on more than 20 customer journey improvement initiatives identified throughout 10 different departments. I report weekly to our most senior leadership team on these initiatives, which are at the very top of our company’s strategic priorities. Though our journey is not nearly complete, we have the organizational focus, investment and talent to continuously evaluate our customer journey and make real, meaningful improvements for our customers and our business.
Here are a few key lessons we learned while driving revenue through our CX focus:
- Understand your customers in the context of your industry. Not all CX approaches are created equal, and priorities from one industry do not always translate to your industry. It is key to understand how your customers buy, how often they buy and the decision-making process they use.
- Spend significant time and energy understanding what your customers value most about your offering. Often, there are very different key drivers of satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. Therefore, “just doing better” may not lead to your intended outcome if you are looking to improve one or more of these areas.
- Take an honest look at the customer experience maturity of your organization. How do you handle customer journey issues? What priority does the customer experience have from the C-Suite? What people, processes and technology do you have at your disposal to solve customer issues? Take an online test from several global CX firms to determine your organizational CX maturity.
- You drive CX to dollars by driving CX to action. Plan to change something, fix something, add something. Wrap your CX with project management, process engineering and product improvements to overcome the challenge of justifying CX spend. In the last year, we have spent significant time, energy and money expanding our product reliability, launching an integrated customer community, and redesigning the way we communicate with customers. These actions were in direct response to CX challenges felt by our customers, and they tie directly to our key drivers of customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.
- Finally, measure the right things. What are the most meaningful outcomes you are seeking to obtain (revenue, profitability, loyalty, advocacy, enrichment)? Get laser focused on those measurements. In a sea of acronyms and measures, it can be very challenging to find the right measures, pick the right metrics, and set the right objectives. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post on this topic!
In the end, committing to great CX means committing to continuous improvement, continuous action, and continuous measurement of your customers and your business. By taking these steps, the monetary gains in your business quickly become measurable and relatable to the customer journey improvement projects you have completed.
Read the Forrester report and get on the road to elevating the value of your contact center, too!
