What Are High-Performing Customer Experience Leaders Doing That Others Aren’t?

June 24, 2019

This article is included in these additional categories:

Analytics, Automated & MarTech | Customer Engagement | Customer Experience | Customer-Centric | Data-driven

Customer experience professionals recognize that there are a range of business risks that can result from a poor customer experience, including loss of customers (61.5%) and damage to brand reputation (52.5%). With these two critical factors at stake, a new survey [download page] from Pointillist reveals that 87% of the more than 700 CX professionals, marketers and analysts surveyed believe that exceptional customer experience (CX) is very or extremely important to their organization.

So what are high performing CX professionals doing differently than their peers? First off, it might help to define what a high performer is. Pointillist defines high performers as teams that are “very or extremely satisfied with their organization’s overall CX performance and the outcomes of their CX investments.” The report concluded that 24% of the respondents surveyed fell into this category, while 50% were considered average performers and 26% were underperformers (who were “not at all” or “not so” satisfied with their CX performance and outcomes.

Eight in 10 respondents overall say that a customer journey-based strategy is either very (29.5%) or extremely (50.1%) important to their overall success. But the extent to which teams are deploying customer journey methods varies significantly between high-performing and underperforming organizations.

Two-thirds (65.8%) of high performing CX teams are using customer journey mapping as part of their customer journey-based strategy, compared to about half (51.5%) of underperforming teams. The use of customer journey mapping has become increasingly important, as reflected in an earlier study by Altimeter that found 6 in 10 professionals surveyed exploring the use of customer journey mapping, with one-third (35%) of them having mapped out their customer journeys.

While high performers are only 1.3 times more likely to use customer journey mapping than underperformers, the difference is more telling when it comes to their use of analytics. The report found that high performers (55.3%) were 3.2 times more likely than underperformers (17.5%) to use customer journey analytics to evaluate and optimize the customer experience.

High Performers More Likely to Integrate Data

Pointillist also found that almost three-quarters (72.3%) of high performers say that their customer journey-based approach is mostly or completely data-driven, which is 3.1 times the proportion of underperformers (23.5%). As a result, high performers are 10 times more likely than underperformers to be very or extremely effective in integrating data, across all tools and sources, into a single customer view.

The single customer view is something that organizations are striving for in order to improve the customer experience, among other things. This is especially relevant as customers are engaging with brands across multiple channels. High performers are very aware that customers move across channels, with two-thirds (66.7%) saying they are very or extremely effective at analyzing multiple customer interactions across channels and over time, compared to the mere 7.2% of underperformers who can say the same.

High Performers Have Mature CX Measurement Programs

Seven in 10 (68.9%) high performers say they have a very or extremely mature CX measurement program. As a result, they are 16.4 times more likely than underperformers to be very or extremely satisfied with their organization’s ability to rapidly generate actionable customer insight.

A sizable share of high performers are also very or extremely satisfied with their organization’s ability to take action on insights to make a quantifiable business impact (53.5%) and quantify the impact of CX on hard metrics like revenue, churn and lifetime value (47.6%). By comparison just 1.6% of underperformers feel the same way in both cases.

What is Standing in the Way of Implementing a Journey-Based Approach?

Of the 9% of respondents who report not currently using a customer journey-based strategy, slightly more than half (53%) blame a lack of understanding about how to effectively implement such an approach. Other factors that are blocking the implementation of such an approach include silo-ed and disparate data (38%), lack of alignment across teams (33%) and lack of buy-in by decision makers (33%).

To read more, download the report here.

About the Data: Pointillist surveyed over 700 CX, marketing and analytics professionals worldwide 45% of whom were from enterprise companies with more than 1,000 employees.

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