Heralded as the last battleground for competition, customer experience management has become a core strategic imperative for many organizations. Building unique emotional ties with customers that are stronger and difficult for competitors to imitate is considered the cornerstone for organizations to achieve an unbeatable competitive edge in today’s market.

Known as “branded customer experience” the association of experiences specific to a brand has created mega organisations such as Apple, Zappos and Amazon. To deliver a great branded experience for customers, an organization must embrace customer experience management as their highest priority if they are to prosper in the future.

But where do you start, what actions do you take, what is the process that you should follow to achieve success? These are some of the key questions organizations seek to answer when they have accepted the value branded customer experience can deliver for them. Our research in this field identified that few organizations understand the complexity and areas they need to change to achieve the privileged position in the marketplace as a customer experience leader. This finding is supported by research conducted by Accenture in 2015. Accenture found that nearly 80% of organizations never achieve any growth in profits or customer numbers from their customer experience programs[1]. At best they achieve mediocre results.

There are a multitude of reasons for the poor performance achieved from customer experience programs. The eight top reasons we identified are as follows:

1. The organization is not ready. Few check the readiness of their organizations prior to making the investment in a customer experience program. This initial ‘look into the mirror’ to obtain an honest view of whether the organization is in fact ready to embark on the journey of becoming a leading customer experience company is an essential first step to determine whether or not the organization should even attempt to take the next step in the process.

2. There is no specific vision or financial metrics associated with the customer experience program. Organizations that are not ready to embark on a journey to achieve strategic customer experience advantages tend to implement programs that lack specific visions or have metrics that properly measure the success of the program. As a result the program tends to focus on no metrics or ones that give the illusion of success.

3. CX initiatives address symptoms and not root causes. Without proper analysis organizations invest in initiatives that address the symptoms associated with poor customer experiences. Without addressing the underlying issues these problems reoccur and customers are no better off. Their investment in the initiates is ephemeral and leads to no sustainable benefits for the organization.

4. Organizations don’t implement processes or structures to fix customer issues but instead focus on a single measure to determine their impact on customers. Organizations that build processes that enable customer feedback to be used as a catalyst for internal improvements achieve greater results than those solely focused on the score achieved in a customer survey.

5. Organisations only focus on the customer side of the equation. Customer experience programs often underachieve because the majority of them only focus on the customer outcomes but fail to address internal leadership, culture, and people of the organization. Transforming the organization is pivotal in achieving the rewards associated with strategic customer experience.

6. Inadequate governance and positioning of the CX program. Any implementation of any initiative to improve the customer experience needs to have the proper governance model in place to ensure there is ongoing monitoring, reporting and remedial actions to ensure the initiative is achieving its desired objectives. Not only does the governance model need to be functional but its positioning within the organisation is as critical. Incorrect positing can compromise the effectiveness of the people empowered to ensure the organization is achieving its customer experience objectives. Incorrect positioning within the organization can undermine the importance of the program ensuring any new behaviours never get embedded as part of the organizational culture.

7. Outsource partners are not included as an integral component for the program’s success. Almost all organization outsource some component of their business. Any component impacting customers requires the organization to properly integrate the outsource provider into the customer experience program. Agreements with providers need to reflect the objectives of the customer experience program and a governance model needs to be in place to monitor the impact on customers from the outsource provider.

8. The ability to effectively innovate and continually improve in customer experience is inadequate. Customer experience excellence in the marketplace is a constantly shifting target. What works today for customers is unlikely to remain relevant forever. Organizations without the ability to evolve and improve through innovation don’t achieve longevity in commercial benefits from their customer experience programs.

Achieving the rewards of a properly designed and implemented branded customer experience program requires the organization to be armed with knowledge about the breadth and depth of change required to transform the organization as a CX leader. For any progressive organization branded customer experience is the blueprint for growth in the current competitive landscape.

Experience My Brand is a book written to exclusively help companies avoid commercial failure from customer experience programs. With clear data to complement the text, Experience My Brand puts theory into practice in a way that is practical and easily understood. Readers are provided the tools to effectively implement transformational change and create a unique and sustainable experience for their customers.

To learn more visit the website: www.experiencemybrand.com

[1] Accenture Strategy: 2015 B2B Customer Experience: https://www.accenture.com/t20161216T021856__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/PDF-27/Accenture-Strategy-B2B-Customer-Experience-2015-Research.pdf