This journey is a series of steps, each of which provides immediate benefit for the customer and the company. And each of which builds upon the steps before it.
While the entire transformation may take a significant time investment – and in some way is never finished – you can start making improvements (and seeing ROI) almost immediately.
Along this path, organizations regularly run into similar challenges that can delay, derail, and even kill these crucial initiatives that have proven to more than double customer lifetime value for those brands that push through to reach their CX goals.
Here are three of the most common CX Transformation roadblocks, along with actionable recommendations you can execute to overcome them.
Common Customer Experience Transformation Roadblocks
1) “We don’t know where to start.”
While knowing you need a CX Transformation is a great first step, many organizations don’t get much further because they don’t know where to focus their efforts.
Here are a few reasons we often see organizations getting blocked before they even get started.
- Change is hard, and getting buy-in on what changes to make can be daunting. It can seem easier to simply revert to business-as-usual and focus on something other than making the necessary CX changes.
- Options can be paralyzing, often leading to no actual decisions. Whether due to over-analyzation or avoidance, even teams that successfully develop a list of necessary changes can seem unable to choose which items to tackle first.
- It can be tricky to move from data that indicates challenges to contextual insights that point to solutions. This inability to identify root causes can lead teams to reactionary Band-Aids that provide minimal results at best.
THE SOLUTION
No matter the specifics of why your team can’t get started, the most effective way to get the ball rolling is to study the challenge from the point of view of your customer.
If you can identify and understand which moments matter most to your customers, you can prioritize which CX issues are most pressing.
By aligning all potential initiatives to the customer’s perspective, you can determine – and get all stakeholders to agree – where to focus first for the biggest business impact.
NEED HELP?
Once you gain agreement to study your CX from the customer POV, doing it on your own can still prove challenging.
To help organizations identify their most pressing CX challenges, we conduct customer research, map out their customer experiences and help them make decisions about where to focus next. Often this can be achieved in a workshop format, for teams who want to quickly gain alignment on their challenges and move forward.
Through these design thinking and experience mapping workshops, teams learn how to empathetically view an experience from the POV of their customers – enabling them to discover actionable insights and prioritize challenges, and often uncover preliminary solutions.
With that prioritized list in hand, your team will know exactly where to start.
2) “We can’t get everyone on the same page.”
Even if everyone within an organization agrees that their customer experience needs at least a little tweaking, it can be tricky getting all stakeholders on board with what exactly needs done, where to start, or how extensive of an overhaul is necessary.
Here are a few of the barriers that can challenge gaining alignment.
- Competing priorities amongst teams can cause those different teams to individually work on the CX components that will most benefit themselves – leading to a disjointed customer experience – instead of collaborating across organizational lines to take a holistic approach to the needed CX Transformation.
- Teams working within silos frequently duplicate efforts and miss out on the opportunities to share tech capabilities and processes. Together, these factors not only waste time and money; they also prevent a comprehensive solution.
- Inconsistent, misaligned, or unclear goals often cause teams to push and pull the CX in different directions, instead of working together to move forward and achieve clearly defined goals that benefit the organization and their customers.
THE SOLUTION
The best way to ensure a unified CX Transformation across multiple teams is to gather stakeholders from the different teams to develop a clear vision of an improved customer experience, agree upon a common focus and direction, and innovate together to achieve that common vision.
And that collaboration, communication, and shared motivation must continue throughout the process, within and between teams.
NEED HELP?
While it’s easy to agree that working across teams is key to transforming your customer experience, it’s often not at all easy to achieve that collaboration – and maintain it – as a member of one of those teams.
Because of that fact, at G2O, we often come into organizations to facilitate visioning and roadmapping workshops that help organizations effectively work across teams to define and achieve common CX goals. Alignment is much easier when it’s facilitated by an unbiased neutral third party.
Through these workshops, you and members of all involved teams will develop an aligned CX vision, define a clear path forward, break down that path into manageable steps, and identify and remove potential barriers to progress.
3) “We know the challenges, but can’t get to delivered solutions.”
Even after collaborating to carefully study the current CX from the customer’s point of view, it can still be difficult to turn those findings, agreed-upon challenges, and common goals into concrete, executable ideas that will actually transform a customer’s experience.
Here are a few ways this roadblock can present itself.
- An inability to translate customer needs to specific technology or process changes that can be understood and where the potential ROI can be estimated. This can cause teams to spin their wheels and often abandon this important work due to a lack of visible progress.
- Knowing what needs to be done but not knowing how to get it done takes many forms – ranging from limited capacity to take on additional work to a lack of influence to push change forward.
- Off-the-shelf solutions can seem like quick, relatively inexpensive options, but implementing one of these so-called best-in-class platforms is seldom a silver bullet and frequently does not provide the promised results.
THE SOLUTION
To clearly define and then develop solutions that go beyond just meeting your customers’ needs, your organization must invest in innovation and adopt an iterative test-and-learn process.
For this iterative process to be successful, it cannot be done within just one team. You’ll need to partner across silos, establish allies, and build wide-spread support along the way. One way to create that buy-in is to break experiences down into pilot-able pieces and test ideas with customers – early and often – to either confirm a direction or enable you to adjust it.
The results of these tests and the forward progress they demonstrate will also help you maintain and grow support for your CX Transformation initiative. A roadmap that breaks down the vision for an experience down to manageable pieces, sequenced over time, supports alignment and continued progress.
NEED HELP?
Through our ideation, co-creation, and design sprint workshops, we help organizations generate ideas, define solutions, and establish plans to bring those ideas and solutions to life.
By bringing members of different teams together, we not only increase the variety of ideas generated, but also help build consensus and buy-in across your organization.
To gain the valuable insight of end-users, we also facilitate community workshops that include team members and customers. These fun, day-long sessions help teams identify unseen challenges, develop new ideas, and build excitement and support for the CX Transformation.
Identify and Overcome Your CX Transformation Roadblocks
If your team is currently running into one of these roadblocks – or if you’re not even sure what’s standing in the way of your Customer Experience improvements – please contact us. We’d love to help you troubleshoot the situation. Many times, a targeted workshop or small project can help your CX Transformation gain or regain its momentum.