Five indispensable lessons from today’s CX Champions

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It takes several positive experiences to win a customer’s heart, but only one bad experience to lose them. With nearly 90 percent of organizations citing customer experience (CX) stagnation as a risk, business leaders around the world need a blueprint for success.

Today, organizations must always be ready to provide timely service and support to optimize customer satisfaction, boost repeat business, and maximize a customer’s lifetime value. Those who do will be rewarded: More than four-fifths will spend more money with brands that provide a positive experience.

“The accelerated shift to digital means customer expectations have never been higher, and the pressure is on for organizations to respond,” said Wendy Johnstone, Chief Operating Officer, APAC, Zendesk. “The new reality is that delivering exceptional customer experience has become a business imperative for any organizations looking to future-proof their operations.”

The consequences of falling short are dire. Brand advocates can become detractors when confronted by long wait times for support, ineffectual answers, unresolved issues or impolite staff. In fact, 51 percent of consumers will walk away from a brand after just one or two bad experiences. To meet evolving customer expectations, organizations must strive to become CX Champions.

Three levels of CX maturity

There are three levels of CX maturity, according to the new report, CX Champions: How CX Leaders who raise their game are driving business success, by Zendesk and Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG): Starters, Risers and Champions.

ESG’s maturity scale used seven questions from the survey as inputs to determine an organization’s maturity score. These seven questions align to the people, process, and data and technology attributes of the service and support organization within represented companies. Using the maturity score, the report then examines the impact of customer service on business outcomes.

When we look at midsize and enterprise organizations, the research shows that 76 percent of Champions—those with the most sophisticated approach to customer service—reported a net increase in customers relative to competitors over a six-month period, while 73 percent of Starters—those with the least sophisticated approach—reported flat or declining customer growth.

Champions had a distinct advantage in Asia Pacific (APAC). Looking at all market segments, APAC’s CX Champions were 10.8 times more successful than Starters at growing customer spend significantly over time. With fewer Champions than any other region, organizations with a robust CX strategy secured a competitive advantage.

"Our research identified a clear connection between CX excellence and business growth,” said Adam DeMattia, Director of Custom Research at ESG. “Companies that are at the Champion stage of the scale not only see better outcomes in traditional service metrics, such as resolution time and [customer satisfaction goals], but they’re also experiencing positive business outcomes in customer spend, retention and board-level support of CX as a business priority.”

Compared to Starters, the report shows that Champions at midsized and enterprise organizations reduce average total customer service resolution time by a third, enjoy 12 percent more one-touch resolutions and provide customers with two more channels of engagement. They were also 3.3 times more likely than Starters to have grown their customer base over the past six months and 8.7 times more likely to have significantly grown customer spending.

Five lessons for a better CX

While the benefits of a strong CX are clear, the path to getting there can be harder to discern. To help Starters and Risers take CX to the next level, Zendesk and ESG identified five key lessons from CX Champions.

Lesson one: Culture is learned. Becoming a Champion requires a CX-focused culture. The more that culture is driven by senior management, the greater the impact. Indeed, a third of midsize and enterprise and 42 percent of small business Champions review CX metrics with C-Suite executives on a daily basis.

Lesson two: Training is crucial. Service and support are predominantly person-to-person endeavors. Success requires empowering your service and support staff with the right skills to deliver against customer expectations. On average, Champions at midsized and enterprise organizations provide their teams with two and a half more days of training per year than Starters. Investing in training is an area where Champions clearly outperform the competition.

Lesson three: Data is king. The maxim “You can’t improve what you can’t measure” holds true when it comes to customer service and support. Around 97 percent of midsized and enterprise Champions say their support metrics and KPIs are strong, while 63 percent can report on those metrics in real time. Data-driven service and support create more impactful customer interactions.

Lesson four: Technology is indispensable. Responding to the increased volume of data and rising customer expectations, Champions make use of automated methods of building and updating cross-channel customer profiles. This enables them to turn noise into actionable insights.

Lesson five: Investment yields dividends. Nearly three-fifths of midsized and enterprise Champions expect their organization to increase investment significantly over the next 12-24 months, versus just 9 percent of Starters. To shape a customer-centric culture and make the most of data and technology, organizations at every maturity level must invest.

"As we see the trend that Champions are taking the steps to invest more in their tools, team and processes for CX success, Starters not only have the challenge of catching up to their competition in customer service, but also ensuring the gap doesn’t widen," added DeMattia. "To make these gains, it will be critical for leaders at lagging organizations to make the most of their budgets by learning from their more mature peers and investing in the areas that can drive the greatest impact on their CX maturity.”

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