.png "imgpsh_fullsize_anim (1)")
What did you do to celebrate CX Day earlier this month?
Wait…what?! You’ve never heard of it?
CX, of course, is short for Customer Experience. CX Day celebrates those customers. You know, the people who keep the lights on. The day itself moves around a bit, making it hard to get traction for this particular celebration.
Last year, CX Day was October 2nd. I remember it because I was in Nashville at an industry event giving a presentation on dealing with customer complaints. I opened my talk the same way I opened this article, by asking the audience “What did you do to celebrate CX day?”
Crickets.
This year, CX Day was on October 1st. With all this confusion, it might as well have been World Smile Day.
That was October 4th by the way.
I’m actually just poking fun. I applaud the efforts of the CXPA (Customer Experience Professionals Association). They launched CX Day only seven years ago, and any event needs time to take hold and become a movement.
The yearly celebration is a good reminder of why we do what we do. But it seems like truly customer-centric businesses must view customer experience not as a day, but as a strategy.
Why should we care about CX?
CX is not a soft, feel-good initiative. It’s about the bottom line.
According to Gartner research, 89% of companies compete on the basis of customer experience. Not product. Not price. In 2010, just 36% of companies made that claim.
Another eye-opening stat: 80% of companies believe they deliver super customer experiences. However, only 8% of customers agree (Bain & Co.)
Uh-oh.
A recent Forrester report noted that “CX leaders grow revenue 5.1 times faster than CX laggards.” The top three reasons cited all impact the bottom line.
- CX improves customer retention.
- CX improves customer satisfaction.
- CX increases existing business (organic growth).
By delivering a great customer experience, you build long-term relationships; you build profits; and you build your brand.
The Challenge of Making CX an Everyday Focus
What’s required to deliver a great customer experience?
Well, it’s not more training for your customer service team, as some still think.
CX is a company-wide strategy that is driven from the top and requires staff and resources (champions, coaches) to guide and activate the strategy.
KANE has embraced CX as strategy for many years. We’ve made Net Promoter Score (NPS) our core corporate metric. We measure hundreds of financial and operational metrics, but NPS is our overarching target. If a customer is not happy, it makes for a shaky business relationship, and a shaky business, period.
Once you establish a measurement program using NPS, you can then add in layers of other customer-centric metrics to deduce the health of your customer relationships. Retention-related metrics like customer satisfaction, customer effort score, and customer churn rate provide a wealth of actionable data.
Delivering great customer service matters. Customers feel it. Customers yearn for it.
CX Day reminds us of the vital importance of customer service in logistics. Of placing customers at the center of all we do.
But customer experience is more than just a day; it’s a strategy.
In fact, it’s the strategy around which all of our other business strategies revolve.
