10 tips for a successful CX strategy

The customer experience (CX) has risen to the top of the priority list for IT leaders, who must adopt a customer-centric mindset, build cross-functional teams, and define the right KPIs to succeed.

CIOs, who were once relegated to the back office, are now key customer-facing leaders charged with providing excellent customer service. According to the CIO's State of the CIO 2022 survey, improving customer experience (CX) is a top priority for 57% of responding IT leaders, while 81% are implementing new technologies to support customer interactions. According to research, many organizations struggle to meet their CX objectives because they have difficulty assembling the necessary skills, tools, and data. Here are the top ten action topics that can have the most impact.

Customer-centric mindset

As their organizations make CX a strategic goal, CIOs must think and work in new ways. On the other hand, some CIOs will have to work harder than others to make this transition because they rely on things they've done for a long time. They rely on familiar things because they have muscle memory. And those things tend to revolve around delivery, such as shipping quickly. But when that is the focus, it is possible to overlook what is best for the customer. Those leaders must be open to new ways of building the right things rather than the same things. CIOs must understand human-centered design and other CX-related methodologies to lead their CX teams effectively.

Cultural shift

The first part of the CIO's role is to build an environment and culture that encourages and supports customer-centric, design-oriented, technically advanced, and agile ways of working. The second part of the job is to enable and empower colleagues to successfully reimagine how to operate and deliver value to customers, both internally and externally.

When evaluating opportunities for how to serve internal and external customers best, CIOs need to constantly seek to understand the core of the opportunity from both a customer and a business perspective and strive to reimagine those experiences based on experience.

Then, based on data and metrics, CIOs can continue regularly collaborating with customers to deliver the highest value experiences that delight and help them realize real business value. From there, they can identify the key metrics expected to impact through re-imagination.

Shared responsibility for CX

According to the 2022 State of the CIO Study, customer experience technologies were among the top IT investments over the past year. However, CIOs must own more than just technology delivery; they must share ownership with marketing, operations, sales, and revenue officers, as well as chief customer or chief experience officers if those roles exist within the company. Research shows that companies that provide excellent customer service make CX a shared responsibility. It's not about a single person or function. It's one thing to say it; what it means is that each of those functions, and each of those leaders within those functions, considers how they're delivering on their operational pieces against the same customer objectives.

Building joint ownership

To ensure better product and business outcomes, tech leaders must establish a structure that tightly couples product, experience, and data teams and even combines them at times when it makes sense. This fosters a collaborative culture throughout the organization, bringing multiple departments — whether directly or indirectly responsible for the customer experience — closer together.

Aligning CX and enterprise strategies

Delivering great customer experiences is desirable, but the goal should be to deliver great experiences in ways that help the organization achieve its objectives. IT must collaborate with the business to answer the question, "What are our customer experience goals?" This includes upselling, customer retention, and customer acquisition. Aligning CX with corporate strategy allows IT to determine which technologies, features, and functions to pursue and advance. For instance, CIOs of businesses that prioritize customer retention must prioritize delivering technologies that can quickly resolve customer issues if the technology cannot.

Defining problems before the solutions

It's all too easy to rush into the addition or purchase of a technology solution without first clearly defining the reason and problem it's supposed to solve. Using design-thinking methodologies can help to define the problem space; journey and process mapping, persona definition, ideation workshops, and many other broad thinking tactics can help CIOs and their teams spend time on the problem, empathize with the customer, and ultimately define and design the solution with a focus on the customer's needs and experience. This is critical for determining not only how to create a great customer experience but also how to create the right ones.

Understanding the problem completely, viewing it from various perspectives, and spending more time in the problem space will result in better solution evaluation, understanding of needs, and goal definition before purchasing your next technology solution.

The value of building data sets

Teams looking to improve CX frequently focus on the experience layer, devoting most of their efforts to understanding customer journeys and personas. However, good data is required for teams to do this successfully. That is the layer that must be addressed fundamentally. IT is critical in constructing the infrastructure required to integrate first-, second-, and third-party data and create a unified customer data view.

Prioritizing CX initiatives

There are far more ideas and projects than there are time and resources. High-performing CX functions systematically prioritize their work. Teams must calculate the worth of proposals and prioritize them based on the impact that each is expected to have. This also gives teams the ability to say no, and when they do, they have the data to back it up, allowing them to prioritize the customer experience products that will drive the most value. CIOs can also take a similar approach with existing features and functions, determining which ones do not provide value and can be retired.

Measuring the impact

Organizations need precise methods for measuring the value of their CX work to prioritize and prune effectively and identify activities enhancing customer experiences.

According to IDC, at least 30% of organizations will implement new success metrics to monitor and assess customer value creation's internal and external flows by 2024. By 2027, one-fourth of global brands will stop using the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) as a metric for evaluating the customer experience and start using a Customer Effort Score correlated to results as a vital sign of the success of the journey. CIOs can deploy tools that enable such measurements and AI technologies that analyze text and verbal tone, allowing organizations to gauge customer sentiment during interactions.

Building CX discipline

Finding the right people is one of the most important tasks in supporting a strong CX function. CIOs should pay attention to how they organize their talent. Research shows that organizations with the best CX have specialized teams with dedicated resources to execute experience transformation. These teams are also linked to the organization's digital transformation strategy. Experts add that such moves enable organizations to shift from viewing CX as a series of one-time projects to developing a true CX practice capable of continuous improvement and evolution as market demands change.