The operational leader’s guide to HX

Build systems and break silos

Introduction

When you have a streamlined, customer- driven system of agile improvements, you can expect substantial returns.

When you know how to get the best out of it, CX pays – and it pays big.  Both B2B and B2C brands that use innovative CX strategies are three times as likely to significantly outperform financial goals.¹

Customer experience is ultimately a demonstration of how well you’re delivering on your brand promise. If your operational activities don’t support great CX, but your brand is making bold claims about how much you value your customers, you’re creating an experience gap.  That’s the discrepancy between what your brand is promising, and what it’s delivering. And when you fail to deliver? Your customers, quite simply, go elsewhere. 

When you deliver a great customer experience, you create opportunities for more: more growth, more retention, more revenue, and eventually more profit. Because CX is about boosting revenues AND cutting costs, you need to understand how CX initiatives link to your business objectives.  

Inside, you’ll find a tailored guide to making CX work for you, as an ops leader.

A. The problem

Operations leaders need to:

1. Increase revenue and grow new revenue channels.
2. Reduce operational costs and boost profitability.
3. Improve customer and employee experience.

B. The solution

By operationalizing CX with these three steps:

• Collaborate and innovate: Business outcomes rest on your customers, so understanding and optimizing the entire customer journey across the business is paramount. Listen to everything your customers and your employees are saying, and work with other stakeholders who can help create positive change.
• Design for results: Start with a customer centric approach, effective personalization and use all the data you have – to solve root causes and deliver broader business objectives.
• Transform for the long haul: Empower your employees to accelerate change and improve the customer experience, and your business’ bottom line.

C. The results

You’ll find that great customer experience means:

1. More growth 
2. More retention 
3. More revenue 
4. More profit 

As an operations leader, you’ve got a great deal of responsibility on your shoulders. You’re the one expected to keep the ship sailing smoothly, navigate its course, and ensure every single cog is perfectly in sync.  It can therefore be difficult to give your time and energy to strategies that don’t have an obvious ROI. 

Customer experience (CX) is one of those areas. Historically the victim of cost-cutting exercises, CX often falls by the wayside in favor of more visibly valuable and profitable initiatives. At Forsta, we see this happening when organizations focus too narrowly on the lead metric – Net Promoter Score (NPS). This can incentivize manipulation and ‘gaming’ to get the desired numbers, rather than promoting the behavior that results in positive business impact. 

But when you reduce your focus on CX to save money and free up resources, you’re doing yourself – and your business – a monumental disservice.