Are CX professionals expendable?
In How Many Customer Experience Professionals Will Survive 2017?, it is stated that “Two trends were found to be particularly similar: of the CX practitioners who said their focus was to encourage their companies to make large investments in CX, only 51% had survived in their role beyond year-2. Of those who described their focus as building proof-points to establish the benefits from CX, 72% survived in their role beyond year-2.”
A striking finding is the similarity of reasons for the departure of CX professionals:
- “The company ran out of patience”
- “The NPS numbers were not improving”
- “The company had to cut costs and CX was an easy target”
The Original Purpose
In 2006, I created the Customer Experience Map in One Cup of Coffee, 20 Experiences: Take a Tip From Starbucks, when the terminology of “Customer Journey Mapping” was still unheard of. Customer Journey Mapping is getting hot in recent years, with sophisticated and fancy models built by CX consulting firms – much more attributes, sub-processes, elements, phases and layers are included, using all kind of eye-catching graphics, storyboards and presentations.
Personally, I’m not too fond of sophistication. My biased views are that sophisticated things consume resources and time, and are usually difficult to operationalize; when things get complicated, they’ll easily side-track our attention and deviate us from the original purpose for doing them.
As you can observe from the above Customer Experience Map – or what you would call Customer Journey Mapping – for a Starbucks in-store experience, it’s not rocket science. It merely maps all the sub-processes and attributes that are encountered by customers and how they affect their emotions in a natural time sequence during a touch-point experience.
The original purpose is to understand how customers feel during an experience; then using these insights to enhance the experience in achieving business result. Period.
Connect ‘What You Do’ to Business Result
To achieve your original purpose, you have to connect CX with business result. One fast track is to simplify your existing fancy and sophisticated Customer Journey Mapping model, and operationalize it to identify the key business drivers.
Take the Starbucks case and NPS as an example, we correlated the satisfaction rating of each sub-process during the in-store experience to the Net Promoter Score given by the Mainland Chinese and American customers for the Global Starbucks In-store Customer Experience Research (note 1).
This figure lists the X-VOC Data (note 2) – the importance ranking of each of the 26 sub-processes in driving NPS. With 26 sub-processes, the importance rankings are literally from 1 to 26, with 1 as the most and 26 as the least important factor affecting NPS.
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