This article is inspired by Todd Unger’s upcoming book “The 10-Second Customer Journey.” Todd is the Chief Experience Officer & SVP Marketing at the American Medical Association and recently gave the opening keynote at GDS Boston: “Putting the ‘X’ in CXO”

Customer Experience (CX) delivers a competitive edge; it offers a foundational advantage for business to drive growth and profitability.

Understanding CX in the Digital Age

Digital transformation introduced a host of new KPIs and business metrics like click-through rates that, while valuable, may not always resonate with company leadership. This gap in understanding between CX professionals and their CEOs can lead to underutilization of CX's potential to drive growth. 

It's time for a paradigm shift, focusing not on esoteric metrics but on the tangible impact of CX on business outcomes.

Key Insights for Leveraging CX:

• Integration is Key: CX isn't confined to customer service; it's the seamless integration of product, marketing, commerce, and service. This holistic approach is crucial for acquiring and retaining customers, thus directly contributing to growth.
• Speak the Language of Growth: To gain buy-in and support for CX initiatives, communicate in terms that resonate with CEOs and other stakeholders. Focus on how CX reduces friction, making it easier to acquire and retain customers, thereby driving growth.
• From Reactive to Proactive: Transform the role of customer service from a reactive, problem-solving entity to a proactive, growth-driving force. This requires a mindset shift and a redefinition of roles within the organization.

Q: What is the role of CX in driving business growth?

A: Lower the effort required for customers to take action 

Today's customer journey, from recognizing a need to making a purchase has condensed dramatically. This requires businesses to eliminate friction points with far more granularity, almost an obsessive focus on lowering effort that covers design, content, security, engagement, and more. 

This proactive approach is highly strategic in nature because pursuing the goal of eliminating all root causes of friction (as much as possible) ultimately enhances customer satisfaction and drives significant growth.

Strategies for Success

• Focus on Seamless Integration: Ensure that all aspects of the organization work in harmony to provide a frictionless customer journey.
  • Integration can occur at many levels and creating a unified view of conversational data (aka customer feedback and customer interactions) is key.

• Redefine Metrics: Shift focus from traditional metrics to those that directly impact growth, such as customer acquisition and retention rates.‍
  • A.I. powered analytics developed by Dashbot offers a range of new derived metrics like predicted effort, predicted satisfaction, predicted abandonment, and more.

• Foster Internal Collaboration: Build strong partnerships across departments, particularly with marketing, to align CX strategies with overall business goals.
  • Adopt BI tools accessible to a wide range of users in your organization that allow any user to jump into exploring the full set of customer data. 

How to Transform CX into a Profitability Engine

At Dashbot we are helping to push CX to the forefront of business strategy, moving beyond its traditional role as a source of customer insights to become a central element in driving the company's strategic direction.

Understanding the direct link between CX metrics and financial performance is crucial. Businesses need to quantify this relationship, demonstrating how improvements in CX lead to revenue growth and enhanced profitability. 

• We know there is a "mathematical calculation" connecting metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) to the profitability of a company. 
• Now it’s time to do more.

To transform CX into a core business capability, integral to strategic decision-making, it must go beyond surveys–especially as response rates continue to fall. It is critical to employ new methods to demonstrate how improvements to the customer experience translate to increased revenue and profitability.

To accomplish this, businesses are delving deeper into their existing, unstructured customer data–"dark data" they may not have fully explored before.

Dashbot’s conversational data platform processes unstructured text across all customer channels at scale. Using this CX may identify key signals like predicted satisfaction, predicted effort, reasons for engagement, and other metrics derived from raw text of thousands of conversations with customers occurring daily.  The unique analytics that only Dashbot can deliver is key to establishing a clear linkage between CX initiatives and financial performance.

Actionable Takeaways

Todd Unger makes a compelling case for CX as a strategic imperative for businesses aiming for growth in the digital era. This approach requires a shift in mindset. Both in terms of (1) recognizing the full potential of CX and (2) implementing the infrastructure to deliver on that potential.

• Embrace CX's Full Spectrum: Recognize that CX encompasses every customer interaction, from initial awareness through post-purchase support.
• Continuous Innovation: Adopt new technology to better serve customers and update your analytics tech-stack to measure the impact.
• Champion CX at Every Level: Promote a culture that values CX as a critical success component, encouraging buy-in from the C-suite to frontline employees.

The 10-Second Customer Journey: The CXO’s playbook for growing and retaining customers in a digital world is available for pre order now.

By embracing a holistic approach, focusing on seamless integration, and aligning with strategic growth objectives, companies can unlock the full potential of CX to propel themselves to new heights of success and innovation.