Despite the pandemic accelerating digital transformation programmes, an ever increasingly plethora of companies stating themselves to be customer-first and numerous industry reports pointing towards CX being more important than product or price. CX professionals, in the vast majority of these businesses, appear to be conspicuous by their absence from the top table.
If the customer is so key to businesses’ futures, then why are they not represented at board level within businesses more frequently?
One reason may be the ongoing difficulty in attaching value to CX programmes and fully defining ROI.
Only 30% of digital leaders saw modelling the commercial return of their CX programmes as ‘essential’
In our recent research study, where we surveyed and interviewed more than 500 digital leaders, we found that only 30% of the group saw modelling the commercial return of their CX programmes as ‘essential’, when securing investment. We found clients to be more focused on keeping up with a competitor’s offering, than identifying which CX initiatives would deliver the greatest returns. On first read, this is mind-blowing, a lack of commercial modelling attached to a strategic programme that stands to be so critical to the success of the business, and one that will require significant investment. However, when we delved deeper, we found that the real answer was, it wasn’t that clients didn’t think this was essential, it’s more that the ethereal nature of certain aspects of CX programmes has led to a struggle to fully quantify impact. That, and the fact that elements of the programme will take months to implement and their impact sometimes not realised entirely for years, means this has dropped down the priority list.
Nonetheless, this remains a major issue for both the programme and the CX leader.
44% stated that difficulty defining ROI was a barrier to investment
Our research also found that the single biggest barrier to CX programmes being fully implemented was the investment they needed (52%) with the difficulty in defining ROI (44%) coming in second place. So while CX is hard to predictively model, it’s a critical process to undertake in order to gain the support and confidence of the C-suite and to ensure that the customer remains at the heart of the business.
Until CX leaders can find a way to bring more rigour to the business cases they put forward, both their budget and their seat at the top table is at risk.
To download a fully copy of the research report click here
To find out more about our Audience Driven Prioritisation Framework, a service that helps predict commercial uplifts, contact paul.vallois@nimbletank.com