How To Align Customer Experience Goals With Support Strategy

#CustomerExperience leaders need to split their strategies into deliberate bottom-up and top-down approaches. Many get the bottom-up right, but they struggle with the top-down. Bottom-up strategies focus on improving customer-centric employee behaviors at scale. These approaches include #CX or empathy training for front-line workers, using Voice of Customer feedback to set touchpoint expectations based on customer feedback, and building customer-centric KPIs into individual performance appraisals. But where many CX leaders struggle is often with engaging senior leaders to influence their customer-centric behaviors. It's difficult to influence C-suite behavior, but if you're expected to improve customer-centric culture in the organization, then you cannot avoid this. Top-down strategies start with showing senior leaders how customer satisfaction impacts growth, retention, margin, and lifetime value. It also includes improving CX and VoC reporting to provide more recommendations and actions, not just findings and data. Having discussions with leaders about the importance of financial and non-financial rewards for customer-centric behaviors is another tool in the top-down toolkit. And using personas and journey maps is a vital way to convert customer and touchpoint data into a compelling story of necessary change. Don't rely on dashboards and reports to do the job of top-down CX engagement. Don't count on a couple of positive customer-centric comments from leaders as a sign of meaningful, irreversible support. And do not assume that the fact your CX job exists is evidence of senior leaders' commitment to customer experience. Part of the job for a successful CX leader is to constantly prove the value of customer-centric strategies, influence senior leader priorities, and arm decision-makers with the insight they need to make customer-centric decisions. Don't just empower your frontline workers and assume the job is done. If you aren't building a consistent dialog with executives, you're not only missing an opportunity to make the most significant customer impact but also seeding future problems that can lead to declining support, budget, and resources for customer experience initiatives. Take a comment today to identify or define your top-down and bottom-up CX strategies for 2024. If there's an imbalance, solving that now can lead to better outcomes by the end of this year.

You probably have more customer info than ever.⁣ So why can’t your team answer basic questions or make confident decisions?⁣ It’s because data lives in separate systems. Align your tools, insights & the people serving customers.⁣ ⁣ Here’s what that disconnect looks like every day:⁣ ✓ The agent answering the call can’t see the customer’s last chat.⁣ ✓ The supervisor reviewing performance can’t trace a customer issue from beginning to end.⁣ ✓ And service teams are expected to deliver great experiences without knowing what’s already been said or promised.⁣ ⁣ The path forward isn’t more tools.⁣ It’s fewer, smarter ones that are connected and accessible.⁣ ⁣ ❶ Start by mapping one customer journey with your cross-functional teams at the same table (in person if possible).⁣ ⁣ ❷ Identify where handoffs happen, where data gets lost, and where communication breaks — both internally and with the customer.⁣ ⁣ ❸ Then rebuild your systems so the right people have the right context at the right moment — without logging into five platforms or asking the customer to explain again.⁣ ⁣ That’s how you create Emotional Highs™:⁣ Not surface-level satisfaction, but a meaningful emotional lift that makes people stay, return, promote, and forgive when mistakes happen.⁣ ⁣ Loyalty isn’t driven by your tech stack.⁣ It comes from how people FEEL when every interaction is easy, efficient, and clearly built around their needs.⁣ Yes — feel. As in emotions. The thing that’s always driven buying decisions, even if companies pretend otherwise.⁣ ⁣ This isn’t a tech upgrade.⁣ It’s experience transformation.⁣ And it’s how you compete and win in today’s market.⁣ ⁣ Are YOU #DoingCXRight®?⁣ Need help with ❶ ❷❸ above? Message me. ⁣ 👉 Share + comment if you found this helpful so others can benefit.⁣ ⁣ #CX #TheFormula #Nextiva #CustomerExperience #CustomerService⁣

Tough Talk Tuesday? If your company says Customer Success is strategic but still treats it like a support function, stop pretending. If your CS team is occupied mainly with “check-in” meetings and renewal prep instead of driving outcomes, stop pretending. If your leaders talk about trust and value but can’t show how CS moves the business forward, stop pretending. Customer Success is not a concierge desk. It is not a feel-good function. It is a growth engine. And it needs to be treated like one. That means: • CSMs who understand the customer’s business better than Sales or Product • Success plans tied to business outcomes, not playbooks • Metrics that reflect value delivered, not just effort made • A culture where CS earns its seat at the revenue table by showing up with data, direction, and urgency We are not here to smooth things over. We are here to move things forward. Five steps to start shifting from support to strategic: 🔢 1. Replace activity metrics with outcome metrics Track customer impact, not just engagement frequency and volume. Stop counting touchpoints and start measuring progress. 🔢 2. Know the customer’s business priorities by heart Treat every EBR and senior executive session like a board meeting. Tie your updates to what your customer’s CEO and CFO care about. 🔢 3. Stop asking “How can I help?” and start saying “Here is what we should do next.” Lead. Recommend. Own the play. 🔢 4. Align CS goals with company goals Revenue, retention, margin, influence - whatever matters to the business should matter to your CS team. 🔢 5. Tell the story of value loudly and often One story, once a week. Share a real example of customer success inside your company until others start doing it for you. The future of Customer Success belongs to those who stop waiting to be seen as strategic and start behaving like it. What is one move your CS team could make this week that shifts how you are seen? #CreatingTheFuture #CustomerSuccess #Leadership #Growth #ClientValue #DISQO

Let’s say your support center is getting hammered with repeat calls about a new product feature. Historically, the team would escalate, create a task force, and maybe update a knowledge base weeks later. With the tech available today, you should be able to unify signals from tickets, chat logs, and social mentions instead. This helps you quickly interpret the root cause. Perhaps in this case it's a confusing update screen that’s triggering the same questions. Instead of just sharing the feedback with the task force that'll take weeks to deliver something, galvanize leaders and use your tech stack to orchestrate a fix in real time. Don't have orchestration in that stack? Start looking into this asap. An orchestration engine canauto-suggest a targeted in-app message for affected users, trigger a proactive email campaign with step-by-step guidance, and update your chatbot’s responses that same day. Reps get nudges on how to resolve the issue faster, and managers can watch repeat contacts drop by a measurable percentage in real time. But the impact isn’t limited to operations. You energize the business by sharing these results in a company-wide standup and spotlighting how different teams contributed to the OUTCOME. Marketing sees reduced churn, operations sees lower cost-to-serve, and leadership sees a team aligned around outcomes instead of activities. If you want your AI investments to move the needle, focus on unified signals, real-time orchestration, and getting the whole business excited about customer outcomes....not just actions. Remember: Outcomes > Actions #customerexperience #ai #cxleaders #outcomesoveraction

Friday honesty: Customer-centricity is a lot harder to maintain than it seems. Even for those of us in Customer Success. The tendency is always to drift toward making our processes and focus company-centric rather than customer-centric. Don't believe me? Just look at one example of this: Customer Journeys. Many teams say that they have a defined Customer Journey. But rather than actually being oriented around the customer, for many the journey map is a list of activities from the company's perspective that are built around milestones the company cares about (contract signature, go-live, renewal, etc). I know about this, because I've been guilty of it in the past myself. I confuse my activity list with a customer journey and wonder why customers aren't as successful as they'd like. While important, that isn't a customer journey. It's an activity list. It's a rut none of us mean to fall into, but it's the natural drift because we live and breathe our own organization. So what do you do about it? How can you adopt a more customer-centric mindset in this area? TRY THIS APPROACH INSTEAD: 1. List out the stages your customers' business goes through at each phase of their experience with your product. Use these to categorize journey stage, rather than your contract lifecycle. 2. For each stage, list out what their experiences, expectations, and activities should be to get the results they want. Don't focus on listing what YOU do, but rather focus on listing what a customer does at each phase of their business with your product. List out the challenges they'd face, the business benefits they'd experience, the change management they'd have to go through, the usage they'd expect. Think bigger than your product here. 3. Then map what support a customer would need to actually accomplish these desired outcomes at each stage of the journey. Think education, change management enablement, training, etc. 4. Based on all of the above, you're finally ready to start identifying what your teams do to support the customer. ____________________________________________ Following a process like this helps build customer-centricity in 3 ways: 1. It causes customers to be the center of how you decide which activities are most important to focus on. 2. It empowers your team to become prescriptive about what customers should be doing for THEIR success. 3. It exposes what you don't know about your customers' business. And if you don't know something, just ask them. Don't make assumptions when you can instead talk to your customers directly. Avoid the company-centric drift, fight to maintain true customer-centricity however you can. This isn't just a nice to have in 2024. It's a business imperative that's important for any business to survive in this climate. But I want to hear from you! How do you guard your org from drifting to company-centricity? #SaaS #CustomerSuccess #Leadership #CustomerCentric

“My customer doesn’t want to talk about their goals.” I hear this from CSMs all the time. But when you listen to those calls, here’s what’s actually happening: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗦𝗠 𝘀𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲, “𝘋𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘐 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘨𝘰𝘢𝘭𝘴... 𝘈𝘭𝘴𝘰 𝘐 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘯 𝘶𝘱𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘶𝘱𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘳𝘰𝘢𝘥𝘮𝘢𝘱 𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴.” Guess which topic the customer jumps to? Of course they choose the shiny new roadmap updates. Not because they don’t care about their goals… But because we gave them an easy out from a harder, more vulnerable conversation. The truth is: Your customer 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 want to talk about strategy. They just need two things from you first:  1. A reason to trust you with their goals.  2. A clear and confident setup for the conversation. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲’𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗮𝘆 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱: “𝘓𝘦𝘵’𝘴 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 10 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘰𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘬𝘦𝘺 𝘨𝘰𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘳.  𝘐𝘧 𝘐 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶’𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥, 𝘐 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘰’𝘷𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘦𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘦’𝘳𝘦 𝘣𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶.” You don’t need to beg for goal alignment. You need to earn it with clarity and confidence teaching the customer why it is valuable for them to share that information with you. Stop asking if they want to talk strategy. Start leading the conversation in a way that makes it a no-brainer. What’s helped you unlock goal-setting conversations with customers? #customersuccess

The user journey is weakened with inconsistent and disjointed efforts. In my conversations with leaders, a common question arises: How do we measure the impact of our work on the user experience? For less mature businesses, this question may go unspoken as they struggle with how to collaborate effectively, but they still sense that their efforts should add up to something. The big issues I’ve heard and seen: - no one painting the bigger picture - next month matters more than next year - siloed teams working in their domains - handoffs are not facilitated or driven - no agreement on metrics that matter - the end goal isn’t aligned with a strategy - endless discussions without action In these situations, continuous discovery and goal alignment can spark momentum. Starting from the ground up, teams can build trust and achieve small, incremental progress, fostering greater awareness. The quickest way to create meaningful impact is by aligning two points in the user journey that rely on different teams, goals, and processes. 1. Agree to shared goals ↳ Decide on a clear outcome that connects both points and make sure everyone agrees. 2. Define metrics ↳ Agree to measurements to track progress and keep points aligned with the plan. 3. Create a feedback loop ↳ Create simple ways for teams to share updates, give feedback, and work together. Start here. Build clarity and alignment. Begin with something manageable. Even the smallest improvements can unlock new opportunities. #productdesign #productdiscovery #userresearch #uxresearch