Balancing Business Goals With Customer-Centric Innovation

#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.

Stop designing your Customer Success journey inside out. Let's be honest, are you designing your customer journey for your business or your customers? I see so many companies and leaders who continue to design their Customer Success programs inside out, instead of outside in. Take a look at Onboarding for example. Onboarding at so many SaaS companies is ⤵ 1) Overly prescriptive 2) Follows a one-size-fits-all flow 3) Is aligned to the company's internal timeline 4) Measures arbitrary KPIs You have CSMs/Onboarding/Implementation teams pushing customers to move quickly through the required steps to meet the timeline the company has set or else they are viewed as "falling behind" or "at risk". You can and should create an Onboarding strategy that is 🎯 Scaleable 🎯 Flexible 🎯 Personalized 🎯 Impactful Here are 3 steps to help you quickly improve your process: ▶ Spend the time required upfront to clearly define a SMART goal with your customers. I see CSMs attempt to get customers to articulate a goal and when they can't the CSM responds with something like "Ok, no worries, let's make that homework. When you have your goal just send it over." You know what never gets sent, the goal. Without this you cannot design a plan nor will you have the right KPIs to measure. ▶ Build in flexibility to ensure your customers have options. Don't have a one-size-fits-all onboarding; create 1-3 options and allow your customer to select the program that best aligns with what they need and how they need it. ▶ Measure KPIs that map to early results that indicate your customer is on track to be successful. Avoid tracking internal metrics that prioritize activity over impact. Think about the KPIs you are tracking for your customers in onboarding. Do those tell you the whole story? At the end of the day we need to find better and more meaningful ways to support and help our customers. We should prioritize their success over our need to build easy and repeatable programs. There are ways to find a closer balance so there is clear mutual benefit to the customer and the business. Wednesday Musings.

My CX Game Changed When I Realized This… I had a very slim chance of getting initiatives prioritized if I went at it alone. Even if I had an airtight business case justifying the business value, proving the ROI, and making a compelling argument for why it mattered. Why? I wasn’t the P&L owner. I was fighting for customer-centric initiatives in a room full of leaders who owned their P&Ls—each with their own targets, KPIs, and priorities already stacked up. And here’s what I learned the hard way: The strength of your case doesn’t matter if the people holding the budget don’t see the problem as their own. So, if I wanted to get customer experience initiatives prioritized, I needed two things beyond a lock-tight business case: 1️⃣ Cross-Functional Champions I had to stop pushing CX initiatives alone and start co-creating solutions with the leaders who controlled the P&L. The CFO isn’t losing sleep over NPS—they care about customer retention and cost-to-serve. The CMO doesn’t care about your effort score—they care about conversion and repeat purchases. The COO isn’t worried about customer sentiment—they’re worried about efficiency and reducing operational waste. I needed to speak their language and show how CX isn’t a competing priority—it’s a lever for helping them hit their own targets. Winning buy-in isn’t about convincing leaders that your priorities matter. It’s about proving that your priorities help them hit theirs. 2️⃣ Make the Problem Their Idea No one wants to feel like they’re being sold on a problem. But people will fight for their own ideas. So instead of walking into the room with a “Here’s the problem, and here’s my solution” pitch… I flipped it. I led with questions that helped them see the issue on their own. “How are we ensuring our best customers stay engaged and keep spending more?” (CMO) “Do we know what percentage of our support volume comes from delivery confusion, and what that costs us?” (COO) “What if we could reduce refunds and lost revenue by improving delivery transparency?” (CFO) By the end of the conversation, they were coming to me asking how we could fix it—and suddenly, CX wasn’t just my initiative. It was theirs. The Shift: From CX as an Ask → CX as a Business Strategy The reality is, if you’re leading CX, you’re not the main decision-maker. But if you know how to build internal champions and position problems as their idea, you’ll stop being the person who’s constantly begging for CX investment… And start being the person who drives business-critical, revenue-impacting change that gets prioritized every time.