Case Study: Readiness to Launch CX Initiatives

You’ve transformed your customer journey vision, and you’ve launched some new customer experience initiatives that you are eager to put in place...AND your analysis shows that they will have significant ROI. 

What could go wrong?

• Who is putting metrics in place to track results? (Which metrics? Measure them how?)
• Who is telling the customer service staff about the new customer experience?
• Where are you going to get the skills that are needed to produce quality content?
• Who will be looking at the end-to-end customer experience overall?
• How does this new set of initiatives fit into what teams are doing right now?
• Does everyone even understand this new customer journey way of thinking?

FROM recently collaborated with a major kids toy and media manufacturer to craft a new customer-centric inspiring customer journey and business vision. This launched a number of projects, including an in-store app, improvement to the website product browser, and a new email campaign targeting parents. 

While the design and build projects were underway to put these new experiences in place, our client realized that new technology is not enough to make the experience exceptional. They asked FROM to provide guidance on what else (backstage and behind the scenes) was needed to get the business ready to consistently deliver these new experiences. After all, the quality of these experiences relies on the employees driving them and the next round of funding relies on the team’s ability to show how well the first round performed.

Employees drive delivery. Keep them informed and happy.

On the front stage, it is the customers who are enjoying the experience, but it is the employees who are ultimately delivering it, whether directly or indirectly.

It is critical to your business case to make sure that employees understand the goals of new customer experiences being put in place so they can adjust and enhance these experiences in ways that stay aligned with strategic goals. In fact, HBR published a study on how engaging customers is good, but having engaged employees and customers is better (see figure below). A few confused or disengaged employees could spoil your big ROI aspirations.

FROM provided communication materials that bring the new customer journey to life. FROM also conducted interactive training with staff to help them internalize the new customer journey and see how their specific directives were part of the overall strategy of building the customer relationship.

New journey often brings new roles

This toy company was very transaction-centric and product-centric culturally. While their mindset shifted as a result of the customer journey vision work and training, there was still the question of who should be working for whom to make sure the work gets done most effectively...and were they missing any roles to support the new experiences. 

For example, this company is like many organizations in that digital had begun taking root organically, and the skilled resources were then found in pockets, each creating their own rules and guidelines. This makes having a consistent, high-quality digital experience a challenge. Many organizations like this one need to rethink where they place digital resources in the organization and who they’ll report to. 

Similarly, with a new goal of having a thought-out step-by-step customer experience, there is the question of who owns that experience?  With an organization of product and brand leads, people are left wondering. 

FROM recommended a new Customer Experience Operating Model (CXOM) that addressed several new needs:

• Customer Experience Lead to define, track, and measure the end-to-end customer experience
• Specific Touchpoint Leads to bring the right design and leading technology to each of the touchpoints - web, apps, store, etc.
• Design Board where design and digital talent from across touchpoints can align with standards and conduct peer reviews to achieve high quality.

Don’t forget to measure success

Ask any millennial, if you didn’t record it, it didn’t happen. Well in CX, if you cannot measure it, it didn’t happen. General stories about success don’t get millions of dollars of funding. Quantitative results do.

Too often companies run out of the gate with new customer experiences without really being clear on metrics and measurement that they’ll need to show what great work they’ve done. Sure for websites, there is Google Analytics, but there is critical and strategic tagging that needs to be done BEFORE putting new features and functions in the market. Understanding baselines is critical to understanding success.

For in-store experiences, these don’t track themselves. Customer Experience leads and store managers need to arrive at mechanisms, processes, or practices to ensure they have quantitative ways to show how the changes made in-store have indeed driven the behaviors they are looking for in customers. Or, it may be that the store staff will play a critical role in helping digital teams understand the impact of their website or app changes.

FROM helped this toy company look at new engagement metrics in addition to typical purchase metrics and tied those together in a single financial model to show how they are connected. This information and research on customer journey led to a new website experience that tied together the corporate goal to drive purchases, with the user interests to deliver information, navigation, and design to a better experience.  Once implemented we found that users discovered more products, and made more purchases by a significant margin, over 30% increase, with an Average Order Value also gaining by 3.4%. 

Summing it up

For a customer journey transformation to be successful, companies have to be sure employees are informed and trained, reporting lines and roles enable smooth and consistent experiences, and measurement mechanisms are in place from the outset to help drive support of future change. With these in place, companies are much more likely to lasso that ROI they had their eye on in defining their customer journey vision and roadmap.