Are your bosses really buying into CX?

About 54% of global companies currently categorise their customer experience (CX) maturity as not very advanced, according to a report by Adobe and Econsultancy in April. The biggest challenge, said 44% of marketers surveyed, is in getting a holistic view of customers across all interactions. This comes as 46% of organisations base their marketing activities on a fragmented approach with inconsistent integration between technologies.At Marketing’s Customer Experience conference, industry players on the panel said a good CX strategy starts with the right key performance indicators (KPIs), but not without getting management’s buy-in first.Raju Nair, DBS Bank’s managing director and regional head of customer experience, said companies have to recognise that CX is not a job for the customer care department alone and that:Staff members will [handle CX] right if their bosses think it’s important. The key thing is: how do you make it important for the bosses? That’s what you need to work on.Sharing his experience at DBS, Nair said it took time getting the top management and employees to speak the same CX lingo and believe in the same processes. To get everyone on the same page, the company had to conduct a CX council meeting involving the CEO and various business heads every quarter.According to him, buy-in from the top is especially critical when a company is looking to change its culture and drive adoption.“The metric has to change based on the maturity of the organisation. Having a simple, operational metric worked for us at the initial part of our journey,” he said.Echoing his sentiments was Spotlight’s Singapore country head Richard Mayne who said that a CX strategy requires the top and middle management to walk the talk and to be change agents.He said: “Unless it’s driven by the top, CX initiatives will be very hard to implement and perfect. It requires a person with some influence to make a difference.”Linda Hassan, Domino’s Pizza’s senior VP of marketing (Malaysia and Singapore), said at a strategic level, the brand shifted its priority from pizza deliveries to the customer, and the tag line was changed from a functional one to an emotional one.But it was critical that during the repositioning process, the company launched internal surveys to get employees’ buy-in. She explained:Everyone makes up the brand. Cascading the strategic vision helps to keep the message singular. This is a brand promise. It doesn’t belong to the marketing department, but the whole organisation.For Pan Pacific Hotels, what governs its CX strategy is a deeply ingrained organisation-wide culture.“We inculcate the mindset that joy is in helping you find yours. I think it’s a very basic human philosophy. When that whole culture comes in, naturally customer satisfaction scores improve,” said Kit Pui Lee, vice-president of brand marketing and communications at Pan Pacific Hotels Group.Measuring at every touch-pointRecognising that CX for the hospitality sector starts when customers are assessing and searching their options online, the hotel group has made TripAdvisor rankings one of its key benchmarks. Additionally, it measures customer satisfaction through surveys with guests at the end of their stay in the hotel.Having an overall strategy and synergy becomes especially important when measuring customer loyalty, said Kit.“How can we measure that people are actually returning to our family of hotels? We have many hotels and resorts around the world and each of them have their own KPIs – how does it then cascade upwards so everything make corporate sense?” she said.Looking externally, Hassan said simplicity was also key to getting customers’ participation in CX initiatives, such as surveys.For example, making it possible for customers to provide their feedback at the point of transaction will see a higher response rate compared with if they have to log on to a web page. Giving out rewards is also another way to drive participation, though she cautioned that if companies are inconsistent, results will be skewed.Across Singapore and Malaysia, Domino’s Pizza oversees some 5,000 staff and more than 270 stores. It serves more than 30 million customers a year.With multiple touch-points, Hassan said the challenge for the company is finding a way to measure the customer experience at each one of them that is affordable and brings in a good ROI. One of the KPIs that Domino’s Pizza has identified is the net promoter score (NPS), which it has been measuring for the past three years.She said: “The whole cycle of the customer experience needs to be measured – from ordering and preparation of products to delivery, consumption and giving feedback. Each of our customers gets a survey to respond to. I’m a firm believer of NPS. It’s powerful.”More than what the score is, Hassan said what was important is the results give her team an overview of the trends, and actionable takeaways.Meanwhile, 3M’s Asia content and SEO lead, Smita Kumar, advised companies to start devising their CX strategy by thinking about what overall performance they want to measure, before breaking it down to various tactical KPIs.“At 3M, these KPIs have to be actionable to a point that it helps me or the organisation influence an important customer interaction or a behaviour change in the customer. We do not stagnate after we create a CX framework. As we progress, we define more metrics,” she said.Retaining the human touchPeering into the future, one of the themes that emerged was the surge of chatbots and its impact on CX. A study by Forrester found 57% of companies globally already using chatbots or planned to do so in 2017, and the number has no doubt risen since. However, panellists were not too concerned about human interactions taking a backseat.Kumar said:Technology is the future, but I don’t think we are there yet where we are completely replaced.She said that acting on the feedback and insights gathered is the key to retaining the human touch.“If you cared enough to respond, that itself is enough for the customer to feel like an individual. It instantly humanises the organisation. You establish that human interaction,” she added.DBS Bank’s Nair said the appeal of technology often comes from not needing a lot of manpower to connect with the customer, but companies underestimate the amount of time and effort needed to train artificially intelligent tools.“People tell me the future is robots, but I don’t think so. Robots may be serving you on the front end, but they are serving us, humans, at the back end too. They must understand us. We have to train these non-humans, just like how we have to train our employees,” he explained.Kit also agreed, stating that people crave for real connections, especially in the hospitality industry. Human intelligence is still required to design the technologies and manage break-downs, she said.