To achieve success in CX and CS, we need to stop talking about CX and CS

In the world of Customer Experience and Customer Success, we love to talk about how our main KPIs are doing. NPS is improving and is even mentioned in the annual report commentary! The Customer Health Score is up! Yay! Success! Give us our big bonus. Fund our major improvement initiatives. After all, we can prove that they will improve NPS and CHS results. What??? No additional people and money??? Scandalous.... now I have to drift off and cry in a corner... (sniffle...)

OK, if where I am going is not clear enough, let me exaggerate just a little to make my point. Nobody on the leadership team cares about NPS, Customer Health Scores, the IT systems, the office building itself, the HR department, the marketing department . . . the list goes on and on. All of these are means to an end. That end is stock price growth, primarily driven by customer retention and growth. These are what the CEO and leadership team, and indeed the company board care about. Nothing else.

It's all about retention and growth

If, for example, we are convinced that customers will become more loyal and buy more when we can understand, predict, and satisfy their needs far better than we do now, we will naturally want to propose a Customer AI-type solution. Then we have to persuade senior managers to buy into it. Based on what I see happening in many companies, I believe we need to ban traditional CX and Customer Success terminology from our proposal. It's all about the dollars. It's only about the dollars. Our message has to be, "We know how to use Customer AI to get more dollars. Give us these resources to do it."

It is all about executive sponsorship

This is all about executive sponsorship. There are four key actions we need to take to get sponsorship for our work:

1. Make sure senior leaders talk about whatever we want to do. If they are not already doing so, supply them the necessary material. If someone else writes their all-employee messages and prepares their presentations, meet with that person and provide them with the necessary compelling collateral. They want to talk about customer retention and growth, so will welcome it. And in current times, they also want to be able to talk about how they plan to implement AI, so that is a bonus.
2. Ensure that the names of the teams and projects are clear, and reflect what the the retention and growth outcomes. Don't use code names. Abandon all CX and CS terminology.
3. Promise and deliver something every two or three months that is clearly worth the effort and investment.
4. Ensure you are able to communicate your work clearly, both internally and externally. If the leadership team members who should be communicating the opportunities and progress are not communicating effectively, do it for them.

So therefore...

Look around you. Has your company added significant resources to your CX, CS, or indeed RevOps teams over the last couple of years? If the answer is no, then please try to accept what I have written above. Keep NPS and CHS and words like them inside your team. Lead off all your discussions and proposals with retention and growth. That's what your leadership team wants to hear. That's where they want to see compelling investment programs. That's where your future lies.

Notes

OCX Cognition predicts customer futures. Our breakthrough Customer AI solution lets enterprises transform what’s possible in customer experience. Reduce your customer risk, break down walls between teams, and drive speedy action – when you can see what’s coming, you can change the outcome. Building on more than 100 years of CX-focused expertise in our small team and thousands in teams we have led, we’ve harnessed today’s advances in AI, elastic computing, and data science to deliver on the promise of customer-driven financial results. Learn more at www.ocxcognition.com.

Maurice FitzGerald is Editor-in-Chief, Content at OCX Cognition. He retired from HP where he was VP of Customer Experience for their $4 billion software business and was previously VP of Strategy and Customer Experience as well as Chief of Staff for HP in EMEA. He and his brother Peter, an Oxford D.Phil in Cognitive Psychology, have written three books on customer experience strategy and NPS, all available from Amazon.