Get really CX fit in 2017

By Andy Wand, Sales Director UK & Europe.

The New Year has arrived and with it a wealth of resolutions– spending more time with family and friends, getting fitter, etc. – and with those come a raft of tactical goals to make them happen – stop snacking, more time in the gym/pool, on the bike, out running, etc.

And amongst those self-pep-talks the phrase ‘BMI’ will have probably popped up. I’m not sure how global this measurement is but in the UK it is Body Mass Index. It is a simple measure that the National Health Service (NHS), the government health department, uses and takes your height and weight and calculates your BMI score. i.e. how lean/fat you are.

As I was driving my son back to the airport to return to Australia for another season as a rugby coach – he is, amongst other things, a sports scientist who looks at exercise, nutrition, training programmes and so on – the BMI score came up as we were discussing New Year’s resolutions. “No Dad!” he cried vehemently, “BMI is such a simple measure that everyone uses but it is riddled with faults and doesn’t give a true picture of someone’s fitness. There are so many other contributing factors, such as age, resting heart rate, the time that you have spent exercising, how long for, what type of exercise you do, what you eat, historical diet, water percentage, metabolic rate, muscle ratio, environment, and so on, that it is virtually worthless.” He was quite adamant and I bow to his superior knowledge. But it did get me thinking and I am sure that you have already guessed where I am going with this….

A lot of organisations use a very simple measure of CX ‘fitness’ which is only based on one attribute – someone’s likelihood to recommend, i.e. NPS. Although very widely used it has its inherent flaws.

Useful to measure ‘simple’ fitness but it doesn’t really give the full picture. Being really CX fit should also include those other measurements too. An NPS score of 25 is pretty good if you have only just begun the journey but pretty poor if you have been CX centric for five years – in the same way that a BMI score of 30 is pretty poor if you have been exercising for five years and started at 32. But 30 is very good if you started at 40 only six months ago. Hence a simple ’30’ doesn’t even begin to tell the full story.

Like BMI there are many other factors that will give a real picture of your organisation’s CX fitness. How long has your organisation been CX centric – ten years, five years, a year, a quarter? How long have you based recruitment policy – even for back office teams – on their customer centric approach? How quickly do you respond to customers’ feedback – a week, a day, an hour, in real time? How long do you take to make the operational and systemic changes needed to make the customer experience better – a year, six months, a month, a week? How aligned are your functional heads on customer delivery? How balanced is your outwards/inwards view? How easy is it for your customers to engage with you? How many channels can your customers engage with you through and can you measure single journeys across multiple channels? Are your customer surveys still standing alone or are they integrated with your ongoing communications and marketing? Are you supplementing customer feedback with data from other sources? How many – one or two, or multiple siloes to make your customer engagement truly personalised? How quickly can you communicate and disseminate that information throughout your organisation so that employees can act on it effectively?

Like a BMI score based on just weight and height there are so many more factors that need to be taken in to account when calculating your organisation’s CX fitness.

For 2017 and beyond do you want your organisation to be pretend CX fit or do you want to get really CX fit? Let me know your thoughts and what you are planning to do to keep your CX resolutions. Happy 2017 everyone.