When I embarked on my journey as a Customer Experience pro nearly two decades ago, I was filled with a sense of discovery and potential. In this field, I saw a set of tools that could truly transform companies; I eagerly absorbed all the processes and strategies CX and UX offered. I was excited to see the intended outcomes come to life.
However, it was in my collaboration during this time that I encountered the most resistance from my non-UX/CX peers. It was perplexing, as I couldn’t comprehend how they failed to see CX techniques’ immense potential. This shared struggle is a common thread in implementing CX and UX.
Over the years, I’ve reconciled that conflict by humbling myself and realizing that the fields of CX and UX sometimes try to do too much to make themselves heard, successful, and impactful. We held on to the purity of our processes in an almost dogmatic way, demanding our teams walk through each step. We appeared to leave no room for flexibility or adaptability to the businesses we claimed to help.
And the result of this inflexibility was a fear of CX and UX and all the changes they might create. How do we overcome that fear? By taking a slow, measured approach, as we will discuss in this article.
Are we inadvertently creating a CX monster?
If we look at things from a business perspective, it’s not hard to understand why our devotion to CX and UX can seem overwhelming. Budgets and timelines are tight, and what do we do? From their perspective, we ask for more budget and more time. From our perspective, of course, we’re just doing things “right”.
For example, imagine a company is launching its upcoming website and companion mobile app next month. They need someone who understands UX to help them ensure what they’ve created is intuitive and doesn’t frustrate customers. Yes, they should have engaged a UX person before they coded the website/application, but that didn’t happen. Still, the UX person tells the team they cannot help unless they do discovery research to develop personas first. This confirms the exasperated team’s idea of why they didn’t reach out to UX in the first place – it’s just too much time, effort, and expense.
Or say the company is looking for a Customer Service team to improve the end-customer experience. They bring on a CX consultant to help. The consultant’s first order of business is a multi-session journey mapping session to better understand the customer pathway. It’s months before the CS team gets practical insights on tweaking their current approach.
The roots of CX fear
Such scenarios have made Customer Experience the monster in the night for many businesses. The idea of embarking on such an involved, intense, and expensive (both budget-wise and resource-wise) journey to investigate and improve a company’s CX is overwhelming. Even if a business has the best intentions, how could it justify the time and resources needed to do this CX thing correctly?
Further, companies fear CX because they fear any changes their customers/users might see. More precisely, they fear their customers/users might react negatively to the changes. So, a CX/UX purist’s push to test on users strikes fear in corporate hearts. Corporates want to present a polished image/experience to their consumers, but CX needs a lot of user feedback to achieve that polished image. It’s a conundrum.
How we take the fear out of CX
Understanding and improving your Customer Experience doesn’t need to be a long, arduous process. It’s probably better to enhance your CX in mini-stages, bit by bit, to ensure your CX goals consistently contribute to and align with your business goals while staying nimble, realistic, and impactful.
The 10/10/10 process
We developed our 10 / 10 / 10 process to help businesses “do CX” without long timelines, high costs, and resource strain. The process is based on a consistent, ongoing improvement philosophy borrowed from lean methodologies and design thinking practices.
We spend the first two weeks defining the CX Starting Line for the team we’re working with. This includes a high-level mapping the customer journey in one hour-long session. We also use these first weeks to outline and understand how the company works, align on KPIs, and define the critical problem we’ve been hired to solve.
In Week 3, we get to work addressing the immediate CX gaps. We focus on the processes, people, and systems contributing to critical CX needs. We also hammer out a more robust set of CX metrics so the team can see continuous improvement and progress along the journey.
Once critical CX gaps are filled, we can shift our attention to optimizing ongoing CX processes specific to the team we’re partnering with. This creates a sort of CX flywheel of progress.
We work this way for the next eight months (or often more), helping the team develop their CX Basics Playbook. At this point, a customer-first mindset guides the team, and most employees speak a shared value language.
The evolution of CX
The outcome of the 10/10/10 method
The 10/10/10 method results in a team that’s constantly focused on incremental changes that greatly impact CX. Because we use business goals and CX data to drive our discussions, we’re continuously working on the 20% that makes a difference.
A great example of this is the project we did for Veterans First Mortgage. By working with their marketing team using the 10/10/10 method over three years, we helped the company see some major results:
- 66% increase in customer engagement.
- 28% increase in communication open rates.
- 988 work-hours saved (and counting).
Finally, working incrementally makes CX approachable, measurable, and realistic for businesses of all sizes. You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 corporation to actualize great CX help. Instead, you need a team interested in making their people, processes, and systems more human-first.
Don’t let fear of CX hold you back
For many companies, CX/UX isn’t a value they can set at the beginning of their efforts; usually it’s because they have just never aligned with CX/UX overall.
However, all is not lost if this is the case (unlike what some CX teams would have you believe). Companies can and should make CX one of their values now. By implementing these values gradually, they can make CX/UX vital to their survival.
Doing so puts them in the league of the successful, longer-lasting companies whose customers keep coming back – not just for their great products, but also because they’re treated and considered as valued humans.
So, in summary, one of the reasons companies fear CX might very well be our attachment to the “right” CX process. By being flexible and willing to adapt to our companies’ requirements, we can start small and build toward bigger changes. This incremental, step-by-step process is much less scary for business leaders – and much easier to justify.
