For many brands, the fourth quarter can make or break the year as they win new customers and serve existing ones.
How brands — and their CX leaders — handle customers during this time, and plan to do so for the returns season, can determine whether a customer sticks around for the next year or more.
Many companies are spending the quarter looking back and looking ahead, while others are drawing renewed attention to how CX should permeate the entire organization.
CX Dive spoke with several CX leaders for their perspectives on what brands should prioritize as they finish out the year.
Pursue goals, not metrics or tools
AI furor has sucked much of the oxygen from the CX room. However, customer journeys and customer experience existed long before AI and will persist long after whatever follows AI.
AI is simply an instrument of CX. Instead of focusing on the tools like AI, organizations should instead focus on how they’re serving customers.
“It’s very tempting to start with the tool, like what is our AI strategy, instead of thinking about who we need to be for our customers in order to meet our organizational goals,” said Jeannie Walters, CEO and chief experience investigator with Experience Investigators.
One challenge to taking this more long-term approach is that CX tends to be reactive to the moment, Walters said. When she asks CX leaders to itemize their goals, they respond with metrics like improving NPS or making their contact center agents more productive and efficient.
“Those are measurements, not goals,” Walters said.
Defining organizational goals should instead involve putting the company into its customers’ shoes and identifying the challenges they’ll likely face and how those needs can best be met, Walters contended. Figuring out how to serve customers in the best way can help the brand achieve its equally important goals like revenue or market share goals.
Take a look back, assess and adjust
Walters also encourages CX leaders to look back at previous goals.
“In Q4, I always encourage leaders to kind of think about what their goals were at the beginning of the year, and did they actually achieve them? Why or why not?” Walters said. “And then, in 12 months, what does success look like? Not just for your organization, but for your customers.”
By starting with that framing, the brand can more easily shift its goal setting from metrics like revenue growth to outcomes that might improve customers’ business. A supplier might streamline institute goals that help it expedite component delivery to a manufacturer which, in turn, would help that manufacturer better meet its customers needs, Walters suggested.
CX leaders can view the looming turn of the calendar year as an opportunity to think more deeply about what they accomplished in the year prior, what their goals actually were and what needs to change — or be emphasized — to impact the next year.
Unwrap successes
The end of the calendar year is a milestone for most people. CX teams should capitalize on the natural “look back, look forward” mentality by reminding their colleagues of how their CX efforts have supported them and contributed to the business’s overall success.
Jon Picoult, founder and principal of Watermark Consulting, suggests that CX teams emulate Spotify Wrapped, which provides a personalized year-end look at users’ listening habits.
Picoul’s “CX Wrapped” idea offers teams a way to market their accomplishments and work to internal stakeholders.
“The end of the calendar year presents them with an opportunity to, through how they communicate, end on a high note and elevate their colleagues' perceptions of how the team has contributed to the business,” Picoult said.
To do that, Picoult recommends CX leaders frame their contributions in terms that internal business leaders care about. It’s not about CSAT or NPS improvements per se, but about how those improvements impacted the business.
“CX Wrapped should capture things like how many calls were reduced by delivering better service experience, or looking at the increase [CX] drove in self-service channel usage, or the rise in customer retention, wallet share or referral business,” Picoult said. “It's about articulating the team's impact over the past year as it relates to revenue growth, expense reduction or profitability improvement.”
CX teams should also highlight where the customer experience fell short.
“A uniformly positive accounting of the year won't come off to colleagues as credible,” Picoult said. “An accounting that's more even-handed and realistic will build credibility with business partners and make it more likely that they'll believe the information that's being conveyed to them — both the good and the bad.”
Review and analyze before setting next year’s budget
The fourth quarter is also when budgets are finalized, so it’s the obvious time to re-examine supplier contracts as well as performance analytics which could help identify CX fulfillment gaps.
“Before renewing budgets, before allocating funds, what can [the CX leadership team] calculate and understand? Is the business compensating for potential underlying problems?” said Julie Geller, principal research director with Info-Tech Research Group.
CX teams can analyze customer behavior and responses to CX efforts, whether that’s uptake of new offerings, responsiveness to particular brand messaging or friction within the customer service function. That analysis of events — good, bad and ugly — can help better position the organization and its budget for the next year.
According to Geller, answering those questions can help the organization address the natural follow-up: “Where can we allocate some of next year's budget so we can lend ourselves to having a much better and stronger customer experience across the board?”
