Why Large Organizations Can Struggle With Customer Experience

Once the CX team understands how they fit into the larger picture, they must identify leaders who have both an understanding of how CX and customer insights can help their part of the business and a track record of getting things done. Align yourself with these change makers. Learn their language and find ways to help them become even more successful. One recent example of this is a contact center leader at a major communications company who delivers reports tailored to colleagues in HR, operations, and finance. 

Create the Right Measures of Accountability

Many large organizations implement initiatives to improve CX, and then fail at finding the right measures and systems of accountability. To keep everyone on track, evaluate what success looks like across the organization as a whole, by department, and even down to the employee level.

There’s an advantage in choosing “one metric to rule them all.” Measures like NPS (Net Promoter Score) and Customer Effort Score (CES) can provide a common framework and serve as a kind of speedometer. When deployed sloppily, they can struggle with being actionable. Brands must find metrics that (1) match what they’re measuring (i.e., a journey) and (2) align with what each department and employee can directly influence. Unfortunately, I see a lot of brands tying frontline employee bonuses to brand-level NPS. While it’s nice to have a common rallying cry, it’s unfair and unproductive to tie reward and punishment to goals so far removed from workers’ day-to-day actions.

What’s a CX leader to do? First, know that there’s no universal metric that works for every business. Also understand that you’ll need different measurements in different places of your business. A good way to get started is to map customer journeys to understand what success looks like at each juncture. For example, when customers call into your contact center, their first priority might be getting their question resolved as quickly and easily as possible. On the other hand, when they visit your location, they want to have personalized interactions with expert staff. Same business, different journey, and very different expectations and metrics.

Big brands have more to gain and more to lose when it comes to customer experience, and CX success is absolutely more difficult at scale. But it can and does happen. Some of the largest brands in the world are also some of the most well-known customer experience leaders. Like the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. What it doesn’t say is that there’s even more opportunity.

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Erich Dietz, senior vice president of global business development at InMoment, is an enterprise leader with a proven track record of building successful direct sales teams, go-to-market strategies, partner and channel programs, and enterprise solutions for Fortune 1000 global organizations. He has held various positions at InMoment since 2003.