Editor’s note: Roberta O’Keith is senior director of customer experience consulting at customer experience and market research provider Confirmit, Kansas City, Kan. 

As customer feedback data becomes more complex and the number of cross-functional teams grows, leaders are finding it increasingly difficult to capture the full 360-degree view of the customer to drive true change. Often, organizations are struggling because they don’t have the right infrastructure and mechanisms in place, making it difficult to manage and support customer experience initiatives.

Dissatisfaction is often the result of customers feeling the breakdown of internal processes and noticing the disparate functional gaps that exist across the business. Organizations tend to struggle with how to leverage customer feedback to help drive an effective CX strategy for a few key reasons:

  • Poor internal structure. Without clear ownership, roles and responsibilities to govern and manage customer insights, it can be difficult to drive action throughout the company. 
  • Inadequate support. Not instituting accountability leads to an absence of metrics and leadership to back the key initiatives derived from customer insights. 
  • Deficient skill sets. If there aren’t methodologies, mechanisms and skill sets to define and drive continuous improvements throughout the organization, CX practitioners are left without the tools to manage initiatives and drive influence.

These challenges are also coupled with external forces that are driving the need for structure and transformation even further.

  • Pushing for transparency: Customers expect organizations to know who they are, what they have bought and how satisfied they are about a product or service. Consumers want full transparency into offerings and demand a range of support options like instant chat and live customer support.
  • Streamlining customer data: Organizations are working to solve the puzzle of unstructured data by bringing financial, operational and customer experience data together to get a single view of the customer to proactively contact customers before they reach out. 
  • Trending predictive analytics: While AI is a hot topic, it’s still growing and adjusting. Finding the right fit rather than rushing to adopt AI models because of industry pressure is essential for long-term success.

The need for governance

CX leaders and consultants can use governance structures to help overcome some of these challenges. Governance, an often overlooked part of a CX strategy, is a critical component in facilitating change. Having a governance structure helps organizations create processes and establish standards that enable quality experience delivery by default. Considerations include:

  • Standardizing design practices. Cross-collaboration on design produces superior experiences. Organizations like Airbnb, Facebook, IBM and Intuit create their own versions of processes or a glossary of terms that provide detail and guidance to streamline design across the organization. 
  • Properly mapping customer journeys. If there is not a consistent way to journey map within an organization, practitioners cannot make comparisons or use the information to benchmark and improve. It’s important that constant actions are taken to improve customer journeys and owners are assigned for those actions and next steps. 
  • Identifying appropriate experience drivers. Organizations must identify and acknowledge which customer experience drivers matter most to customers, even if those drivers aren’t within the organization’s control. Outside of simply determining those drivers, organization must find ways to integrate them within existing approaches and processes. 
  • Taking stock of your launch. Finally, organizations should compare projects post-launch to pre-launch predictions. Is it having the desired impact? Were predictions accurate? Are the right projects being prioritized? Doing a postmortem or after action review can be very beneficial in driving future change.

Implementing the Goldilocks scale

In addition to processes, organizations must establish standards that enable quality experience delivery. Standards are critical to preventing avoidable experience mistakes, ensuring consistent experience delivery and setting a high bar for quality. Standards should make it easier for employees to be customer-centric, not put them in a straitjacket by making staff strictly adhere to a process. Building freedom within a framework gives employees the knowledge they need to answer questions and the flexibility to provide information in a way that meets customer needs. I call this the Goldilocks scale as it helps ensure the guiderails are not too much or too little. Steps for implementing the Goldilocks scale include:

  • Provide clear evidence. Standards should exist for a reason and the evidence for why the company is implementing them should be communicated to employees. 
  • Make standards relevant. Ensure processes are applicable to the role, department and geography to make them feel unique and tailored for each employee. 
  • Adjust standards as needed. As needs change, make sure you properly revise your standards. Standards should be flexible and adaptable so that governance feels like it is still serving a purpose and providing value for employees. 

Even in the fast pace of today’s CX environment, it’s important to have governance and standards in place to help organizations execute a better customer experience strategy. Spending the time up-front to set standards and get the right people involved will make it easier to produce better work, develop (and determine) metrics/ROI and ensure the success of CX programs.