Imagine going back in time 20 years and telling a customer experience professional about the technology at our disposal today. The unprecedented ability to target and personalize content. The ever-more-sophisticated attribution metrics. The AI-driven capability to iterate and test at lightning speed.
"Wow!" that 2005 CX expert would exclaim. "The mid-2020s must be a Golden Age of CX!"
Surprise! That's not the case. Global research firm Forrester's annual CX Index recorded its worst result ever among 275,000 consumers around the world. Some 25% of US brands saw statistically significant declines in customer sentiment in the last year alone. As R/GA head of strategy, Yael Cesarkas put it in a provocative address at Cannes, "This is not anecdotal, this is a phenomenon. It is a trend that has been accelerating for the past three years, across categories, across geographies."
AI hasn't been a magic arrow to customers' hearts, either - and the rush to ship something, anything AI might be making it worse. "There should have been more testing, more experimenting and design work before putting some of these (AI) efforts in front of consumers," Forrester analyst Pete Jacques told the Wall Street Journal.
What's going on? Why, when content ops are more powerful than ever, does CX seem to be stagnating, or moving backwards?
To digital product teams, the very premise of declining CX might seem like heresy. Look at all the friction we've eliminated! Look how much more efficient interactions are! Look at all the ways users can self-serve! Obviously, customer experience just keeps getting better: the customers are the problem. They just expect too much.
Content ops people may point to the mountains of material they produce, to the content assembly line whizzing by at speeds unimaginable just a few years ago. Certainly, they can't be to blame for sliding customer sentiment. A million microtargeted ad variations can't be wrong.
And brand marketers might just shrug the whole thing off. Our job is to bring customers through the door. Whatever happens after that isn't our department. And so, every function is hitting its KPIs with room to spare, yet churn mounts higher, NPS drifts lower, and you lose ground to your competitors.
These are exaggerated caricatures, of course. But the kernel of truth is that, too often, these teams are all working to different incentives. They're getting better at optimizing everything they do without considering whether it all adds up to what really matters to customers. Like the fable of the blind men examining the elephant, they're reaching contradictory conclusions about what they're dealing with. Worse, their efforts are starting to annoy the elephant, and that never ends well.
The way through starts with expanding your definition of CX. It's not just the function of one siloed team measuring a few UI analytics. Make CX a company-wide focus. Every interaction with your brand, from seeing a banner ad with your logo to paying an invoice for your services, is part of their customer experience.
How this could play out depends on the specifics of your organization and the appetite for change. But just about every company could do at least some of the following to get CX and Content Operations singing off the same hymn sheet.
Share KPIs. Teams working toward some of the same goals will naturally reinforce each other. Sure, you want Ops to maximise production efficiency, and you want CX to maximise interaction efficiency. Beyond that, though, identify some growth-oriented metrics for both teams: positive goals that add to the business and encourage both sides to open up. Make those shared objectives just as high-priority as each team's specific ones.
Weave brand, ops, and CX into projects from the start. Brand is the promise. Content ops is how that promise reaches customers. CX is how that promise is kept. So make sure these principles are intrinsic to every project from day one. (Late-stage box-checking approvals don't count.) Even the most focused initiative doesn't exist in a vacuum. Involving multiple teams will make sure the crucial context is always considered.
Organize by journey, cross-functionally. Customers don't care about your org chart. They want to create an account, or shop, or get support after the sale. Make sure key journeys are clearly owned and driven by specific leaders, with the remit to reach across teams to optimize that journey for customers - and accountability for its performance.
Agree on the customer. It sounds simple, but you may be surprised by how differently the various teams in your organization view your customers. It's impossible to align on a CX strategy if we're not aligned on who those customers are. Even in the crush of daily work, it's worth calling periodic time-outs to socialize a shared understanding of what your customers want and how you're serving them.
The worldwide CX slump presents an opportunity for those brands that can get it right. But you don't have to figure it out alone. For over a decade, WNDYR has been helping organizations large and small deploy the right tech to support the right processes to serve their people, with some impressive results. Contact our CX practice to start your own transformation today.