Brad Anderson is the President of Products and Engineering at Qualtrics. Brad previously spent 17 years as a key leader at Microsoft.
Consumers are no longer influenced only by product features or pricing—they’re increasingly swayed by the overall experience a brand provides, whether it’s through customer service, product usability or emotional engagement. We know a negative interaction can lead to swift consequences—a lost customer, a tarnished reputation or a competitive advantage slipping away. That’s why experience management—the practice of understanding and optimizing the interactions people have with a company to spot opportunities for improvement—is becoming more important for brands worldwide.
In fact, a Qualtrics XM Institute survey of over 1,000 executives from large companies around the globe found that leaders who rate their company’s experience management as “significantly above average” overwhelmingly report better revenue growth, profitability and employee retention than competitors. It’s part of the reason Qualtrics and industry heavyweights Bain and Kantar have asked the greater community to help establish the first-ever global standard for benchmarking customer experience (CX) that goes beyond measuring customer satisfaction.
Businesses must advance past simple feedback collection to foster deeper customer loyalty and deliver business growth. In this article, I’ll outline what’s at stake and provide the practical strategies that any leader can implement to take their strategy to the next level.
Most Businesses Only Scratch The Surface With Their CX Efforts
As someone who spends their day-to-day talking to company leaders about experience management, it’s clear to me that companies are missing the opportunity to get more value out of their programs. Over 40% of companies fail to recognize customer experience management as a strategic opportunity. Instead, their efforts are often limited to reactive measures—essential functions like post-transaction surveys or collecting product feedback that do little to inform broader strategies.
Leadership and investors often have an incomplete understanding of what experience management is, which can lead to their CX teams focusing solely on monitoring limited metrics like NPS or CSAT scores. However, the true value of experience management lies in its ability to drive customer value creation, enhance customer acquisition and contribute to overall business growth.
Three Steps To Build A More Successful Experience Management Program
The most successful companies not only see the value of managing CX but have effectively woven those CX metrics into the fabric of their entire operation. They systematically identify CX breakdowns and engagement opportunities and use customer feedback to inform their strategic objectives, operational processes and everyday work routines.
So, why do many organizations struggle to move beyond the basics? The answer often lies in the technical infrastructure, culture and competencies—or lack thereof—that businesses have in place.
Below are three steps that every CX leader can take to advance their influence and deliver more value to the business:
Step 1: Prove the value of experience management to leadership with early wins.
Organizations often start applying the experience management discipline in one area of their business or across a few tightly related areas. For example, a company may kick off its experience management efforts by taking action based on the results of a relationship NPS survey and through feedback collected on customers’ call center experiences.
To tie those metrics to business value, teams must find the connection between experience data and operational metrics like average customer spend, then demonstrate how increases or decreases in the core experience metrics impact those spending figures. A tangible win using CX data that the organization already collects can demonstrate the value of expanding into new areas of the business.
Step 2: Expand and connect similar use cases.
Next, CX teams and leaders should look for similar areas of the business to enhance with customer data insights. For example, after analyzing the results of its initial NPS and customer support surveys, a company might expand its listening channels and incorporate more advanced features, like text and predictive analytics. These more advanced organizations imbue surveys with historical transaction data they already have for each customer. This data includes details about what customers purchased, when and where they made those purchases (online or in-store), how much they spent and the history of their recent contacts with a company, like a chat with the support center.
Armed with this additional information, business leaders can more accurately identify which service or purchase experiences are causing customers to leave or encourage repeat purchases and loyalty. This level of data allows leaders to make recommendations that span business groups, such as tweaking an employee recognition program to encourage improvements to frontline customer service.
Step 3: Make experience management a strategic priority across the organization.
The most strategic organizations with advanced CX programs treat every interaction as an opportunity to deliver personalized experiences and predict future behavior. At this stage, data teams arm leaders across the organization with near real-time insights into the business’ most important experience metrics, empowering them to focus on the initiatives that will drive the most value for employees and customers. As a result, every team in the organization will seek to apply experience to every new initiative they undertake, whether introducing a new product or organizing an employee engagement program. Product, marketing, sales and customer service teams all share their experience metrics, and changes are made with the collective business in mind.
To advance through each stage of maturity, businesses need the right tools and systems to continuously monitor, analyze and adapt to changing consumer expectations. An experience management platform should integrate with the organization’s existing enterprise systems, including CRM and HCM platforms, databases and workflow management tools.
AI will continue to transform how businesses operate. And its ability to turn raw data into actionable insights—delivered to the right people and processes in tailored and timely formats—could create a new pinnacle for experience management.
The companies that invest in building their experience management programs now are expected to benefit for years to come.
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