For the past few years, we here at Topdown have been focusing on ways to improve your organization’s customer experience (CX). We’ve heard time and again from the analysts with whom we engage that most companies are struggling to create a viable CX strategy and need help choosing metrics to measure the business outcomes. To help you get started down this path, we created a special-edition eBook as a thought-starter to create strategies for identifying key business indicator (KPI) metrics that help you advise your organization of its progress, achievements, and impact.
Need a CX strategy and a way to measure the business outcomes of it? Start here.
In the eBook, “Creating a Customer Experience Strategy that Aligns to Business Metrics”, you will see how to:
- Develop a business value-based approach to CX strategy
- Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that measure business impact
- Connect strategy, KPIs and business outcomes
Start with a Value-Based Discipline Model
A successful CX strategy requires creating a holistic approach that combines technology, processes, and people. You must have vision and develop a strategy that runs across your entire organization—from the customer to the CEO—and sew them together with KPIs.
One widely accepted business paradigm, the Value Disciplines model1, describes three essential areas that organizations should concentrate on to create competitive differentiation. The three Value disciplines begin the internal examination for determining where you most need to focus:
- Customer intimacy – How customer-oriented are you?
- Product leadership – Can you accurately predict and respond to customer demand?
- Operational excellence – How well do you control your costs?
Identify What you Need to Measure
Once you determine your key Value Discipline, you now begin to work with individual departments, teams and tools in order to identify and connect the right micro metrics to a matrix of metrics: there is no single KPI that can successfully define a comprehensive CX strategy. Rather, you must incorporate a comprehensive matrix of metrics with a carefully crafted CX strategy that brings them all together.
Here are just a few examples of KPIs (download and read the eBook for the complete list) for you to consider that link your strategy across and down the business to key stakeholders:
- Increase shareholder value and earnings per share (EPS), which links to…
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), which is impacted by…
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), which is impacted by…
Align Metrics to Your Discipline
What role do you play in your organization? For example, if you are a key stakeholder and contributor in your organization’s IT department, you are keenly focused on improving the digital customer experience (DX) tools and processes that lead to Operational Excellence.
Marketing mavens are maniacally focused on how not only to capture key inputs at every touchpoint in the CX journey, but also how to respond to customer wants or to understand their needs better than competitors. Improving Customer Intimacy creates greater customer loyalty that leads to revenue growth and an increase in repeat purchases.
Leaders in lines of business and product owners most likely have internal metrics tied to increased speed of innovation and the revenue derived from new product delivery. Such contributors will want to focus on Product Leadership metrics that can increase time-to-market or loyalty program enrollment.
Connect Strategy to Outcomes
Now that you have a strategy devised around the relevant KPIs, you can now consider the technology to deliver your customer experience. You have a rare opportunity to seize upon making measurable improvements. Your focus shifts more on the art of the possible, and less on what already exists.
In the eBook, we show an example of how Topdown worked with a state agency to identify key metrics across all three of the Value Disciplines. Together, we created a more customer-centric experience that improved operational efficiency. Content and communication management solutions from Topdown now provide a friction-free customer experience and the agency is enjoying a 45% improvement in productivity. You’ll need to read the eBook for the rest of the story, and for ideas on creating your own strategy and choosing metrics.
Download and read the entire ebook here to find out how Topdown can help you align a CX strategy to the KPIs critical to your business by implementing the right tools, processes, people and technologies to improve your organization’s customer experience journey.
1 Created by Michael Tracy and Fred Wieserman describing the three generic “value disciplines” that most companies use to strive for continued success.
