Customer Experience (CX) tools help marketers achieve key customer journey elements. These tools help automate tasks and organize customer data, boosting customer engagement and sales. So why do they fail?
Most CX tools are set strategically, but companies deviate from critical business objectives and just track the metrics. Lack of innovation and moving forward without a purpose hampers the effectiveness of the CX tools. These mistakes can hinder the ability to design, operationalize, and implement an effective CX program.
What is a CX Tool?
A CX tool helps analyze and manage customer interaction and optimize sales, marketing, and retention rates. It helps deliver a more tailored CX, leading to increased customer loyalty and higher customer retention rates. A CX tool is a valuable asset for businesses offering exceptional CXs and building long-term customer relationships.
How to Select the Right CX Tool?
- Define goals before selecting a CX tool. It will help understand whether or not the tool aligns with the business objectives.
- Evaluate features that will help measure customer feedback and track customer interactions. Also, look for features that will help tailor CX and boost customer engagement.
- Select a tool that is easy to use and integrates seamlessly with the existing systems.
- The tool must be able to scale as the business grows. This retains the tool’s relevancy and value in the long run.
What are the Reasons Why CX Tools Fail?
1. Reluctant to Change or Innovation
The goal of every CX tool is to make smart changes, gather data, and track performance. Marketers use these insights to understand their performance and devise strategies to create positive changes in the CX.
Marketers have access to vast data but do not dedicate enough time and resources to use it accurately, leading to “analysis paralysis.” These bottlenecks cause marketers to move forward without any change or innovation plans.
What Should Marketers Do?
They must dedicate more time to planning to understand the implications and applications of the collected information. Solid planning helps create the right strategy to benefit the firm and the customers.
2. Disconnected Tech Silos
Companies using tech systems are independent of one another with little or no integration. Even with little integration, the systems are less likely to be connected to the CX management platform.
Lack of integration limits the company’s ability to understand the customers better and use the data to enhance service levels across multiple channels.
What Can Marketers Do?
Marketers must ensure that the tech is integrated correctly. This way, they will have sentiment analysis, real-time feedback, and social media conversation tracking tools in one place.
3. Lack of Integration with Legacy Systems
Old tech is a major concern for companies seeking to achieve business goals. When implementing a CX platform, companies replace the old tech due to the inability to integrate the new and old ones.
As per a recent survey by Gartner,
What Can Marketers Do?
As customers’ data is stored in multiple silos across the businesses, a well-integrated CX tool can help create a unified customer view with disparate data. Companies can adopt API strategies to set a process to draw data from legacy systems to drive new platforms.
A systems integration partner and a solid legacy infrastructure mapping can help set an integration plan. This combination prevents issues in poorly synchronized systems down the line.
4. Correlating Metrics and Business Outcomes
Most companies rely on CX tools to track the metrics as they define the success or failure of CX programs. Often, they use and accept these metrics at face value. However, these scores cannot help companies understand whether they are suitable for net revenue.
What Can Marketers Do?
When setting KPIs, ensure to align them with the inputs from other departments. Some examples marketers might want to consider are-
- Cost to Acquire and Serve a Customer (CAC and CSC)
- Customer Penetration
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Customer Churn
Firms do not sufficiently use and understand the above metrics. Therefore, they must use metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) as empirical evidence. Furthermore, it is vital to assess the KPI success or failure with caution, as a satisfied customer is not always profitable.
5. Rigidity in Feedback Collection
Some companies use traditional tools that do not align with the growing customer expectations. This is one of the core reasons they struggle to achieve CX.
For instance, companies that conduct annual surveys gather customer feedback. But how are marketers gaining accurate data? Does the customer remember every detail of the past issues?
What Can Marketers Do?
To understand the customers and improve the effectiveness of the CX tool, firms must collect real-time feedback. They can use social media channels or instant messaging.
More importantly, the fastest way to increase the CX is to seek customer feedback from customers just after they have experienced the issues.
6. Lack of Cultural Engagement and Training
Companies invest in tech to understand customers and gain real-time insights. They refine their processes to better interact with customers. But they often ignore the people-culture aspect.
CX platforms fail because the aims and objectives were not communicated or implemented into the operations. Such miscommunication leads to lower engagement levels with the team and a surge in weak data. This directly hampers the platform’s credibility and its use.
What Can Marketers Do?
Marketers must build a customer-centric culture, train the customer-facing employees, and understand the employees’ routines, priorities, and motivational factors.
At the same time, they implement formal rewards for their progress in offering a better CX. By driving change and embracing cultural engagement, firms can let them understand the importance of CX.
Also Read: Leveraging MarTech to Deliver Personalized Customer Experience
Conclusion
Companies often think of CX tools as a foundation to accomplish their objectives. But, customers think differently, as every customer interaction is different. Moreover, they expect quick responses from companies.
Furthermore, A CX program requires omnichannel support to maintain a solid brand experience. If the CX tool does not support omnichannel or is inflexible, revamping or re-evaluating the tool is vital.
With solid technical support and turning customer feedback into real-time, the CX tool will better manage customer expectations across all channels. It improves brand image and boosts customer satisfaction.
Any company can have a CX program in place, but implementing the right CX tool requires efforts from the stakeholders within a company. Overcoming these mistakes helps continually design and enhance experiences across the customer journey, driving customer loyalty.
