Operationalizing CX: Organizational Strategies for Delivering Superior Omnichannel Experiences

In today’s fast and interconnected world, consumers expect smooth, unfragmented interactions with companies across a variety of channels and products. The demand for high-quality customer journeys has created operational challenges for organizations. Broad-scope user experience, commonly referred to as customer experience (CX), goes beyond traditional, interaction-level user experience and seeks to design good, cohesive, and connected customer journeys, but this discipline cannot simply be stacked upon a company’s existing infrastructure, strategy, and internal practices. For CX work to thrive at scale, beyond one-off initiatives, companies must develop a supporting operational ecosystem that allows for quick reaction to customer needs. Creating this ecosystem requires organizations to transform their internal operations to resolve challenges that legacy business practices impose on CX-related business goals. 

This 142-page report provides guidance for our audience of UX practitioners, who may already have a mature UX practice within their organization at the product level but seek to broaden their experience-design work, operationalize it within their business, and deliver high-quality customer journeys at scale. The report delivers a high-level framework to guide organizations toward operationalizing CX work.

This report was developed based on 20 in-depth interviews with customer-experience leaders across many industries and in varying roles, including executives, directors, and consultants. It synthesizes insights obtained from these interviews, along with themes from a large-scale literature review of research and resources relevant to these challenges and the ways organizations seek to resolve them. The report also includes 29 case studies highlighting how teams have approached this work through the development of CX programs, cultural initiatives, new team and employee structures, and more. Many are success stories, demonstrating effective tactics resulting in mature CX operations. Some are lessons learned from teams whose efforts were not effective. 

Topics

• The state of customer experience
  • Top challenges organizations see
• The case for CX transformation to operationalize CX work
• Building stakeholder buy-in for large-scale change
• A framework for CX transformation
  • Key organizational focus areas
  • 4 building blocks for developing a CX program
• Laying out the foundation for CX transformation
  • Building stakeholder buy-in
  • Establishing guiding values and principles
  • Defining an achievable strategy and vision
  • Forecasting the ROI of CX transformation and CX initiatives
  • Identifying the right pilot projects to pave the way for larger change
• Working structures to support CX operations
  • Teams and roles
    • Establishing crossfunctional networks
• Processes and approaches for operationalizing CX
  • Journey management
  • Customer listening and insight-management programs
  • Governance strategy
• Supporting tools and technology
  • Customer-data structures
  • Journey-analytics tools
  • Customer-data management tools
  • Metrics to track and distribute
• Creating a culture of shared responsibility
  • Developing programs and practices for creating a company culture that delivers upon strategy