From doing CX to being a CX-driven organization – the 9 traits of great CX organizations

Companies today face daunting challenges. According to our most recent Global CEO Survey, business leaders understand that threats to their long-term viability are growing and that they need to reinvent or risk dying within the next decade. Among the over 4,000 CEOs we surveyed, shifting customer demands and preferences stood out as the top threat to the future profitability of their businesses—shining a spotlight on how critical customer experience (CX) is today and will be in the years ahead.

What is a great CX company?

Most companies have conviction that CX is important and have launched programs aimed at improving their CX activities. Too often, however, these programs are disjointed because companies have not defined a vision for what CX means to them. This has led many to chase a CX number instead of concentrating on becoming a learning organization focused on driving CX that results in real operational or business outcomes.

Through our work, we’ve found that great CX organizations don’t simply focus on doing CX activities. They have transformed into being CX-centric organizations that put the customer at the heart of everything they do, from governance and decision-making to innovation, product and service development and operations.

But how does an organization evolve from doing CX to being a CX company? The truth is that there is no one recipe or formula for success that will work for every business. But there are key traits that companies should address in order for their transformation to drive sustained outcomes.

The 9 traits of great CX organizations

Below, we identify nine traits that organizations should consider as part of their CX transformation. Not all great CX companies have addressed each of these equally or in the same way. They have prioritized the attributes right for them. 

1. Conviction and role modelling from the top: There is top-down conviction, with actions not simply words, that CX is a major driver of business growth and that there is an economic business case for focusing on the customer experience. In addition to executive conviction, leading companies have their executives role model and communicate the importance of customer-centricity—ensuring that CX doesn’t stand alone but is embedded across all facets of their organization.

2. CX vision: Companies have a clear, simple and compelling definition of their customer experience vision, their North Star vision, that is meaningful, easily understood by their employees and used to align initiatives.

3. CX-focused design: Organizations use their vision, customer needs and feedback to develop products and services. They also use CX and operational/business metrics tied together to evaluate the success of products and services and make appropriate course corrections. Products and services are both designed for experience and designed for operational excellence.

4. A learning culture: Companies have a closed-loop, customer-centric learning culture focused on using client data and feedback not only to identify and better understand their CX strengths and weaknesses, but also to drive rapid improvements to that experience. Companies similarly use data and feedback processes to drive both frontline CX changes and back-end operational improvements. They have stopped fixating on the question of how do we improve our NPS score—focusing instead on questions like what are we learning from this, how are we improving, and what changes do we need to make?

5. A culture of innovation: Organizations have a culture of innovation that encourages employees to learn, ask questions, experiment and seek ways to make changes to products, services and ways of working that improve and enhance the customer experience. Innovation is viewed as an ongoing endeavour, rather than as a fixed target. As a key part of this culture, employees are upskilled on tools and approaches so that they can be more innovative and customer-centric.

6. An employee experience that enables CX: Companies align their employee experience to their customer experience in order to foster stronger outcomes. Most importantly, they integrate customer-centricity into their recruitment, onboarding, ongoing training and upskilling programs so that employees always have the current skills, tools and techniques they need to deliver a great CX experience.

7. Governance and operating models that incorporate CX: Organizations integrate both operational metrics and CX metrics (e.g., ROX) into all aspects of their strategic decision-making processes, including planning, budgeting and project prioritization. Any desired CX outcomes are clearly stated and linked to measurable and more holistic business metrics (e.g., share of wallet, sales, profitability, lifetime customer value). They also link performance and reward systems up and down, from the highest CX and operational metrics at the enterprise level to granular CX and operational metrics at the individual employee level. 

8. Proactive management of customer expectations: Companies thoughtfully manage customer expectations—both positive and negative—in advance. They transparently communicate expectations and updates on what experience to expect and then work to deliver that experience.

9. Data foundations and AI programs that support CX outcomes: As organizations gather and use more data, and gain the ability to understand their customers in a 360 way, leaders are developing AI capabilities that inform their decision-making and actions. They are also creating robust AI-driven data analytics solutions so they can make better operational decisions and create more personalized customer experiences.