Aug 31, 2010
Stat of the week: when customer experience is UNimportant
For this stat of the week, we focus on the leaders from our research who told us customer experience is NOT well understood, or commonly used in daily decision making across their organizations. We asked: Why not? Why not right now?
What do you think their #1 reason was?
Photo by Andrew Magill
Did you guess money? That would seem like the logical answer, but it wasn’t the top reason customer experience was deemed unimportant. Here’s what we found:
21% of the leaders said they should understand and use Customer Experience across their organization but there aren’t enough of, or the right champions to make it happen.
Money shows up in the #2 position:
20% said their organizations are financially driven and that right now, all that matters is making the (profit) numbers.
In these two groups of organizations, customer experience is not well understood or used in daily decision making. Said differently (and perhaps more bluntly), for these organizations, customer experience is simply not important.
Surprising? Well, perhaps the #1 response isn’t surprising when you compare it to last week’s stat where 25% said everyone in the organization is responsible for the customer experience. It’s hard to have the right champions when everyone is responsible, isn’t it?
As for the money motivated types, I just sigh. It’s been proven time and time and time again that there is no trade off between financial performance and customer experience. The later is a path to the former. Our research has proven that organizations that have a well-understood definition of customer experience are TWICE as likely to beat their profit targets than those who do not. Yes, twice as likely.
Have you found yourself thinking there is a trade off between financial performance and customer experience? Or are you the change champion, dispelling this myth a little each day?
I’m new here, so I haven’t seen the “research” you allude to. I’d like to. My bet is that like the other research on this topic, you cannot and have not demonstrated a CAUSAL link between financial performance and customer experience.
If you have, get in touch. If you haven’t, and again, I bet you haven’t, then a bit more honesty would be in order. Remember, direct causal relationship is the issue. Can’t do it, can you?
Why not.
Hi Linda,
Interesting statistic! I would be interested to know what you think organisations can do about #1 at an organisational level.
Re. your comment “the former is a path to the latter” – shouldn’t that be the other way round “the latter is a path to the former”?
Cheers,
Maff
Maff, what if the isolated believers – those who see that using customer experience as an operating strategy can indeed drive financial performance – shared this very conversation. Like breadcrumbs leading the path home, we can see that those who focus on numbers as a strategy aren’t as likely to achieve their financial goals. Those who don’t have enough champions don’t. But those where everyone understands customer experience DO.
Think we’d start something big?! And thanks for the great catch on ‘former and later.’ Fixed and updated for all. LCI