You understand the potential of a compelling CX program, but your stakeholders don’t.
And in order to establish a winning experience for your customers, you need buy-in and investment in technology to move your program forward.
So, what can you do to win financial investment?
It starts with developing a rich and compelling business case that answers the tough questions, levels expectations and showcases return.
Whether you’re just getting started with your own CX program or looking to gather more funding for continued growth, in this blog, we’re detailing how you can establish a compelling business case for CX investment.
Before Building Your Case: Create a Focus & Understand Current Landscape
While it may seem natural to jump into strategy and build your case, there are some considerations to keep top of mind before you begin. For instance, formulating an objective should factor in investor pain points as well as the direct impact on the business’s bottom line. This requires heavy research on your business, investors and the CX landscape overall. In that, you can determine a point of focus, and how you’ll argue your case for a CX program.
Here are a few examples of growth objectives that you can directly tie to your use case;
- How a CX program will influence revenue and retention
- How CX will enhance business reputation
- Impact on operations and how it will reduce customer service costs
- Reduce risk or loss of revenue
Similarly, having general knowledge of the current CX landscape can help support your case on paper and in the boardroom. Before you start, browse the internet, sign up for newsletters and set desktop notifications for key publications so you can stay up to date on current CX trends, and reports on CX findings.
How to Establish a Compelling Business Case for a CX Program
Determine a Specific CX Program Goal
As we just mentioned, determining a goal in line with stakeholder pain points and growth opportunity is critical to gaining interest. However, the key here is to get specific. Because the people you’re presenting to want to know the direct impact on your specific business’s bottom line.
First, begin by establishing the current strengths and weaknesses of your business. How does adopting a CX program add value to this list? For example;
- Will it reduce the number of customers calling in?
- Does it provide your teams with more insight into providing better service?
- Will it give you a leg up on competitors by providing insight on customer trends?
Knowing these answers in relation to your business specifically can help investors visualize the ROI. Further, it can provide you with benchmarks, helping you determine what to measure in your program moving forward. Just be wary to not over-promise. Throughout your program, you’ll have to consistently present your findings and success to ensure future investment and over-promising can hinder that.
Use Key Data To Support Your CX Program Hypothesis
The benefits of a customer experience program are truly endless. We’ve seen businesses across the globe, in varying industries experience the immense return from their programs.
When building your case, data will become your best friend. It provides, solid evidence to back up your hypothesis and draw attention to the growth and success experienced by other businesses. This can also help establish benchmarks and give investors a taste of what you can start to measure.
As you compile your statistics, incorporate a mix of general statistics for a holistic perspective and more specific statistics that tie to your industry, and objectives.
To get you started, we’ve compiled a few examples that you can utilize in your own case;
- 73% point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, behind the price and product quality. (PwC)
- Customer-focused companies increase their revenue 1.4x faster than non-customer-focused companies. (TechJury)
- For 80% of businesses, improving the customer experience is a top priority for the next 12 months. (TechJury)
- 73% of customers agree that customer experience helps to drive their buying decision. (PwC)
- A positive customer experience encounter can increase customer spending by up to 140%. (Deloitte)
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many reputable sources like Forrester, Accenture, and PwC, that hold immense insight.
On a side note, if you’re also thinking of utilizing technology to streamline your CX program, browse your platform of interests case studies and reach out to reps for data. Coming prepared to your board meeting with CX platform options, pricing, and insight on the impact they’ve had on other businesses can help push your initiative.
Highlight The ROI of Your CX Program
A language you and your stakeholders can both get behind is revenue.
A strong customer experience program reduces costs across the board and enables business growth. Think of it from the customer retention perspective. With investment into the experience, you increase sentiment and build greater relationships. In turn, you build rapport with your customers, increasing loyalty and reducing churn.
Further, a CX program can reduce operational costs through feedback collection. For example, by asking customers about their experience, including their likes, and dislikes you can determine where to effectively allocate spend. Maybe there is a product that customers are complaining about that needs to be removed. Or maybe there is an inefficient employee that needs a conversation. A CX program not only aids reputation but reduces significant costs that can accrue over time and pull from other aspects of the company.
Get Ready to Measure
Compiling your business case is just the beginning, in fact, it’s the continued measurement of your CX program and the progress you make, that’ll determine future investment.
Keep an eye on compelling metrics that investors want to see like improvements in NPS, CSAT, and CES. In addition, make sure to highlight insights that aren’t on their radar but should be. Things like trending customer verbiage (ex. delicious food, unclean bathrooms, best service, etc), overperforming employees, and busy times of the week.
Pairing your customer experience program with a solution designed to enhance the customer experience makes your case for continued investment simple. For example, with the Loop Experience Platform, you get insights in real-time on a dashboard customizable to your objectives. You can continuously reference key data while also having the ability to download or export them in a format that directly speaks to your stakeholders.
