Many businesses are still managing their brand reputation by employing outdated tactics, addressing one problem and then moving on to the next. But, to succeed in today’s competitive landscape, businesses need an integrated, holistic CX strategy to keep their brand reputation unharmed.
One of the biggest challenges in the customer experience industry, still today, is the urge to deliver a “quick fix” when things go wrong. Experience.com CEO Scott Harris begins his insightful book “Create Wow Customer Experiences: 9 Rules for Designing the Perfect CX Strategy” retelling an all too common business story:
Craig, an executive at ACME Enterprises, gets a call from Fred, his top sales guy. Fred says, “I lost a big deal, because of our Google reviews.” Ouch! Craig is not happy. He runs down the hall to Stephanie, the head of marketing saying “Our Google reviews are causing us to lose business. Fix it!” And there it is — a box to check.
As Harris goes on to explain, the primary problem here is that the company is looking for a quick fix instead of focusing on a long term solution to boost the customer experience. Being reactive and trying to find a quick fix, without having a strategic customer experience strategy in place, not only creates a potential for ongoing customer experience issues, it puts your brand reputation at risk.
In today’s digital-first world, where customers use multiple channels to engage with a brand, enterprise organizations need to move away from the urge to apply a quick fix and take a broader look at their overall CX program.
How outdated CX practices can ruin brand reputation
When businesses rely on simply checking one box after another — resolving customer issues as they happen versus building a holistic and integrated CX strategy — they fail to address underlying CX issues that may have a lasting, negative impact on business outcomes. Worse, by not digging into customer experience problems to find out the heart of the matter, businesses put their brand reputation at risk.
In fact, quick fixes often end up having the exact opposite effect. The idea that you can duct tape or put a bandaid over a customer experience issue — and then let it be — is problematic on a number of levels. Instead of solving the primary problem, you take a chance on ignoring it, allowing it to fester into something much worse.
As Scott mentions in his book, there are endless examples of “all the boxes that get checked one by one”: Employee scorecards, brand mentions, bad reviews on third-party sites. A quick fix on any of these issues translates to a siloed solution that doesn’t take the full customer journey into consideration. Inevitably, money is spent on solutions that fail to work or teams are hired to manage a poor process that could have been resolved by taking a big picture view of their entire CX program (or lack thereof).
Brands need a holistic, integrated CX strategy to compete in a digital-first world
As enterprise organizations become more sophisticated, with customer journeys that span across multiple channels and devices, they need a robust CX platform that integrates with their technology stack and offers a suite of solutions to give them a full view of the customer experience.
An integrated, holistic CX strategy means having the ability to capture customer feedback, analyze that feedback by turning into actionable data and then optimizing the data to improve future experiences. Being able to capture customer feedback in real-time, analyze the data and then operationalize it is key to implementing an exceptional CX strategy.
Many businesses fear that an integrated, holistic CX strategy costs millions of dollars and expensive consultants to build a customized program that yields measurable results. Once upon a time, that may have been true, but technological advancements within the CX industry has ushered in a new era of platforms that make exceptional CX accessible for nearly all enterprise organizations.
Experience.com’s experience management platform is a prime example of a solution that combines customer experience and employee experience capabilities — making it possible for enterprise organizations to have a full view of every component that makes up the customer journey.
“Experience management is not a list of individual problems and solutions. It is a single puzzle. When put together properly, each piece works far more efficiently than it possibly could as an individual solution,” writes Scott, “It is all connected: Culture, brand, reputation, retention, recruiting, loyalty, engagement and behavior. They are all leaves on the same very leafy tree.”
