I’ve spoken to a number of businesses over recent years about customer experience. What I find concerning is that there seems to be a common belief that they are already customer-centred. They already listen to their customers, and they don’t need to pay much attention to customer experience. But when you dig a little deeper, their customer experience is not that good.
There was a report released in 2005 by Bain & Company finding 80% of companies believed they offered a superior customer experience, but only 8% of customers agreed.
Sadly, things didn’t change much in the next ten years. With the CMO Council and SAP reporting that 73% of senior execs say customer centricity is critical to business success, but only 14% saying customer-centricity is done well within that business.
In another report I saw last week, a massive 79% of companies surveyed by the XM Institute are at the bottom two stages of customer experience maturity.
This all suggests that companies really aren’t as good as they believe they are when it comes to delivering great experiences to their customers.
I think there are a number of reasons for this, but if I had to lay a bet. I would guess that they are placing too much reliance on poor metrics, like the NPS.
Perhaps now is a good time for you to be honest with yourself. Having customer-centricity as an objective has to be less about theory and more about practice. There’s a lot of ground to make up, and the first place to start is to take a good long look at the experiences customers are receiving at every point they interact with your business. If you’d like some help in doing this or advice on where to start, get in touch.
