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Thanks to the influx of customer data from social media, e-commerce and
mobile devices, companies have more data on their consumers than ever before. JOHN WOOKEY
Yet, without the means to act on this data—or extract meaningful insights— EXECUTIVE VICE
businesses are struggling to understand their customers any better than they did in PRESIDENT
generations past. SALESFORCE
PLATFORM
Harvard Business Review Analytic Services has done a deep-dive into what conflicts
companies are encountering while attempting to deliver one-to-one customer
experiences and what factors are contributing to the successes of others. These
findings reveal that IT decision makers are currently more empowered than ever to
position their companies to place customer experience at the forefront.
This report has identified many barriers that prevent companies from gaining
a single view of the customer. From organizational silos and data integration
problems to data quality issues and inconsistent data collection, companies need
solutions to the problems that stand between them and delivering personalized
customer experiences. The successful companies that are using customer data to
tailor experiences have identified that a company customer-centric focus and the
use of emerging technologies are critical.
It is no wonder that the ability to easily analyze customer data and create
actionable insights is becoming valuable. A single view of the customer from a
single, integrated source of truth will prove invaluable as customers and technology
continue to evolve together.
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CLOSING THE CUSTOMER
EXPERIENCE GAP
How IT and Business Can Partner to
Transform Customer Experiences
These are among the findings of a new Harvard Business Review Analytic Services
study of 680 executives about customer experience management—research that
features in-depth interviews with several top-performing company leaders.
WHAT IT WILL TAKE TO with leaders that have not bought into
the value of an integrated and all-
critical components of delivering a
winning customer experience. Yet less
4 Closing the Customer Experience Gap: How IT and Business Can Partner to Transform Customer Experiences
technology foundation required to make FIGURE 2
sense of it all and distribute the resulting
insight throughout the organization. THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTORS TO DELIVERING AN
Data and systems integration and EFFECTIVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
visibility across the enterprise, giving How important is each factor in delivering a relevant and reliable customer experience?
employees the power to deliver and How effective is your organization in this area? [PERCENTAGE INDICATING 8,9. OR 10 ON A SCALE OF 1-10)
innovate around customer experience,
and aligning IT decision-making
with customer experience demands
• IMPORTANCE
• EFFECTIVENESS
A customer-centric culture
were all cited as extremely important
90%
in delivering a superior customer 45%
experience. Yet only around a quarter
of respondents said their companies Management/leadership buy-in
perform well in these areas. 88%
49%
The chief customer officer (CCO) at Visibility into and understanding of the end customer experience
a multibillion-dollar institutional 87%
investment and benefits provider is 35%
beginning to address some of these A clearly communicated customer experience strategy
issues by breaking down barriers 86%
between customer experience and IT 34%
strategy and execution. “We realized we
Clarity around customer experience value/ROI
weren’t moving fast enough, so our CIO
79%
handed 36 of his technologists to me,” 29%
said the CCO. “You can’t get meaningful
customer work done if there are Data and systems integration across all channels and products
functional lines getting in the way. So we 78%
25%
have arranged ourselves entirely around
the customer under one structure. We Visibility of data across all functional areas
make all the decisions—and we’re on the 77%
26%
hook for the outcomes.”
Employees who are empowered and/or autonomous in delivering or innovating around customer experience
Having senior leaders define ideal 76%
customer experiences and translate 31%
those into a well-thought-out strategy
Alignment between IT decisions and customer experience demands
is also key. Ideally, executives convert
76%
these intended outcomes into a 25%
“detailed and prioritized customer
experience initiative road map that
SOURCE: HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW ANALYTIC SERVICES SURVEY, APRIL 2017
incorporates a well-thought-out data
strategy, integration of databases, and
tools to provide a single view of the
customer, the means of delivering
the right intelligence to the frontline company—an industry not known
employees to manage customers’ for satisfied customers—said creating
experiences, and staff training,” said a customer-centric culture takes a
the senior vice president of strategic targeted effort. “One of our challenges
analytics for a marketing services firm. is bringing customer centricity into
“When such an exercise hasn’t taken all levels of the organization. Most
place, customer experience is only of our organization is made up of
a ‘temperature-checking’ exercise engineers; understanding customers
without the ability to quantify how is not something they are taught,” he
improvements in key engagement areas said. “When we hire someone, we
translate into improving customer spend a great deal of time and money
experience and connecting those gains
to get them to the place where they
to economic results.”
understand what is important [to the
Creating a customer-focused culture is customer]. Once you have a customer-
easier in some industries than others. centric culture in place, it’s easier.
The head of process and technology That’s a much more powerful tool than
innovation for a software development just training.”
• LEADERS
• FOLLOWERS But perhaps what really sets apart
leaders—and even followers—is that
A customer-centric culture they believe there is no time to waste
8.78 in transforming to deliver a superior
7.24
customer experience. They are
Management/leadership buy-in convinced customer experience is key
8.72 to performance today, while laggards
7.37 believe this will be the case in two years’
Clearly communicated CX strategy time. Thus, they have already begun
8.42 the hard work of defining customer
6.53 experience outcomes, developing
Employees empowered to deliver/innovate CX new customer-centric strategies, and
7.75 rethinking people, processes, and
6.31 technologies to deliver better customer
Staff access to CX data/tools experiences and improve overall
7.54 performance.
5.86
Partner access to CX data/tools The Need for Speed and Agility
7.18 What many leaders are working toward
5.55 is the ability not just to deliver a reliable
All employees have good analytics skills and relevant customer experience,
6.93 but also to quickly respond to changes
5.61 in customer or market dynamics.
“Customer demands are growing, and
BASE: BEST IN CLASS N=100, FOLLOWERS=364 the need for speed is increasing,” said
SOURCE: HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW ANALYTIC SERVICES SURVEY, APRIL 2017 the credit union CEO.
6 Closing the Customer Experience Gap: How IT and Business Can Partner to Transform Customer Experiences
The vast majority of customer FIGURE 4
experience leaders (86%) said—as did
two-thirds of followers—that their CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE LEADERS’ RESPONSIVENESS
companies are able to quickly build new
Do you agree with the following statement: My company is able to quickly build new and
innovative customer experiences in response to market changes.
and innovative customer experiences in
response to market dynamics, while the
majority of laggards remain flat-footed • STRONGLY DISAGREE
• SOMEWHAT DISAGREE
• SOMEWHAT AGREE
• STRONGLY AGREE
Don’t know 4%
• • •
3% All of it
None of it 2% LEADERS FOLLOWERS LAGGARDS
20% Most of it
54%
48%
Very little of it 21% 43% 41%
50% Some of it
36%
24%
18%
12%
10%
FIGURE 6
Leaders are collecting and acting
SINGLE SOURCE OF CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE ELUDES on more data than their rivals are.
MOST COMPANIES Notably, they also are more likely to
immediately put it to use. Four out
Do you have a single, reliable source of customer intelligence across all products and
activities today? of 10 said confidently that they are
able to quickly act on the data they
do use to make enhancements to the
13% customer experience, compared to just
7% Yes, single CI source across all 11% of followers and 5% of laggards.
Don’t know products and activities
But they too have plenty of room for
30% improvement in extracting the full value
22%
No, have not begun No, actively working on of the customer information they are
to address this issue creating single source gathering.
8 Closing the Customer Experience Gap: How IT and Business Can Partner to Transform Customer Experiences
challenge, although it is something they FIGURE 7
are actively developing.
BARRIERS TO CREATING A SINGLE SOURCE OF
At the terminal technology provider,
consolidation of systems with its
CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE
What are the biggest impediments to creating a single source of customer intelligence?
parent company and also with a newly [MULTIPLE ANSWERS ACCEPTED]
acquired company has to date thwarted
such efforts. “It’s an ongoing process to
rationalize and clean up the data across • CULTURAL BARRIER
• PROCESS/DATA BARRIER
FIGURE 8
• IMPORTANT
• CURRENTLY USING
80%
60%
40
20
0
WEARABLES INTERNET OTHER ONLINE PARTNER MOBILE FOCUS POS ERP CONTACT TRANS- SOCIAL SALES EMAIL/ WEBSITE CUST. CRM
OF THINGS 3RD-PARTY REVIEW DATA APPS GROUPS SYSTEMS SYSTEM CENTER ACTION MEDIA STAFF SMS SAT. SYSTEMS
DATA DATA SYSTEMS DATA TOOLS FEEDBACK SURVEYS
10 Closing the Customer Experience Gap: How IT and Business Can Partner to Transform Customer Experiences
However, being able to ingest and analyze FIGURE 9
such new sources of customer insight and
use that to inform and update a single UNDER HALF USE DATA TO ANTICIPATE AND PERSONALIZE
source of customer intelligence will be In which of the following ways do you leverage customer data to deliver or innovate
a key competitive differentiator going
around the customer experience? [MULTIPLE ANSWERS ACCEPTED]
forward. Ingesting new sources outside
enterprise systems “is vitally important,” Improved customer insight for employees
says the credit union CEO. “We need to 60%
use those small seeds of information
that may be easily overlooked. The key
New/innovative customer engagement
is to have a very flexible system that can 55%
ingest a variety of data in many forms. It’s
Streamlining customer-facing processes
difficult to require normalized data from
46%
each source.”
12 Closing the Customer Experience Gap: How IT and Business Can Partner to Transform Customer Experiences
FIGURE 11
• IMPORTANCE
• EFFECTIVENESS
Ensuring staff has access to the customer data and analysis it needs to deliver a superior customer experience
71%
24%
Having automated or streamlined business processes to free up employees to deliver a superior customer experience
69%
23%
Having a single, reliable source of customer intelligence
63%
22%
Ensuring our strategic partners have access to the tools and data they need to deliver a superior customer experience
53%
20%
• TODAY
• TWO YEARS FROM NOW
Voice recognition
45%
Website Augmented/virtual reality
25%
Email/SMS Image recognition
5%
14 Closing the Customer Experience Gap: How IT and Business Can Partner to Transform Customer Experiences
FIGURE 13 future. Their biggest concerns were not
whether the efforts put into customer-
HOW LEADERS MEASURE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE focused transformation would pay off,
EFFECTIVENESS but the challenge of making sure that
How do you measure the effectiveness of your customer experience strategy and tactics? customer experience efforts remain a
[MULTIPLE ANSWERS ACCEPTED] top focus.
• OVERALL
• LEADERS “There are always strategic choices
to be made, and other priorities
can overshadow the benefits of
60% 180
improving the customer experience.
160
Nonetheless, we aim to improve
159 140
133 the customer experience whilst, for
40 120
119 example, replacing legacy systems,”
100
80
said the customer experience leader
20 60
at a financial services company. At
40 the online retailer in hypergrowth
20 mode, “a lot of things are happening,”
0 17% 22% 27% 27% 27% 32% 42% 56% 0 says the performance marketing
LIKES IN SOCIAL/ TOTAL CUSTOMER CUSTOMER NET REVENUE CUSTOMER CUSTOMER manager, noting that the launch of a
CUSTOMER SENT. TOPLINE LIFETIME ADVOCACY/ PROMOTER PER RETENTION/ SATISFACTION
ANALYSIS SALES VALUE REFERRALS SCORE CUSTOMER REPEAT SURVEYS new collection can take precedence
SALES over consolidating and analyzing
customer data. “Getting resources to
SOURCE: HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW ANALYTIC SERVICES SURVEY, APRIL 2017 lock up the effort is always a challenge.
It’s not a matter of buy-in. There is
complete alignment and agreement
that this needs to happen. But things
customer experience strategies and much effort it takes for a customer to are happening so fast, it can be hard
tactics going forward. get something done with us, and how to keep up with everything.” The vice
we can reduce that.” president of customer experience at the
“Surveys are only one piece of the
terminal technologies provider agreed.
puzzle,” explained the credit union
CEO. “Identifying actual behavior is far The Customer “Overcoming competing priorities is
more important and gives us insight Experience Payoff the biggest challenge we face on all
Of course, what really matters to any customer experience fronts.”
into what customers actually do versus
what they say they do.” The online business is the bottom line. Customer Ongoing vigilance will be important
fashion retailer uses a combination of experience efforts are only a priority for all companies. Even leaders that
information from surveys, focus groups insofar as they benefit the bottom line. may be ahead of their rivals in their
and individual interviews, CRM data, And it’s becoming clear that they do. customer experience delivery have
and online behavioral data to monitor by no means achieved mastery. They
Leaders are outperforming others on
and adjust customer experience have plenty of scope to improve their
the customer experience leadership,
efforts. “The combination enables us data usage through a single-source of
cultural, and skills fronts, which
to overcome the shortcomings of any customer intelligence system. They
explains why they are also more
one method and build a more holistic too suffer from budgetary constraints
effective on the process, technology,
view of results,” said the company’s and the continually growing deluge of
and organizational alignment fronts.
performance marketing manager. customer data.
FIGURE 14
Net promoter scores and customer “There will always be new data
That has led these organizations
satisfaction figures give the elements, and tools are getting better
to outperform their rivals and see
institutional investment and benefits and better,” said the credit CEO.
stronger revenue growth than their
company common metrics to compare “We’re doing reasonably well. But
competitors. A coordinated, clear,
across business units and against the it’s something we can never become
and fully integrated customer-centric
competition, but they serve as only a complacent with. It’s a journey.” And
transformation yields not just improved
“high-level read on how we’re [doing] as it is one without a foreseeable end,
customer experience quality but also
with customers,” said the company’s what the best companies can do is map
business growth.
CCO. “Beyond that, we focus on out a direction and pave the way for
the metrics that matter. Unsatisfied The leaders interviewed for this report ongoing improvement and innovation.
customers can stay because they don’t were convinced that their customer “Anyone that says they’re done with this
see alternatives. Satisfied customers experience focus was critical to their is mistaken, particularly as technologies
still leave. So for us, the key metrics overall performance and would continue to evolve at a breakneck
are things like customer friction: how continue to be so for the foreseeable pace,” says the CCO of the institutional
16 Closing the Customer Experience Gap: How IT and Business Can Partner to Transform Customer Experiences
METHODOLOGY AND PARTICIPANT PROFILE
A total of 682 respondents completed the survey, including 367 who are members of the
Harvard Business Review Advisory Council. All the respondents had knowledge of their
organization’s CX across channels, business lines, and products.
SIZE OF ORGANIZATION
ONLY ORGANIZATIONS WITH 100 OR MORE EMPLOYEES TOOK PART IN THE SURVEY
SENIORITY
21% 32% 30% 17%
EXECUTIVE SENIOR MIDDLE OTHER
MANAGEMENT OR MANAGEMENT MANAGEMENT LEVELS
BOARD MEMBER
JOB FUNCTION
15% 10% 9% 9% 7%
OPERATIONS/ SALES/BUSINESS MARKETING/ HR/TRAINING OTHER
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT COMMUNICATIONS
MANAGEMENT
REGIONS
35% 34% 23% 8%
NORTH AMERICA EUROPE, THE ASIA/PACIFIC SOUTH/CENTRAL
MIDDLE EAST, AMERICA
AND AFRICA
HBR.org/hbr-analytic-services