Four Customer Experience Challenges and How CX Leaders Solve Them

What is a CX Leader? The role can seem nebulous, but the reality is that CX leaders have one of the most important jobs in modern business. Their job is to oversee customer experience across the entire organization. Whether CX leadership comes in the form of a marketing manager, an IT professional, or a full-fledged C-suite CX executive, the role of CX leader is a challenging and rewarding one.

When CX leaders are successful they protect and generate revenue, increase customer loyalty and align their organizations toward customer obsession. But there are challenges that every CX program faces in some measure. In our eBook, The 2023 CX Leader Handbook: How to Overcome Four Core Challenges, we explore four areas where CX leaders need some guidance, namely:

• Disconnected listening
• Lack of context
• Unactionable data
• Misalignment across teams.

In this blog, we’ll quickly explore the Engagement Capacity Gap and see how CX leaders can tackle the “lack of context” and “misalignment across teams” challenges to help close it.

Why Does the Engagement Capacity Gap Matter for CX?

Put simply, the Engagement Capacity Gap (ECG) is found by measuring the difference between what the organization wants to do and their ability to do it. This can mean a lack of the right employees, an inability to communicate across channels, insufficient customer feedback to make good decisions, or a lack of team alignment to execute organizational goals.

For a CX leader, helping to close the ECG means closing the gap between customer expectations and your organization’s capacity for engagement. When these two are misaligned the customer experience suffers. If you are facing this challenge, know you’re not alone.  Many organizations struggle with the Engagement Capacity Gap to some degree. For example, 63% of retailers say they’re unable to properly staff stores, and more than half of companies across sectors are seeing new demand for digital-first customer interactions. These gaps and others indicate that there is no better time for CX leaders to have a massive impact. In fact, CX leaders are uniquely positioned to identify ways to close the ECG and improve the customer experience in turn. One way they do this is by prioritizing CX context.

Understand Customer Context for Great CX

How do you listen to what your customers don’t say? Even if you have great listening tools on various channels, uncovering behavioral and attitudinal data can take your customer experience to the next level.

Let’s say your organization already uses a tool to manage surveys. How do you know what customers were doing before or after giving feedback? Are you able to determine if their feedback matches up with their behavior? If you’re not able to answer those questions, it is far more difficult to target changes to the customer journey and to close the loop to resolve customer issues. By investing in this contextual data, CX leaders can drive a deeper understanding of the “why” behind customer challenges. In turn, this understanding can be used to close the Engagement Capacity Gap by building on your existing strengths and knowing where to invest in areas that need improvement.

While this insight is possible thanks to the work of the CX leader and their team, it is only by aligning the organization as a whole that truly aspirational customer experience is possible.

How to Make Change and Influence the Organization

Many organizations suffer from a lack of alignment on key metrics, goals, and KPIs. But what if the CX Leader could impact these directly by communicating how different teams within the business impact the customer?

When you align goals and metrics across the organization, you eliminate contradicting goals and help focus the entire enterprise on delivering an exceptional experience and operating efficiently.

In the realm of customer experience, in particular, finding this alignment is critical because customers don’t see the departments within your organization—they see your business as a single entity. Customers would much rather receive a consistent, context-rich engagement no matter where they are interacting.

But how do you align the wider team? For CX Leaders, their best assets for making changes are rich customer data and the ability to demonstrate the impact of existing misalignments. By showing the paths that customers take through the business and the ways these touchpoints create inflections in the customer’s experience, you can clearly communicate where changes are needed.

Tackling Challenges As a CX Leader

CX leaders have unique challenges, and the stakes are high. Thankfully, CX leaders also have the ability to see both the big picture of the customer journey and the impact of small changes to individual experiences.

If you’re interested in learning how to solve four key challenges faced by CX leaders around the world, check out our eBook: The 2023 CX Leader Handbook. It’s full of tips and information that can help you shape your CX program, your organization, and your customer journey for the better.