Connecting business and customer goals
60% of CX initiatives fail because they are not linked to business goals. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Aligning business and customer goals is more than a strategic initiative; it's a pathway to sustainable growth and customer loyalty. By understanding and integrating customer goals into your journey framework, you can achieve remarkable results. TheyDo enables you to make this alignment a cornerstone of your strategy and watch your business grow.
However, in most companies today, business metrics live in dashboards, while the customer experience is captured in many different tools. This misalignment creates a lack of context for every decision you make.
Peter Drucker famously said the only reason a business exists is to produce a customer. But as we like to think about it, once you have a customer you want them to stay excited about your product or service and buy more in the long run.
The link between journeys and KPIs
Success comes from understanding both customer and business needs in the right context. With Journey Management in TheyDo, you can break down any business KPI into customer journeys and link both together. This enables you to align each team with what matters most and achieve your company’s bigger goals.
Forrester research shared that 60% of CX initiatives fail because they are not linked to business KPIs. Without journey context, your initiatives are likely not tied to business results either.
Practical steps to meaningful alignment
Focusing solely on creating customer value is not enough. You must ensure that this aligns with business needs. Many customer-obsessed organizations focus on the customer but fail to impact the business. For example, NPS can become a vanity metric if not used correctly. Instead of merely chasing the number and trying to improve it, tweaking the moment you send out a survey or sending it only to successful customers, we need to focus on making a real impact on both customers and business results.
Here’s a straightforward approach you can apply in the context of your business, breaking down customer value in line with a business goal.
Define the business KPI: Your business has a strategy, typically broken down into annual goals or named challenges in the annual statements. Specific KPIs are attached to each of these goals.
Map 3-5 journeys to this KPI: Single out the journeys that impact the KPI the most. Mapping all data onto the customer experience helps you to get a good understanding of the 20% of the entire customer experience that impacts 80% of the KPI.
Prioritize three opportunities: Use data from research, surveys, and support tickets to identify top opportunities within these journeys. Mix of qualitative and quantitative data for comprehensive insights.
Link these to epics on a roadmap: Ensure that insights are turned into action (this is where the magic happens). Prioritize roadmap items or process changes against the identified opportunities.
Track impact on the journeys: Use journey context to understand how solutions impact business results, as different teams often work on different solutions in parallel.
Drive customer value: Repeat the process (from step 3 onwards) for continuous improvement or start anew with a different business goal and set of journeys. This approach ensures consistent customer value across teams.
Case study example
Imagine a major telecom provider, providing broadband internet and mobile phone subscriptions. Typically, churn is a problem, as competition is fierce and customers demand faster internet for lower fees. While the quality of the network depends on the hardware, like cables and coverage, the perceived customer experience when there are issues have a big impact on how satisfied customers are.
Focusing on churn reduction, here’s how identifying customer experience gaps can be used to impact the business:
KPI: Consider how to reduce churn in key markets to increase revenue from the installed customer base.
3-5 journeys: The journeys around churn and lifetime value will consist around the most common churn moments in the customer experience (e.g. customers who are up for renewal or people moving out of the country). The acquisition journey is also typically important for churn. Acquiring the right type of customers that match your ideal customer profile is a huge predictor for lifetime value.
Prioritize 3 opportunities: Compare opportunities that enable customers to have less frustration or provide more reasons to stay, rather than looking for general customer value across these journeys. Use a scorecard to make the prioritization more objective. In the case of our TelCo, one of the opportunities identified is about proactive communication on coverage: How might we proactively communicate when a customer enters an area with low coverage, so that when they have bad signal, they are not too frustrated they start looking for another provider?
Link to epics: Add items to roadmaps and prioritize them based on data-rich journeys that show how solutions might decrease churn. Align the teams involved around these solutions—in this example about messaging, the Mobile team (responsible for in-app notifications) and the Digital team (who send text-messages and email).
Track impact across journeys: Monitor the impact of solutions on churn rate over time. Obviously, one bad experience with low signal won’t cause large sets of customers to churn, but perhaps the business ultimately saw a .2% decrease in churn which impacted millions of revenue over the next 24 months.
Additional tips for fast execution
Identifying and mapping 3-5 Customer Journeys:
Begin by understanding what your customers truly want. Use customer feedback, surveys, and support call transcripts to identify their primary goals and pain points.
Journey Mining with AI helps you to skip the deep analyses and uncover the journeys from data instantly.
On Business Metrics:
Once you have a clear understanding of customer goals, map them to your business metrics. For example, if customers seek a seamless onboarding experience, link this to metrics like churn rate and customer lifetime value.
Typically this data is already measured in a dashboard. Ask your data science team to integrate the data lake into your journeys. They can use the same SQL queries they’ve already built for your Tableau or PowerBI dashboards.
Integrating Goals into Customer Journeys:
Ensure that customer goals are integrated into every touchpoint of their journey. This involves redesigning processes and experiences to meet these goals consistently.
A great simplification can be to simply link the identified opportunities, which contain solutions in delivery to goals. TheyDo enables you to build a simple goal, opportunity, solution hierarchy so you can track progress.
Using Data and Analytics:
Track the alignment of business and customer goals using data. Visualize the impact of solutions (digital touchpoints, new features or changes in human-to-human processes) over time. This helps provide insight into the areas that are improved.
Sometimes, competing solutions go live at the same time from different teams. Understanding these delivery issues in the journey context helps you to better align teams in the future.
Avoiding common pitfalls
Based on experience working across 100s of Enterprise companies, we know there are a few common pitfalls to avoid when aligning business and customer goals:
Lack of clear ownership:
Designate a team or individual responsible for maintaining the alignment of goals.
Failure to communicate:
Keep all stakeholders informed and engaged. Transparent communication helps in maintaining focus and alignment. Having a system to align KPIs and customer journeys is essential, but making sure it becomes the main dashboard is what makes it stick.
Ignoring the bigger picture:
Always keep the larger business objectives and customer satisfaction in mind, so you’re not bogged down by micro-goals. .
Start your journey to business-customer alignment
In the most successful companies, aligning customer needs with business goals is the key to lasting growth. Building out a journey-centric approach helps to put everything in a context different teams can use, and helps you to track impact across the business.
If you want to connect your business goals with customer goals across journeys, here's how you can get started:
Give it a try: Experiment with aligning metrics, goals, and journeys and ask for our feedback. Leverage our metric/data-related features to track your progress.
Talk to us: Need help? Reach out, and our experts will guide you through the process.