6 CX Challenges and How to Overcome Them

The evolving world of customer experience (CX) brings new challenges, but at Alchemer we see each challenge as a chance to elevate your CX game and stay competitive. Here’s how to tackle the biggest challenges in CX today and seize new opportunities to level up your CX program.  

The Current CX Landscape: Challenges and Opportunities 

The ongoing economic constraints have caused many organizations to compromise on customer-centric initiatives, moving customer experience down their priority lists. Despite this, maintaining a customer-centric approach remains crucial for long-term revenue growth and brand sustainability 

However, CX programs face numerous hurdles. These range from overreliance on traditional surveys, like CSAT and NPS, to grappling with overwhelming data and a need for actionable insight. Considering these challenges, businesses must explore new strategies that enhance their CX programs and regain customers’ trust and loyalty in an increasingly competitive market. 

In this post, we’ll break down how to tackle six challenges facing CX programs today. We’ll also explore actionable steps to transform them into opportunities to drive your business forward.  

6 CX Challenges Blog: Closeup of Computer

1. Unactionable feedback  

Many CX programs heavily rely on CSAT and NPS surveys. However, NPS alone doesn’t provide actionable insights or a comprehensive understanding of the customer experience.  

You have a number that fails to explain the ‘why’ behind the NPS score. In fact, Gartner Inc. has predicted that over 75% of organizations will stop using NPS as a measure of success for customer service and support by 2025. With 2025 right around the corner, it’s time to go beyond NPS and rethink how to measure the full customer experience. 

Opportunity: Comprehensive feedback collection  

There’s a goldmine of customer insight out there that you may not have yet dug into. To have a robust CX program, it’s essential to integrate feedback from different customer touchpoints. These include surveys, support interactions, app store ratings, review websites, call centers, and other open-ended feedback sources.  

This approach allows businesses to understand customer sentiment and preferences holistically. When you combine all this rich data, you see the whole customer picture. Take this first step towards a successful CX program. 

2. Overwhelming data  

Now that you’ve collected all this critical feedback, what do you do with it?  62% of marketers say they feel overwhelmed by the amount of data they have. 85% are unable to fully utilize that data. Manually reviewing all your feedback from multiple sources can be a huge undertaking.  

Before you even begin to analyze it, someone or a team of people must read through and tag it with sentiment and theme. This tedious and time-consuming task can lead to bias and human error. More importantly, missed opportunities in identifying key trends and addressing critical issues. 

Opportunity:  Unlock insights through scalable analysis 

It’s all about working smarter, not harder. Leveraging AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies purpose-built for CX are how you quickly turn overwhelming data into actionable insight. AI allows you to automatically analyze all your customer insight in minutes, instead of days.  

But not just any AI or NLP solution will do. To effectively unlock customer insight, you need to ensure your solution delivers comprehensive and accurate results. For example, a single customer comment can have multiple layers of themes and sentiment. It’s essential to select a tool that can understand the nuance in every piece of feedback to identify sentiment and themes granularly, rather than taking a black-and-white approach.   

6 CX Challenges Blog: Customer Experience Screenshot showing what a customer liked and what they did not like

3. Identifying and prioritizing CX problems  

Businesses often struggle to identify and address the most critical customer experience issues. Instead of a clear action plan, it can feel like a guessing game. This often results in focusing on the wrong things.  It leads to unhappy customers, decreased retention, and failure to promptly address emerging concerns.  

Opportunity: Gain clarity on what matters  

Surprise, we’re focusing on AI again. Using AI technologies to pinpoint and accurately identify your customers’ biggest needs takes the guesswork out of the equation.  AI tech builds data-driven strategies by analyzing customer journeys and identifying trends across all feedback channels effectively. 

Drilling down into these trends gives you a clear, focused picture of what your customers love about your brand, and the problem areas. When you can see exactly what your customers need and where they need it, you can immediately determine the necessary actions for your team to take. This enables your team to resolve issues effectively and quickly.  

6 CX Challenges Blog: People in a meeting looking at brand guidelines

4.  Organizational silos  

CX programs require buy-in and collaboration across an entire company. However, often the necessary feedback never makes it to the people who need it.  

Organizational and data silos can isolate customer feedback, causing a significant disconnect. Disjointed and siloed data can impede communication across teams. This fragmentation often results in an incomplete view of the customer, leading to inconsistent objectives, marketing strategies, service delivery, and aligned metrics. Without internal alignment on understanding customer needs and improving outcomes, organizations risk delivering inconsistent brand experiences and failing to improve the overall customer experience. 

Opportunity: Promote cross-functional collaboration and empowerment  

The first step to breaking down organizational and data silos is consolidating all your customer feedback into a single source of CX truth. As we discussed above, there are many different platforms out there that unify your data. However, accessibility and presentation of data are key to creating a truly cross-functional feedback program.  

Teams need to filter the feedback that matters to them to ensure clear priorities and actionable insights. Additionally, it’s crucial for teams to understand how their actions impact the overall customer experience and see the zoomed-out picture of the customer journey. This promotes a culture of cross-functional empowerment, encouraging proactive collaboration and problem-solving while facilitating an aligned customer-centric approach across departments. 

5. Lack of real-time analysis  

According to a new report from Accenture, an overwhelming 88% of executives believe their businesses are struggling to keep up with the rapid changes in customer and employee behaviors, leading to a significant crisis of relevance. This creates a divide between what consumers need and the value businesses offer. Lacking real-time monitoring and actionable insights, companies struggle to promptly identify and address emerging customer issues. This delay can negatively affect customer satisfaction and loyalty, as unresolved problems may persist longer than necessary, impacting overall customer experience.   

Opportunity: Real-time monitoring and problem-solving 

Get and stay ahead of the curve by uncovering issues as soon as they arise. To achieve this, integrate customer feedback directly into your workspace. This facilitates a seamless approach to staying informed and monitoring your CX program. This requires flexible technology capable of automating system data connection and surfacing reports and alerts. 

Automated reports and alerts keep key stakeholders informed and prepared. They enable stakeholders to address customer concerns in real time, thereby enhancing the overall customer experience.  

6. Proving CX program value  

Finally, the biggest challenge facing CX programs today is the ability to prove their value. Demonstrating the value of CX programs and securing investments requires aligning strategies with overall business objectives and gaining support and buy-in from key stakeholders and leadership. This is easier said than done, especially if you haven’t tied CX measurements to your KPIs yet. 

Opportunity: Demonstrate clear CX ROI  

Spoiler alert: you need to tie your CX measurements to your KPIs or similar business metrics. But the key is focusing on long-term outcomes instead of short-term financial benefits.  To do this, leverage a variety of measures focused on profitability and growth, cost optimization, and established metrics, like NPS, to explore the link between customer satisfaction and the benefits it brings to the organization.  

Some customer-centric business metrics that may matter to your organization include organic sales, customer loyalty and retention rates, advocacy, engagement, and revenue.  A particularly powerful KPI is measuring customer lifetime value (LTV).  

Once you’ve connected your CX program to your key business metrics it’s essential to align leadership. You likely won’t get very far by trying to get executives to learn and regularly check a new software program. Instead, you’ll want a tool that can weave and embed CX metrics and reports into stakeholders’ existing workflows.  

Making it clear and easy for them to understand how improvements in customer experience are impacting what they care about fosters an understanding of the value of CX efforts and secures support and investment for further initiatives. 

Navigating the intricate customer experience landscape offers a clear path from challenge to opportunity for those willing to embrace change and innovation.  

At Alchemer, we believe that transforming challenges into opportunities isn’t just about adopting new technologies or methodologies. It’s about fostering a culture that places the customer at the heart of every decision and action.  

By rethinking traditional metrics, embracing comprehensive feedback collection, leveraging AI for actionable insights, promoting cross-functional collaboration, and demonstrating the undeniable ROI of a robust CX program, organizations can not only anticipate the needs and desires of their customers but exceed them. 

If you’re ready to up your CX game learn more by clicking here.

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