Common CX Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Customer experience strategies often make simple mistakes that actively harm your business. These may result from someone demanding that your CX must ‘go above and beyond’ without the necessary structural or organisational underpinnings required to get the basics right. Operational inefficiency, lack of understanding and misaligned priorities also contribute to this.

Based on my experience, here are three common mistakes B2B SMBs make in their CX execution:

You lack the courage to be truly customer-centric

When designing customer-centric strategies, practices and policies most companies intend to put the customer first but then retreat when they realize that means doing things they’re uncomfortable with or exposing flaws.

Some companies, for example, hide customer service behind terrible automated chatbots, website forms or telephone lines that never get answered. This is because they either have too many inquiries to handle effectively or haven’t invested properly in their service teams. But instead of fixing the underlying problem (reduce service issues), which might be difficult and complicated, they throw a wall in front of it that drives down CX.

How to avoid

Take a leaf out of the Amazon playbook and start with the customer experience first. ‘What is the ideal CX in this situation’ should catalyse the conversation, and then you can work backwards to something that delivers great CX and is feasible for you to achieve. Do not allow gaps in process or inefficiencies to compromise CX.

CX is the responsibility of one team (or one person)

‘CX is the responsibility of the whole company’ is a truism, and you won’t find many businesses or C-level executives saying otherwise.

But it’s one of those things that’s easy to say on paper but harder, and rarer, to see implemented. More commonly, you have a customer experience team (maybe under the guise of customer success or marketing) who are seen as holding the keys to the effectiveness of your CX. Sure, they can design and deliver a great CX strategy, a nice customer journey, and some strong relationship management, but that’s not enough and expecting this one team to ensure you have exceptional CX will likely fail (through no fault of theirs!).

How to avoid

Embed CX objectives, principles or accountabilities across each domain and ensure CX is a pillar of decision-making in each one. For example:

• Sales sells based on ICP and partakes in smooth journey transitions.

• Marketing delivers accurate, personalised messaging.

• Product teams operate through a customer lens.

• Engineering asks how what they build improves the CX.

• People teams build CX training and awareness across the organisation.

You measure but do not act

It’s common to see companies tracking metrics such as NPS, CSAT, CES, churn, NRR (if you’re not tracking these items…you should be). It’s not common to see companies using these metrics to actively inform and drive initiatives and improvements across their CX program.

Instead, they are often reduced to numbers buried in reports or put into slide decks, greeted with a nod of the head or a perfunctory question. Only when these numbers are bad or show a decline do alarm bells start to be raised and valuable questions asked, which renders them largely meaningless a lot of the time.

How to avoid

Identify the metrics that really matter to your business and that genuinely reflect or impact the customer experience. Build a cadence of regularly reviewing and discussing these numbers at executive level, understanding why the numbers are as they are and what can be done to improve them. Where possible, share these numbers with customers (probably not churn/NRR!) and publish CX improvement roadmaps in the same way you do product roadmaps, holding your company accountable for delivering them.

If your business could do with some help navigating some of these challenges in more detail, contact us for a free, no obligation discussion.