Dive Brief:
- Three in 5 CX leaders struggled to link their metrics to business metrics last year, according to a Forrester survey of over 300 CX professionals, released last month.
- Another 2 in 5 listed the ability to collaborate and acquire buy-in from other departments as a top challenge.
- While the most common skills on CX teams were survey design and data analytics, the least common skill was ROI modeling, Forrester found. This suggests that CX teams often don’t have the skill sets to connect CX metrics to that of the business, according to Colleen Fazio, senior CX analyst at Forrester and an author of the report.
Dive Insight:
CX leaders who struggle to connect CX initiatives to business objectives risk losing buy-in from business leadership and could see their budgets slashed.
“There's an organizational risk, and then there's an existential risk for CX teams,” Fazio told CX Dive. “CX teams have to prove that their efforts on making money and saving money for organizations to continue to be effective within their organizations.”
Part of the problem is which metrics CX leaders are using, according to Moira Dorsey, head of Qualtrics XM Institute.
“If people don't have the right portfolio of metrics in place, they won’t really be able to make the connection between the improved experiences and the behaviors and the business outcomes,” Dorsey said.
If organizations don’t see CX teams as worthwhile, their budgets and remit could be drastically cut, which hurts the entire organization.
“Organizations that aren't investing in CX, our data shows that they're leaving money on the table,” Fazio said. “Our CX index shows that for a lot of organizations, even a 1-point increase in that customer index score can mean millions of dollars of incremental revenue.”
Forrester’s findings are also in line with others. Demonstrating ROI was among CXOs’ top challenges, Deloitte Digital found. Linking CX metrics to business metrics and collaborating and getting buy-in from other departments were also CX leaders’ top challenges in Forrester’s 2022 survey.
It’s important that CX leaders learn to speak the language of the C-suite to gain buy-in, experts told CX Dive.
“I talked to a lot of clients about communications 101: know your audience. And your audience in the C-suite cares about money. So how can you show that CX saves money and prove that CX makes money?” Fazio said.
