Dive Brief:

• Identifying actionable metrics and demonstrating ROI are among the top five challenges chief experience officers face, according to a Deloitte Digital report released Thursday. 
• Two-thirds of CXOs track customer satisfaction, according to the survey of 250 CXOs. Just over half of respondents said they tracked retention rates or engagement rates.
• “If you can't demonstrate measurable progress, you're not going to get the support and the buy-in and even the funding that you're going to need to make this a long-term success,” Amelia Dunlop, CXO at Deloitte Digital and an author of the report, told CX Dive.

Dive Insight:

The role of a CXO is relatively new, with half of respondents telling Deloitte Digital that they are the first in their organization to serve in their role. As such, CXOs don’t often have roadmaps on how to best determine metrics of success and demonstrate ROI for their organization.

Often, CXOs are measuring customer experience with the metrics and tools they already have on hand. The analogy, Dunlop says, is the “street light effect,” in which someone is searching for their keys under the street light, not because that’s where they lost them but because that’s where they have light. 

CXOs must shift away from historical metrics and determine what the right measures are for one’s company. Dunlop and her team sees trust — and measuring whether an interaction actually builds trust — as the gold standard “because we know that trust is the path to loyalty.” 

A net promoter system is a step in the right direction, but whatever metric businesses decide on must provide actionable insight and connect to business goals, according to Dunlop.

CXOs must also balance demonstrating CX’s value to business, but without short-thrifting long-term goals for short-term and vice versa.

“Yes, you have to improve calls that are happening in the contact center today,” she said. “But if all we ever do is make those incremental changes in that near term, we might not ever see that longer horizon.”

If businesses never demonstrate the short-term value of their work, they may not get the chance to continue their work in the long term. “Part of it is setting the expectation that experience has to be this bifocal journey,” Dunlop said. 

She encourages businesses to set those expectations from the beginning and get buy-in from executive leadership.