Bain & Company, Kantar and Qualtrics have updated the Global Standards for Customer Experience, a set of measurements designed to offer a single CX benchmark, following a 10-week industrywide consultation, the companies said Tuesday.
Bain, the creator of the NPS score, worked with Kantar and Qualtrics to create the framework, which was unveiled in July. The standards are designed to provide foundational measurements that CX leaders in any industry can use to benchmark their CX success against competitors’ offerings.
The feedback period was included to ensure the Global Standards for Customer Experience meet practitioners' needs, as well as to earn buy-in from other companies. The consultation drew responses from CX professionals and companies in 23 countries.
The industrywide response to the Global Standards for CX has been positive, according to Rob Huijboom, global head of customer experience at Kantar. Based on the feedback, Bain, Kantar and Qualtrics refined about half of the proposed standards and added three additional standards.
The new standards include tools to help CX practitioners measure how well company leaders link their purpose and value creation, whether tools are in place to support gathering and analyzing customer feedback, and whether the organization has a unified method for describing customer needs, journeys and touchpoints.
“If we're going to claim that these are universal standards, then we certainly need that input from different practitioners around the world,” Stanford Swinton, EVP at Bain and principal author of the standards, told CX Dive in a July interview.
Even small changes in wording can have a big impact on what the metrics mean or how they shape the execution of customer experience strategies, Swinton said.
Professionals need a better benchmark
The three companies behind the standards saw a need for a comprehensive CX benchmark beyond what previously existed.
NPS is commonly held up as a customer experience North Star metric, but it measures loyalty and doesn’t tie directly to bottom line results.
NPS isn’t going away, however. It will be folded into the new global standards, but the framework as a whole aims to create better benchmarking than any single metric.
“As few as 1 in 8 executives today report actually seeing business impact from their CX investments,” Swinton said. “Either we all stop investing in CX or we start elevating it as a profession that contributes to the bottom line.”
It's not that CX doesn't impact the bottom line; in fact, experience is a major growth driver. But CX practitioners need help showing others how. The new global standards will help leaders prove the power of experience to their peers, according to Huijboom.
The global framework aims to help leaders design better strategies as well.
CX leaders are taking on bigger roles in the C-suite, and the very nature of customer experience is changing. Bain, Kantar and Qualtrics believe a worldwide CX benchmark will prove extremely useful in the coming years.
“These global standards serve as a roadmap for companies aiming to build durable differentiation and the discipline to quickly adapt to the evolving needs of their market, their customers and their employees," Brian Stucki, president and COO of Qualtrics, said in a prepared statement Tuesday.
